A story has been coagulating in my noggin. It takes place in the same county as my other little horror stories, so I should be able to concentrate on the telling and not worry so much about details. I figured out the details for those other tales. Unfortunately, the narrative doesn’t agree.
Things began with Timmy’s Zombie Abatement Service and a few places in Abish County, Iowa. It is a fictional county made up by averaging out all the rural counties in the state. Essentially, Iowa has ninety-nine counties, but Abish ain’t one. So far, there’s a primary town, a little history, and a sheriff’s department.
What is the name of that town anyway? For the new story, it would be nice to know. The next question: how do I create a fictional county seat for an Iowa county without picking an existing town, and while making it sound like an actual Iowa town. Time to fall back on averaging and pattern matching. The new name for the town is Elrin.
The next struggle: road names. There are two ways to name county roads in Iowa. If there was a good reason, and a petition, then the road may use a common name that has been around a while. Otherwise, there is a coding scheme that uses letters ‘A’ through ‘J’ for East-West roads, and ‘K’ through ‘Z’ for North-South roads. The lettering transitions as the roads move further south or east through the state.
This means I must either reference the roads by the common name, or come up with a relative location for my county within the state. One of my goals with this county was to make it a generic, average, rural county in Iowa. Using letter codes for the county roads would establish a location, which also establishes terrain, nearness to large cities, and other things. I could use weird combinations, for example having one road with an ‘A’ and another with a ‘Z’ in the same county is nonsensical in the real world. It’s a tough one.
A county also needs more towns than just the county seat. A typical county in Iowa will have around eight to ten actual towns, but may also have other communities such as unincorporated areas. Online searches must be phrased as “counties in Iowa” and not “Iowa counties” because the search engines keep wanting to “correct” the spelling to “Iowa County”, an actual county in Iowa. When I do figure out those towns, they need names and people.
A couple of members of the sheriff’s department participated in the earlier stories. Some show up again. Everytime they show up, they require more development while still staying true to their original appearances. One of them is the main character in the new tale. This requires that I carefully review my prior notes and integrate them into the new notes. Since this is a recurring thing, I need to create a story-independent database of characters.
Finally, because my brain works like this, details about the history of the county have started to bubble up. When was the county founded? Who were those founders? Were they into anything weird? Is there a reason why this county may be better suited to odd things happening? There seem to be long-reaching shadows that may lead to more stories later.
The overall result of this is that writing the story is taking longer than thought. My preference is to say I want to jump right in and tell the tale. Unfortunately, part of my brain would rather spend all the time building every little detail of this story’s world. It’s a constant fight. I will get there eventually.