(Camp Nanowrimo /April 2015-Feb. 2017)
Montana, 1870
Escaping the havoc wrought by the Beast of Gevaudan, the five families have made a life in the remote forests of the New World. Here Fallon Loupe is one of the oldest werewolves in existence, but his peace is interrupted by war and his paranoia that his old enemy Georges de Soissons has found him.
The Madman is available as a free download in all formats over at Smashwords. You can also find it on Amazon.
Word Count Progress
4/30/15: 20,168 words
2/19/17: 22,692 words
Writing Process
I wrote about 90% of this back in April 2015, during Camp Nanowrimo – I made my word count goal of 20K, but the story wasn’t actually complete. I was optimistic about being able to finish the actual story. Too optimistic. While the final draft is about 22,700 words – meaning all I needed was to write less than 3,000 words to finish, it took me nearly two years to do that.
Why?
First off was the discovery that one of the major plot points of the novel (heavily dependent on the eye color of Georges and Fallon) was incorrect. This wouldn’t be a huge thing to fix, but at that time it seemed insurmountable. I needed to go back through the other Wolf Point novels and double check every character’s description to make sure I hadn’t made any other giant continuity errors.
Second was my descent into writing fanfiction, which basically put all my original writing on hold for about a year and a half. I attempted an original novel (Wolf Point #4) during Nanowrimo 2015, but ended up abandoning the novel within the first few chapters to write more fanfiction. It wasn’t until late summer/early fall 2016 that I finally started to refocus my energies. Finishing The Madman seemed like the best place to start, since it would be a fast project to complete. Still, I didn’t actually start writing until after the new year.
Research
Most of my research for this came from previous research for Scavengers and had to do with the Assiniboine tribe – part of the Sioux Nation, which lives in the area of the Fort Peck Reservation (where Wolf Point, Montana is located). Of course this is such a small tribe that there is very little information about it. Here are a few websites where I found information:
Lots of good information here, including language, history, legends, etc.
This was a first-person account of one Assinboine woman, Lorilane Longknife Walker, talking about the organization of the tribe and clans and various traditions of family and gender. In Scavengers, Zeke meets members of one clan (in this document, the woman states that there are 33 clans – the Angry Dog clan is invented for the purposes of the story). I ended up using Lorilane’s last name for the members of the Angry Dog clan, mostly because it seemed fitting. This was probably the most useful source of information, it was difficult to find any first-person accounts of life among this particular tribe.
Books
- Drury, Bob. The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend. Simon & Schuster, 2013.
- Mails, Thomas E. Plains Indians: Dog Soldiers, Bear Men, and Buffalo Women. Bonanza Books, 1985.
- Weil, Ann. Sitting Bull. Heinemann, 2012. (mostly for a basic timeline of events)
Work in Progress 