#104 (of 365) "Edmonton" The Rural Alberta Advantage

This song came out on the RAA's brilliant debut Hometowns in 2008 (one of the best albums of the 21st century), when I was in Writing School. I came up with an idea for a story about a snowed in town in rural Alberta where a "monster" was loose, and I'd sketched out the entire novel in my head at the time - like entire scenes and characters and plots -- over several days. I didn't write it all down. In fact, I didn't write down much. I wrote the start of the opening scene, though, and I titled it "Edmonton". Almost definitely because of this song. Years later, I decided to write my first great horror novel and used Edmonton as the starting point. The scenes I remembered made it into this version, moved to Vermont (because I used to go to Mt. Snow all the time) and interspersed with a separate story about teenagers in a school musical that was more the YA story I always write. Eventually the teens go to Vermont over Christmas break and encounter the monster that's been ravaging the town. This story was called "Some Kind of Monster" and there is a finished version somewhere and many versions that jettison most of the "local town ravaged by a monster" parts, focusing instead (and basically only) on the teens, because beta readers could not get past the narrative jump between a 1st person YA POV and a 3rd person horror story in adjacent chapters. Which is fair. Unfortunately none of the versions got picked up by a publisher.

I spent a couple years taking the characters in that story (the teens at least) and moving them to a new setting, in upstate NY (where I also spent time), still in the musical, and still away for Christmas break in a massive snowstorm that makes it impossible to get to help. The "monster" in this version is a witch, or more accurately, the ghost of a witch, and there are a few flashbacks/asides to her attacking townsfolk we only briefly meet (to help flesh out the witch's character) but the story almost entirely follows the teen friends. The new plot excises basically all of the scenes that were in my original Edmonton story so in many ways this new version (called The Lady in the Lake) is unrelated to that draft of an idea from 2008, other than it's a "Horror" story. Sadly, that also didn't get picked it.

I've since written a brand new horror novel (completely unrelated - this has zombies and takes place in Florida, a place where I've spent more time recently, unfortunately) and it's called SWIM and I'm in the process of trying to get an agent interested. In the meantime, I have written a first draft of a new novel (always writing!) that is NOT a horror story and it's set in Hoboken, NJ (where I lived for 10 years) but it does feature several of the characters from The Lady in the Lake (some are changed but the names are the same, some are quite similar - I really really love the cast). The plot is different (completely) and it's not horror and they're not in a musical. But the name of this novel is Hometowns. It all comes full circle, I guess.

Hope you'll get to read it sometime.

"Edmonton" - The Rural Alberta Advantage // Hometowns (2008)