Fighting the darkness

It's only a month until the spoken word event I'm doing as part of Portsmouth's Darkfest.  It's a big event, at the Square Tower in Southsea, a prestigious venue, and I need to get going on my story.

I have a story idea, and I have its development mapped out, so it's just a case of sitting down to write it.  I don't suffer from writers' block, and once I've mapped a story idea out I can always write it.  So why am I putting off starting this one?

I've decided that I'm fighting the darkness.  In the week when impeachment proceedings have finally started against Trump, and Boris Johnson's prorogation of the British Parliament has been ruled illegal, there's plenty of darkness in real life.

But that isn't the kind of darkness you see in a horror story.  It's the sort of scenario that kicks off a dystopian tale of the future where democratic government has collapsed.  What's happening in real life is a kind of creeping darkness.

I've  had enough of darkness in real life, and  I'm finding it a challenge to put it into a story.   I don't read dark stories, for a start.  If someone describes their novel as dark and twisted, then it's a definite no.  There's a highly-regarded series of fantasy novels that I won't read because the author gleefully describes them that way.  No, thanks.

I've also only read the first book of the Game of Thrones story.  Apart from getting totally lost in the many viewpoints half-way through the book, what really put me off was the gleeful description of characters being killed.  In great detail.  No, thanks.  The real world holds more than enough examples of that kind of darkness.  I don't need to read it in stories.

At one spoken word event I attended the stories were full of women killing off their husbands. "Why don't they just divorce them," my friend said, and that pretty much sums up my attitude to darkness.  Running away from it always seems preferable to me.

I'm a hopepunk writer, always on the side of the light, so don't expect gruesome blackness from me.  I'm aiming for a shiver at a suggestion of darkness rather than to make you feel sick.  

I think It's time for the alien artefacts to surface.  And my character will have to do the equivalent of going looking for the ship's cat.