Wednesday, December 9, 2015

It's December and we have no snow

Despite my comments to the contrary, I ended up doing NaNoWriMo.

I started my novel on November 18, and in fact made the 50,000 mark. On the 30th, in fact, writing 8600 words that day.

It's a draft I'm so far happy with. Space science fiction,  near-ish future. Per my usual NaNoWriMo habits, it's currently "trunked", pending finishing at a later date. It doesn't have a title. It has a lot of plot kinks to work out. But the bones are there, and that's pretty cool.




In other news, I've gotten a few rejections back from the October submissions, and one of my October submissions has gone on to the second round of consideration. That's always a neat email to receive (listen to me, "always". It's happened a couple of times, anyway).

I've also, of course, been engaged in the circuitous thoughts regarding what to write next. I've got a couple of ideas, but nothing ready to come out of the slow cooker yet, as it were.  I know I've blogged previously about how I think my ideas kind of like that; I throw the bits together in my subconscious, and let it all stew until the pieces fall apart and then come together in a whole greater than the sum of its parts. But I'll be damned if I can remember what I would've tagged the post(s), so fuck it.

I've thought about rewriting one of my "literary" stories to perhaps go with my "memory" sci fi shorts, for lack of a better term for them. The first is more properly a novelette, 17,000 words or so, and I wrote it years ago. The other, which I've submitted several times actually, is more like 7. But they feel like they go together, in a way. Not that they're parts of a novel arc, but they're part of a greater story told within the same future. Both are named after paintings, one "The Persistence of Memory", the other "The Wave". They had different inspirations, different types of characters, but similar themes.

I've also thought about Learn to Howl more recently, which means maybe that novel is in store for another read through, maybe an edit or a rewrite. It's hard to call something the beginning of a trilogy if you've got one finished, one half done, and in the third you only know who dies. That's the kind of thing I need to outline, the trilogy as a whole, not the individual novels. I need to know what happens in the arc, how the third one picks up and ultimately resolves. I certainly have Intentions for The Wolf You Feed (book 2) but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Ideas do no good if they aren't on the page, n'est-ce pas?

2 comments:

  1. I remember you sent me The Persistence of Memory to read years ago. I liked it a lot, that one really stuck with me. It'd be awesome if you did something more with that.

    -Lennon

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    1. It makes me really happy for that story to have stuck with you. It's one I really like (though I guess it'd be silly to not like my stories, right?) and I actually haven't sent it anywhere. For whatever reason, I've been "holding it back", I guess with some idea of doing this kind of novel-length-storeis-that-are-related thing. We'll see how it goes.

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