At about 11 today, I finished the novella.

Total word count, for them’s that care: 31,518. Lets hope I can trim it to make it a bit tighter. In pages, depending on breaks and what not, I think that means we’re talking about ~80-90 pages book pages.

The title is “Knowing Mars,” and it’s sort of a coming out story, I guess. This project, and the other one that I’m thinking about, and will probably start soon, really focus on ideas that center around historiography and historical narratives, and the impact of these stories. You’ll see at some point, of course. As Melissa Scot points out It’s hard to talk about the process and ideas behind the creative process “without making it sound either stilted […] or mystical.” So I think explaining myself too much might just get me in trouble.

This project has been a revival and remaining of some material that I envisioned as sort of historical backstroke for the novel that I wrote when I was in high school. I realized that these three pages (and possibly the next several) were the best part of the 500+ pages that I wrote then, so I ran with it, and ended up with this pleasant little novella.

I’m better at telling stories now, and I’m not such a n00b about a lot of the mechanics of fiction writing. I also have a better sense of the genre, so I think this is likely to feel a lot less trite.

Having said that, if everyone has a million words of crap in them that they have to get out, then this puts me at only about say, 160k in terms of fiction writing…

I’m going to do a very quick once through and then send it off to a group of readers, I hope by the beginning of next week.

Dearest Readers,

I have a Monkey on my back. The penultimate scene of the novella, specifically. I’m so close, it’s sort of maddening. Once the draft is in order, I’ll have editing and revisions to handle, but that shouldn’t be much of a problem: there aren’t major problems I think, and , we’ll see what the reviewers say, and most of the things that I’m worried about can be cut without much trouble. Shaving as much as 5,000 words wouldn’t be a bad thing, and could conceivably make this more sellable.¹

Anyway, that’s beside the point, it’s useless without this last two scenes. In fairness, once the one I’m hung up on gets written, the following “scene” isn’t an issue.

In the mean time I’ve been trolling YouTube, and I have a discovery to report. There are people who do Bob Dylan covers and post them on You Tube. I have to say that I love Dylan songs, “The Times they are A-Changing,” is perhaps the most misunderstood 3-part harmony song or waltz (take your pick) in all of American Folk Music. I’ve long been of the opinion that while there is a certain “kitsch” value in listening to Bob Dylan, almost everyone does a better job with them than Dylan.

Here’s one by a cute hipster. I’m not wild about the introduction, and he’s classically sincere, but it works. There are a lot of good versions of “Don’t think Twice it’s Alright,” and Dylan does a good job with it, but anyway, I like the way YouTube supports this kind of stuff. Enjoy.

And… I should be writing.

I chickened out and wrote the last “scene,” before the penultimate scene which is giving me trouble. I’m pretty happy with it, but it might need some tweaking so that it doesn’t come off as too sentimental in the ending.

I’ve got the files laid out for ten chapters, nixing my earlier, “compress the last two chapters into one, because there isn’t enough material.” At the moment, the ratio of scene lengths is looking like 4:2:2:1, (the italicized 2 is the part I haven’t written, it might come up looking like 3). With a total length of 4,500-5,000 words. All the other chapters are a smidgen more than 3k. I’m leaning toward having two chapters with a length ratio of say, 2:1 or 3:2.

While it’s a hard scene on an emotional level, the larger issue is that the embodiment of a couple of these characters is quite difficult to write, and I think that I’m looking at what is necessarily a pretty physical scene.

If I can get this damn monkey off my back. I think I have a date with a sandwhich and my notebook. I think I’m going to try blockign the scene out and then writing the dialogue, and see how that goes.

Cheers.

Stephen King, fresh off of editing the Year’s Best Short Stories 2007 (well probably not), wrote an essay for the New York Times about “What Ails the Short Story”.

I must admit I’ve never been terribly fond of King. I think he’s a bit heavy handed, and I thought that On Writing was disgusting. But that’s just me. Interesting then that we should both be on the same side of this argument.

The short story as a form is in trouble, and I think that the lack of good publication venues with good audiences is a big problem, but it’s only part of the picture. Other factors that I’d consider:

• Mainstream short story conventions tend toward the experimental, which precludes a lot of audience, because we are taught how to read experimental texts. For good or ill.
• Short stories also tend to be pretty conceptual (and this includes Science Fiction, alas), and conceptual work is also pretty hard to read, and not what I’d call classically fun. Interesting? Yes. Thought provoking? Yes. Important? Yes. Enjoyable? Only sometimes if you’re lucky.
• It’s hard to read short stories before bed. I suspect that most people do their fiction reading before they go to bed as “winding down” short stories can be read quickly, but are hard to get into when you’re tired.
• A lot of people who would have, in previous times, written short stories are writing other things: novels, blogs, etc. This isn’t a bad thing, so much as a “media and art change” fact.
• The novel has gotten shorter. Whereas once 100k words was sort of the bare-minimum for a novel length work, we’re seeing more novels in the 60k-80k range. This is still a bunch longer than the short story, but there has to be some compression effect downstream.
• Short fiction seems to be the best/only way to teach people how to write fiction. It’s not a huge commitment to a project, you can play around with ideas and techniques without wasting months of your time. I think we should give fiction writers who want to write novels or poetry the opportunity and encouragement to train for that separately.

Having said that, I think that podcasting represents a great hope for the short story. I find short stories pretty hard to read in most cases¹, but when they’re read to me, I often find that I can really enjoy the stories and get into them. EscapePod is a great example of this². And while I think the 365Tomorrows project is brilliance, I can pretty much only absorb these stories only in the podcast form, Voices of Tomorrow, and there is of course The Voice of Free Planet X, which is great fun.

This also forces us to consider the difference between literary and science fiction short stories. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m not sure that other than the New Yorker, Playboy, Harpers, and the Atlantic Monthly, there are literary short story publications that pay authors. Not that the SF markets pay all that well, but I think that’s worth something. SF pubs have to pay their authors in order to be taken seriously³, and some of the most respect literature-literary markets, don’t. Thus is in better shape, I think: Escape Pod is a huge force in this, but in the last decade I think we’ve seen an increase in pro-level markets: Jim Baen’s Universe, Orson Scott Card’s IGMS, and Strange Horizon’s are--I hope--a signal of good things to come. Maybe.

Despite podcasts and new markets; despite my loyalties to the science fiction community/movement/genre, I still don’t really want to read short fiction. So in the end I think I have to agree with Mr. King. The short story is in trouble, particularly the literary short story.

While I’d seen the LJ crossposter before, for some reason I’d never really installed it. Now I have. This post should be the first crosspost between this site tychoish and the tychoish livejournal.

I was in the MarsEdit support room--mostly because I like to be supportive of programs I like--and I thought, you know there has to be a good way to automate the Wordpress-LJ mess. I can’t get rid of LJ, and I don’t want to have LJ be my only blog-output.

So cross posting, is probably the best idea. In the past (and still, I suppose) I’ve used LJs feed importer option for TealArt,

In truth I’ll probably need to tweak the settings a bit, and while I initially thought that it would be cool to take care of this on my end, this seems like the kind of thing that might actually be best done on the server. I mean when in doubt use a supercomputer to do something rather than my trusty little powerbook g4.

So, I’m totally not keeping up with my tychoish blogging, like I want to. Alas.

I haven’t gotten started on the last chapter, but I think I’m getting a little bit closer to that. Once I start it’ll be pretty easy, I just have to have a start.

I’ve been planning the next project, which is a good thing to do, so I’m not exactly bemoaning lost productivity, because the next project needs a lot more research and planning at the moment. I’m not going to do NaNoWriMo, but using November 1 as a start date might not be a bad idea, but I suspect I’ll start sooner.

At the moment the planning I’m doing involves, get this: a lot of math. Before I start a detailed outline, I want to have a good idea of how long and where the major divisions in the story fall. What this means for chapter break down, and the sort of “topographical shape” of the story. Basically I’m trying to figure out pacing and that depends on knowing how long the chapters are and how much story I can fit into those divisions. It changes and shifts as the writing progresses, but it’s good to start with a plan.

(A scene in the novella that I planned for the 2nd chapter, appears in chapter six, I think.)

So that’s what I’m up to.

I also got a desk on craigslist, so it’s at least a possibility that the next post will be from the new offices for TealArt/tychoish/tycho.

Cheers!

Here’s a little writing question/thought I have about how we write about the future in science fiction.

I tend to write SF that’s set in the semi-distant future. Because a lot of the conceptual work that I’m playing with is about history, I think playing with what “might” happen and having 3000 or so years of history already around to play with is helpful.

At the core my question is about having different projects, take different opinions of the future. So for instance:

The novella I’m working on is set in the second half of the 26th century. I actually think that in terms of “development” it’s a lot like what people in the 1950s and 1960s thought that the (late) 21st would be like. There’s a little bit of colonization of the solar system, but not much. There’s radio lag that characters have to fight, no fast way to transverse space, but the government(s) on earth have gone through a lot of changes. It’s not star trek-ey at all.

The novel that I’m planning out at the moment is set in three time periods between about 2350 and the mid 28th century. It’s more space opera-ey, but no FTL, and I haven’t gotten into any post-human stuff in either story. There’s been more colonization in the solar system, in this one, and my conjecture here is that Earth is much more abandoned, and much less important, even if there are pockets of population/civilization.

I mean there are similarities, but I put up to one another, they’re contradictory, in some fundamental ways. Does this make me a hack? I mean clearly I am, but should I avoid setting up contradictory worlds in unconnected works? Your thoughts are much appreciated.

(I’m also cross posting this to my SF-Writing list. Sorry if you’re getting it double.)

As I draw to the end of the novella, I realize that I’m not quite ready for it to be over.

When I was finishing up Chapter #8, I had in my mind that I had two chapters left to write. While I wrote a couple of chapters in a very short period of time, for the most part 2 more meant that I had a couple more weeks to deal with the material.

My realization a few hours ago, that I really only had a smidgen more than a chapter’s worth of material, has sort of put me into a bit of a scare. This project has been a guiding force for a long time, like sweaters can be, frankly, so knowing that I’m close to having to let go and move on is hard. To make matters worse, I’m not sure that I’m far enough along on the planning of the next novel to begin to write it. The upside to this point is that planning is one of those things that I’m pretty good at just doing without thinking much about it, unlike writing.

So knowing that, I’m going to go sit down with my pen and moleskin and see what comes out.