Writing thoughts
I've been fiddling with the novel chapter I'm stuck on and have written some notes. Tomorrow, I'm rewriting the chapter from scratch borrowing a few things from previous versions. This was a chapter I had written, then decided was boring, and happily got rid of it. Instead I wrote a summary of what happened in the beginning of the next chapter. I mean, who really wants to read a whole chapter about a guy mostly by himself traveling along solving a sort of puzzle that was set for him? But it is important to the plot that this happens, and readers told me they needed to see it happening. Errr, maybe I just need to slim it way down, combine it with the next chapter, and rewrite it so that it isn't boring? That's a job for tomorrow and Wednesday.
I also reread the story I wrote a week or so ago, which is currently titled "The Fair Emilia." I worried that the ending would not be as unexpected as I hoped for seasoned genre readers. But I'm toying with the idea of taking the idea of what happens at the end and rotating it 90 degrees. Not what might be expected in a non-genre story, not the possibly expected fantasy outcome, but something that isn't quite either. We'll see if it works. I don't want to complicate things unnecessarily and I already have some interesting subplots creeping up on me that probably aren't relevant to the story I want to tell. Worldbuilding muscles, you can take a break, you know?
I'm sort of stuck on a story I started about the same time tentatively called "The Mouths" but I had a look at that today too. If I do it right, it will be an allegory about something in our modern lives. The closest thing I can think of that it resembles is some of the short stories in Ursula K. Leguin's collection, Changing Planes. But I've got lots of work to do.
I also reread the story I wrote a week or so ago, which is currently titled "The Fair Emilia." I worried that the ending would not be as unexpected as I hoped for seasoned genre readers. But I'm toying with the idea of taking the idea of what happens at the end and rotating it 90 degrees. Not what might be expected in a non-genre story, not the possibly expected fantasy outcome, but something that isn't quite either. We'll see if it works. I don't want to complicate things unnecessarily and I already have some interesting subplots creeping up on me that probably aren't relevant to the story I want to tell. Worldbuilding muscles, you can take a break, you know?
I'm sort of stuck on a story I started about the same time tentatively called "The Mouths" but I had a look at that today too. If I do it right, it will be an allegory about something in our modern lives. The closest thing I can think of that it resembles is some of the short stories in Ursula K. Leguin's collection, Changing Planes. But I've got lots of work to do.