I've Been Negligent
...in terms of posting here, as with so much else. It's a lot easier to just like and reblog a bunch of shit on Tumblr, or have my conversations on Facebook, and that's frankly sad as hell. But then again, both Livejournal and Dreamwidth appear to be almost exactly as mordant, these days. Comments conversation is a dead art, I fear.;)
Anyhow: I went through my notebooks again, did a transcription binge and moved all my In Development pieces into a folder, thus discovering that while I may have far more upcoming deadlines than I thought I did, I also have roughly fifty things I could potentially use to plug those particular holes--seeds, sketches or outlines, as I like to call them, depending on the level of content. (A seed, for example, might be as simple as the sentence "Break John Wyndham's "Close Behind Me" down for parts and remix it to my own satisfaction."; an outline goes all the way, from first few sentences to three-act structure and coda sentence, with nothing left un-worked-out.) So that's good.
All of which goes to explain why I'm currently in the process of bulling my way through a new story called "The Church in the Mountains," based on the vague yet highly specific memory of something I thought for years that I must have caught on TV sometime in my teens, maybe as part of a Canadian anthology series, except that Google Fu has completely defeated me in terms of working out exactly what the hell that might have been. Thus leaving me with the floating question of "If this comes from inside me rather than outside me, then what IS it, exactly? A really detailed dream? A story idea that came to me so full-blown I convinced myself someone else had already made it? Where do these tropes come from, these images? Does the simple act of trying to tell it to other people make it change and evolve, and could disseminating that telling start to alter the world around you?" (That last part seems unlikely, yet makes for a pretty good thesis statement.)
In other news, I finished "The Puppet Motel" and sold it, then finished a shorter piece called "Come Closer," and sold that too. I posted the contracts on that one today, so I guess I can count on being paid for it soon. I also placed a couple of reprints and did more brainstorming work on Nightcrawling; I think I'm almost ready to start the first real chapter, now that I'm done with the prologue and I understand the overall structure. It'll be set back in 1990, so that'll be interesting--weird to think of that making it a period piece, even though it totally does. The other day it occurred to me that that's around the time I started writing many of the stories that eventually made it into Kissing Carrion, so maybe I should go back and take a look at some of those, because it'll give me a sense of how Lennox Frewer might write for that Creative Writing 101 course she and Ancke Ewert (Nightcrawling's protagonist) meet at. Everything eventually folds in somewhere, doesn't it? Which is sort of one of the refrains of the book, so there you go.
In personal news, we're proceeding apace towards Cal's tonsilectomy, which is going to happen (fingers crossed) on October 13. Not even a stay-over procedure anymore, as I recall--he gets it done, then comes home with us, has two weeks of recuperation and might even be back on track just in time to go off to the Viva! Youth Choir's annual music camp. Tomorrow I'm in Peterborough, doing ChiSeries Pride; mis-October I'll be in Windsor, Ontario, doing another book festival. It doesn't stop, which I guess is good.
Oh yeah, and I need to do some reviews pretty soon, drive-by or not, or people will stop reading this. Ha!
This entry was originally posted at http://handful-ofdust.dreamwidth.org/574854.html. Please comment either here or there using OpenID.
Anyhow: I went through my notebooks again, did a transcription binge and moved all my In Development pieces into a folder, thus discovering that while I may have far more upcoming deadlines than I thought I did, I also have roughly fifty things I could potentially use to plug those particular holes--seeds, sketches or outlines, as I like to call them, depending on the level of content. (A seed, for example, might be as simple as the sentence "Break John Wyndham's "Close Behind Me" down for parts and remix it to my own satisfaction."; an outline goes all the way, from first few sentences to three-act structure and coda sentence, with nothing left un-worked-out.) So that's good.
All of which goes to explain why I'm currently in the process of bulling my way through a new story called "The Church in the Mountains," based on the vague yet highly specific memory of something I thought for years that I must have caught on TV sometime in my teens, maybe as part of a Canadian anthology series, except that Google Fu has completely defeated me in terms of working out exactly what the hell that might have been. Thus leaving me with the floating question of "If this comes from inside me rather than outside me, then what IS it, exactly? A really detailed dream? A story idea that came to me so full-blown I convinced myself someone else had already made it? Where do these tropes come from, these images? Does the simple act of trying to tell it to other people make it change and evolve, and could disseminating that telling start to alter the world around you?" (That last part seems unlikely, yet makes for a pretty good thesis statement.)
In other news, I finished "The Puppet Motel" and sold it, then finished a shorter piece called "Come Closer," and sold that too. I posted the contracts on that one today, so I guess I can count on being paid for it soon. I also placed a couple of reprints and did more brainstorming work on Nightcrawling; I think I'm almost ready to start the first real chapter, now that I'm done with the prologue and I understand the overall structure. It'll be set back in 1990, so that'll be interesting--weird to think of that making it a period piece, even though it totally does. The other day it occurred to me that that's around the time I started writing many of the stories that eventually made it into Kissing Carrion, so maybe I should go back and take a look at some of those, because it'll give me a sense of how Lennox Frewer might write for that Creative Writing 101 course she and Ancke Ewert (Nightcrawling's protagonist) meet at. Everything eventually folds in somewhere, doesn't it? Which is sort of one of the refrains of the book, so there you go.
In personal news, we're proceeding apace towards Cal's tonsilectomy, which is going to happen (fingers crossed) on October 13. Not even a stay-over procedure anymore, as I recall--he gets it done, then comes home with us, has two weeks of recuperation and might even be back on track just in time to go off to the Viva! Youth Choir's annual music camp. Tomorrow I'm in Peterborough, doing ChiSeries Pride; mis-October I'll be in Windsor, Ontario, doing another book festival. It doesn't stop, which I guess is good.
Oh yeah, and I need to do some reviews pretty soon, drive-by or not, or people will stop reading this. Ha!
This entry was originally posted at http://handful-ofdust.dreamwidth.org/574854.html. Please comment either here or there using OpenID.