(no subject)
So I've been puttering away on the old AHoS Shorts for about a month now, but never with much of focus. I've been re-reading them, making margin notes, fixing sloppy mistakes - generally just fiddling with them without any real purpose or plan. I just wasn’t inspired, in other words.
And then, while I was walking to sign language class last night, my inspiration arrived.
One of the more experimental aspects of the original run of AHoS was that the shorts were written and posted in no particular order, and the reader had to sort of figure it all out as they read them - sort of like Catch 22, only without the literary greatness. The disjointed nature turned out to not work very well, and I briefly tried adding a bit more of a narrative structure to the project before I eventually ended the whole experiment (on what I like to think was a high note).
Last night’s inspiration was to drop this questionable aspect - to take the shorts, group them loosely by theme and chronology, re-work them slightly to make them flow a bit more smoothly, and possibly add a few more shorts to make the whole series feel a bit more complete.
So for a couple of months now I’ve had a pile of 44 somewhat edited shorts on my desk, an empty and corrupted database on my server and a desire to do AHoS justice in my heart. Today, I have a plan for how to combine the above elements with last night’s inspiration and make a sort of AHoS Director’s Cut. Of course, since writing is a far more revisionist art form than making movies, I’m not going to call it a director’s cut - I’m just going to pretend that the first AHoS (itself secretly the second AHoS) simply doesn’t exist and just quietly replace it (not difficult, since aside from the original shorts on my hard drives, it doesn’t exist).
Then I’m going to publish whole thing (again) and switch gears for a while. My next project is going to be “The Ongoing Parable of The Weapon”, a slightly less hard sci-fi universe with significantly more narrative structure and characters and chronology and all those wonderful things that stories other than AHoS tend to have. Eventually I’ll come back to the universe of AHoS (I’ve still got story ideas for somewhere between three and oh-god-so-many novels set there), but that’s still somewhere off in the distant future currently.
And then, while I was walking to sign language class last night, my inspiration arrived.
One of the more experimental aspects of the original run of AHoS was that the shorts were written and posted in no particular order, and the reader had to sort of figure it all out as they read them - sort of like Catch 22, only without the literary greatness. The disjointed nature turned out to not work very well, and I briefly tried adding a bit more of a narrative structure to the project before I eventually ended the whole experiment (on what I like to think was a high note).
Last night’s inspiration was to drop this questionable aspect - to take the shorts, group them loosely by theme and chronology, re-work them slightly to make them flow a bit more smoothly, and possibly add a few more shorts to make the whole series feel a bit more complete.
So for a couple of months now I’ve had a pile of 44 somewhat edited shorts on my desk, an empty and corrupted database on my server and a desire to do AHoS justice in my heart. Today, I have a plan for how to combine the above elements with last night’s inspiration and make a sort of AHoS Director’s Cut. Of course, since writing is a far more revisionist art form than making movies, I’m not going to call it a director’s cut - I’m just going to pretend that the first AHoS (itself secretly the second AHoS) simply doesn’t exist and just quietly replace it (not difficult, since aside from the original shorts on my hard drives, it doesn’t exist).
Then I’m going to publish whole thing (again) and switch gears for a while. My next project is going to be “The Ongoing Parable of The Weapon”, a slightly less hard sci-fi universe with significantly more narrative structure and characters and chronology and all those wonderful things that stories other than AHoS tend to have. Eventually I’ll come back to the universe of AHoS (I’ve still got story ideas for somewhere between three and oh-god-so-many novels set there), but that’s still somewhere off in the distant future currently.