Two different kinds of awesomeness, obviously.
Having finished a story last week, this week I started a whole new story! Just like that! Or, to put those exclamation points in perspective: having finally achieved a draft that I think probably fixes the major howling structural and storytelling errors of the previous draft of the story that I first plotted out in October of 2007 (although it has doubtless introduced new structural and storytelling problems), this week I banged out over three thousand words of brand new story that I had never thought of before about ten days ago.
It's weird, going from something I've been mulling over and fixing and re-fixing for three years to something where I'm still trying to figure out the major points of internal logic like "does everyone in this town know that their neighbors are werewolves?" A couple of times this week I've sort of gotten frozen up by stuff like that, and then remembered: it's okay! It's a draft! I just started this story this week! If I want it to work some other way, later, I can change it. It's kind of awesome.
And speaking of short stories and awesomesomeness, here are some awesome short stories I've enjoyed this week:
The Cambist and Lord Iron, by Daniel Abraham, from Logorrhea, a collection of stories each based on an interesting vocabulary word. "The Cambist and Lord Iron" is subtitled "a fairy tale of economics" and that was pretty much all the enticement I needed to read it--a whole fairy tale about exchange rates! It's right up there with a whole book about going off the gold standard.
Mister Hadj's Sunset Ride by Saladin Ahmed, from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Rubes by Fred Warren, from Reflection's Edge, are both from the apparently presently kinda trendy fantasy Western subgenre--which is not My Thing in the way that fantasies of economics evidently are, but I quite liked them both. "Rubes," especially, had an ending that I didn't expect and really, really loved.
It's weird, going from something I've been mulling over and fixing and re-fixing for three years to something where I'm still trying to figure out the major points of internal logic like "does everyone in this town know that their neighbors are werewolves?" A couple of times this week I've sort of gotten frozen up by stuff like that, and then remembered: it's okay! It's a draft! I just started this story this week! If I want it to work some other way, later, I can change it. It's kind of awesome.
And speaking of short stories and awesomesomeness, here are some awesome short stories I've enjoyed this week:
The Cambist and Lord Iron, by Daniel Abraham, from Logorrhea, a collection of stories each based on an interesting vocabulary word. "The Cambist and Lord Iron" is subtitled "a fairy tale of economics" and that was pretty much all the enticement I needed to read it--a whole fairy tale about exchange rates! It's right up there with a whole book about going off the gold standard.
Mister Hadj's Sunset Ride by Saladin Ahmed, from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Rubes by Fred Warren, from Reflection's Edge, are both from the apparently presently kinda trendy fantasy Western subgenre--which is not My Thing in the way that fantasies of economics evidently are, but I quite liked them both. "Rubes," especially, had an ending that I didn't expect and really, really loved.