[I’m amused as I realize I’m adding this post on October 31st … mere hours before November starts. Why is this amusing, you wonder? There’s this tiny thing … somewhat related to writing … which happens in November. Maybe you’ve heard of it? It’s called NaNoWriMo, a.k.a., “National Novel Writing Month” — which typically takes place in November. The challenge is to generate a 50K word manuscript in the space of a month. I am not planning on actively participating in this, although, given my productivity if I get my teeth into something, it’s entirely possible I’d actually accomplish it.]
One of the overarching senses of dread that I’ve been starting to feel has come from not having something which I’d consider a “great” idea for another book. Yeah, “Rough Times in Osaka” feels like it’s coming into the “end stretch”, so I don’t think I’ve got a lot more to do on that one just yet.
I’d contemplated trying to tackle some more Pub Tales, but I don’t quite have a good feel on more than, maybe, half of another one.
Scrounging my brain (and looking at all of the tumbleweeds rolling by), I was suddenly struck with the thought of re-examining some of the short stories I’ve written and contemplating if any of them could be redone / lengthened / expanded upon. Shortly after I’d first written “Strange Vacation“, one of the readers suggested that it could (should) be turned into at least a novella — since there was already a fairly meaty short story there to begin with.
Possible Ideas?
And that’s when there seemed to be a little bit of lubricant leaking into the mind gears. There are actually two stories I’ve written which might fit that categorization nicely.
There’s “Nonna“, which I had subsequently envisioned turning into a sort of … Fafhrd and Gray Mouser sort of series of adventures. But I was having (and still am having) a bit of trouble with coming up with a really good “Mouser” counterpart to Nonna herself. And don’t even get me started on what might happen after I get the two main characters together.
And the other one was “The Landing“. It had started as a bit of a weird excuse (for myself) to contemplate “what if the guy on the space station lands to have a chat with the local natives … only to discover they’re not quite as ‘native’ as he’d first thought?” After I’d written it, I contemplated extending it — telling more of the story of what happens “after”.
Realistically, for it, there’s parts of the story I like a lot, but there’s also a bunch of it (ok, a big bunch of it) which, in retrospect, doesn’t really work well and I wound up screwing up my own thought process because I wanted to have some initial bits there to be “cool”, but, as part of the overall story, don’t really make sense.
I kind of like the basic story, to be honest. And I think there’s more that I can do with it. Although, I also realize the “more” probably shouldn’t start right after the story, but there’s miles of backstory I could throw in.
Hell, I even realized I’d never actually named the planet!
Thus is born … “Tewei”!
So, that’s what I’m going to work on now / next. I just did a very crude set of folders and such in Scrivener to give myself a basic novel story structure. Now I get to start filling all of that in.
And, this time … I’m starting from a bit further back than just the day of stuff kicking off.
