Friday, June 25, 2004
TGIF
This week for the 2K words deal, I gave Ed a significantly revised story to review. It's a bit longer than 2K words, but it's not the 8K words that it was. Much tighter, I think, and that's an improvement. He seemed to like it when he read it earlier, and I'm curious to learn what he thinks of it since it's changed rather so much and the biggest of those changes came about at his suggestion.
Today I finished the fantasy story he has critiqued on two previous occasions. The work on this final draft involved writing the part that made the transition from the end of the middle to the beginning of the end (which I'd already written because it had kept distracting me from the middle) and addressing some of the concerns that he had brought up in his last critique. When he got to the part that just read BLAHBLAHBLAH and then skipped to the end, his comment was that it was going to be tricky to pull this off. But I think maybe I have. I think that I finally pulled together some of the details that I knew I wanted to bring out. The real test will be how the reader responds.
If these two stories really are at a finished point, then that's three of the four ideas I started working on when we started this deal done. Every now and then, I worry a little bit about running out of ideas. So far, every time I've started to worry, something has come along and caught my attention. I have an idea that may put a new and different spin on a SFF standard, if I can figure out the logistics. Then there's this idea that my friend K and I have tossed back and forth for a while that I want to try to work on, although I expect I'll need to have someone clean up my science when I do get started on the writing. And there's this idea that came to me last week that seems nearly perfect for a juv/YA novel - that is, if the juv/YA crowd actually reads anything anymore.
And, of course, there's this Eberron open call. According to overstock.com, my manual has been shipped from IL. I hope it arrives on Monday, but it would be a great thing to have it arrive even sooner, like Saturday - a welcome distraction from the housecleaning that simply must be done this weekend before the dust bunnies start attacking my cats, Grace and Mitya.
Kameron asked about writing fiction set in the world of a game I've played. That's not something I can say I have ever expected to do. Having spent the better portion of my life working towards a specific career goal that didn't really have anything to do with writing (at least not as a creative activity), investing time and energy into some kind of creative writing isn't something that I had expected to do, either.
So let's roll the dice and see what happens now.
Today I finished the fantasy story he has critiqued on two previous occasions. The work on this final draft involved writing the part that made the transition from the end of the middle to the beginning of the end (which I'd already written because it had kept distracting me from the middle) and addressing some of the concerns that he had brought up in his last critique. When he got to the part that just read BLAHBLAHBLAH and then skipped to the end, his comment was that it was going to be tricky to pull this off. But I think maybe I have. I think that I finally pulled together some of the details that I knew I wanted to bring out. The real test will be how the reader responds.
If these two stories really are at a finished point, then that's three of the four ideas I started working on when we started this deal done. Every now and then, I worry a little bit about running out of ideas. So far, every time I've started to worry, something has come along and caught my attention. I have an idea that may put a new and different spin on a SFF standard, if I can figure out the logistics. Then there's this idea that my friend K and I have tossed back and forth for a while that I want to try to work on, although I expect I'll need to have someone clean up my science when I do get started on the writing. And there's this idea that came to me last week that seems nearly perfect for a juv/YA novel - that is, if the juv/YA crowd actually reads anything anymore.
And, of course, there's this Eberron open call. According to overstock.com, my manual has been shipped from IL. I hope it arrives on Monday, but it would be a great thing to have it arrive even sooner, like Saturday - a welcome distraction from the housecleaning that simply must be done this weekend before the dust bunnies start attacking my cats, Grace and Mitya.
Kameron asked about writing fiction set in the world of a game I've played. That's not something I can say I have ever expected to do. Having spent the better portion of my life working towards a specific career goal that didn't really have anything to do with writing (at least not as a creative activity), investing time and energy into some kind of creative writing isn't something that I had expected to do, either.
So let's roll the dice and see what happens now.
