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Jan. 7th, 2012 10:12 amI've talked about this a little bit on the Extribulum blog (which I really should be linking to more, sorry about that), but I have a writing plan for the new year. It's a very loose plan, but it does have deadlines.
I've been saying since before Trace came out that the next book I published would be The Dead Isle, and to that end I've started rewriting it, which is no mean feat since it's easily the longest book I've ever written and there's a lot of dead air in it that needs to be removed, but sometimes the dead air leads to important moments, so there's a lot of string pulling I'm doing.
My other goal is to "treat" two books this year -- get them outlined or written and prepped for you guys to help me rework them, possibly the end of this year or the start of next. One of those is Valet of Anize, which needs a lot of reworking before I can even do anything new, but that'll be good practice. The other one, I thought, should be something new.
I have a whole file of ideas, but I took the half-dozen I liked best and I've been slowly discarding them as they start to seem implausible, too difficult, or just not as strong as others. I've got it down to three, but I'm struggling really hard to pick a finalist, so I thought I'd get your input as readers. That is, after all, at the heart of the way I write: to speak to a reader.
Tunnel is something I've talked about on the journal before, a magical realism story set in Chicago, focused around the extensive network of underground pedestrian, mail, and prohibition tunnels that honeycomb downtown and the north side of Chicago. I love the concept of Tunnel, and I have a vague plot, but I'm having trouble actually writing it, so I'm struggling with that. Also the plot seems a bit like Neverwhere, and I'd hate to be unoriginal.
American Jackal has come out of my fascination with Chicago's coyotes; I want to write a story about a group of people who can become coyotes and how they fit into both the human and the coyote population of the city. I'm having trouble even outlining this one, and certainly it would need a lot of research (likely into the Native American tribes in and around the area, which is really difficult since there are even fewer records than normal; this would be so much easier in California). But I think once I had my feet under me I could blow this one out of the water.
The third is by far the most difficult, but it's the one that entrances me most. I've written "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories before, on commission for a Chicago art project, and I know how hard they are to structure, but I love the challenge and the idea of writing a Choose Your Own Adventure for adults, which would be a meditation on genre literature, why we make the choices we make, and whether our lives have a pre-destiny. I'm a little scared of this one, too, so it doesn't even have a title yet; it's just headed "Choose Your Own Adventure" in my notes. The biggest downside of this is that it's likely I couldn't Extribulum it; the complexity would make that really difficult, and probably the best I could do would be to run it past some people for grammar and messy prose.
Anyway, those are the stories I'm looking at, and I'd like to know your thoughts.
[Poll #1808980]
I've been saying since before Trace came out that the next book I published would be The Dead Isle, and to that end I've started rewriting it, which is no mean feat since it's easily the longest book I've ever written and there's a lot of dead air in it that needs to be removed, but sometimes the dead air leads to important moments, so there's a lot of string pulling I'm doing.
My other goal is to "treat" two books this year -- get them outlined or written and prepped for you guys to help me rework them, possibly the end of this year or the start of next. One of those is Valet of Anize, which needs a lot of reworking before I can even do anything new, but that'll be good practice. The other one, I thought, should be something new.
I have a whole file of ideas, but I took the half-dozen I liked best and I've been slowly discarding them as they start to seem implausible, too difficult, or just not as strong as others. I've got it down to three, but I'm struggling really hard to pick a finalist, so I thought I'd get your input as readers. That is, after all, at the heart of the way I write: to speak to a reader.
Tunnel is something I've talked about on the journal before, a magical realism story set in Chicago, focused around the extensive network of underground pedestrian, mail, and prohibition tunnels that honeycomb downtown and the north side of Chicago. I love the concept of Tunnel, and I have a vague plot, but I'm having trouble actually writing it, so I'm struggling with that. Also the plot seems a bit like Neverwhere, and I'd hate to be unoriginal.
American Jackal has come out of my fascination with Chicago's coyotes; I want to write a story about a group of people who can become coyotes and how they fit into both the human and the coyote population of the city. I'm having trouble even outlining this one, and certainly it would need a lot of research (likely into the Native American tribes in and around the area, which is really difficult since there are even fewer records than normal; this would be so much easier in California). But I think once I had my feet under me I could blow this one out of the water.
The third is by far the most difficult, but it's the one that entrances me most. I've written "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories before, on commission for a Chicago art project, and I know how hard they are to structure, but I love the challenge and the idea of writing a Choose Your Own Adventure for adults, which would be a meditation on genre literature, why we make the choices we make, and whether our lives have a pre-destiny. I'm a little scared of this one, too, so it doesn't even have a title yet; it's just headed "Choose Your Own Adventure" in my notes. The biggest downside of this is that it's likely I couldn't Extribulum it; the complexity would make that really difficult, and probably the best I could do would be to run it past some people for grammar and messy prose.
Anyway, those are the stories I'm looking at, and I'd like to know your thoughts.
[Poll #1808980]
