Category: Works in Progress

Works in Progress

Morning.

There is a very peculiar quality to the light outside my study window today. Very white, a little too midday for this early morning hour, and it leaves the view (such as it is) a little bleached out. And although it’s cool and pleasant in my house there’s a very nifty heat-haze rising up off the corrugated iron roof of the neighbor’s place. Soon the cloud cover will shift a little and it’ll all disappear, but right now I’m amusing myself with looking out the window and taking notes. Junked the Black Candy draft last night after long hours of debating its various merits against its various elements of wrongness. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom for new novel writers and will probably come back to haunt me in the near future, but I’m more-or-less convinced it was the right call – I have a novella that shows my love of The Big Sleep already, I don’t actually

Works in Progress

It was not an exciting day at the word mines…

Word tells me I’ve added about 800 words to the Queen of the Winter Sea today, along with miscellaneous tinkering and cutting, so it should be counted as productive by any reasonable metric. Unfortunately my head still hasn’t got with the program and continues to tell me that I’m making no discernible forward progress – I’m blaming the fact that there seems to be a conflict between my thematic plan and the subtext that’s coming up during the writing process, which largely means that it all feels muddleheaded instead of clicking into place. Solution: call this a draft, let it sit fallow for a few days, and start a new draft over the weekend while working on other stuff. I’ve got enough of a draft down that there’s a shape, so I figure I can give the writer-brain a few days to dwell upon it and trust in its ability to deliver something worthwhile, thematically, that will amuse me as much

Works in Progress

This is not a reason to panic…

Earlier this week I put together my writing-based to-do list that covers all the stuff I’d like to achieve between now and the end of February. It basically consists of a novel draft, an exegesis draft, a novella draft, and a dozen stories that either need to be written or re-written. It’s the kind of workload that seems reasonable inside my head, but experience says that real life will not let it run as smoothly as I expect. Especially since the work breakdown says I should have a story draft done by this Sunday, as well as a small chunk of novel and a 3500 word outline for the exegesis. My brain is refusing to do any of it and demanding to watch Predator 2 instead (No, I don’t know why Predator 2 has become the topic of fixation, but apparently my subconscious is convinced it’s a reasonable facsimile for work). I’m not panicking about this, which is my usual

Works in Progress

More Last Short Story

Another mention from Last Short Story today, this time from GirlieJones: “The strongest story for me in Fantasy this year was Peter M Ball’s “On the Finding of Photographs of My Former Loves”, which was also when I perked up my ears and hopped on the Peter M Ball train. It’s tender and odd and sad and bittersweet. And beautifully beautifully written. I’m looking forward to reading what Ball does next. “