So there I am trying to figure out what kind of proposal to put forth that won’t die in Chapter Two, while short stuff is sprouting up all over my mind, like greenbriar in a mowed pasture.\u00a0\u00a0 Greenbriar will never grow into a tall, shady tree full of delicious fruit, but it sure can pop out of the ground and stab you in the ankle.\u00a0 Short fiction is less painful (I hope!) but\u00a0 I do now know the difference in feel between “This should run out of steam before x-thousand words” and “AHA!\u00a0 This character and situation has real potential.”\u00a0 Usually.\u00a0 Almost always.\u00a0\u00a0 Many of my stories try to grow longer, but they’re like greenbriar, putting out long sneaky strands that have no woody potential.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Right now I’ve got a new story going about a character I told you had been secretive with me before, Cracolnya.\u00a0\u00a0 Nobody, he’d always said when I cornered him, really wants my story. It’s nothing.\u00a0 There’s nothing to see here, move along.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He had little personality he wanted to share, it seemed.\u00a0 And since I had a sheaf of characters eager to come onstage and show me their worlds, I let it go.<\/p>\n
This story started out as what I thought would be a simple but interesting story of\u00a0 “known character’s adventure when young.”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 First few pages went that way.\u00a0\u00a0 Then…down the rat-hole we went, and into something far more…something.\u00a0\u00a0 I can’t yet define something.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There are tantalizing hints, but nothing definite yet except what’s going on in the immediate present, but it’s feeling like resolution is farther and farther away, while story-stuff is accumulating, rather like the way storm clouds did on Monday (thought they fizzled out.\u00a0 Will this story fizzle out?\u00a0 Having had several fizzle-outers over the fall and winter I’m not eager to have another.)<\/p>\n
(Interruption: a very young Texas Spiny Lizard leaped up on the window screen and then discovered I was watching it.\u00a0 Closely.\u00a0\u00a0 It gave me the hairy eyeball from the right, then the left, and then decided to leave, zipping back down to the window sill and away.)<\/p>\n
To resume.\u00a0 Cracolnya would not have been my guess to arrive with a story longer than 7000 words, if that long.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s over 3000 words now, and there’s no sign of a “turn.”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I can’t figure out how this could be a book, given that we know how he turns out as an adult…we know the end, so to speak.\u00a0 Or we think we do.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m getting peculiar twitches out of this thing.\u00a0\u00a0 A YA book, maybe?\u00a0\u00a0 Or something else….Cracolnya as the connection to a more protagonist-like character that he’s going to come across?\u00a0\u00a0 The story so far, though it’s definitely him,\u00a0 is not leading in a direction that will end in his being a Fox Company captain, so there’s a turn in there somewhere.<\/p>\n
Discovery writing is scary sometimes.\u00a0\u00a0 Climb on the wild horse–no saddle, no bridle–and be taken somewhere.\u00a0\u00a0 Appropriate for a story about someone whose family was born into a horse nomad tribe.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile a couple of other “When they were very young” stories about other Paksworld characters are sort of stuck.\u00a0 Not badly stuck, but Cracolnya came charging out the gate and knocked them aside.<\/p>\n
Then there are the fans clamoring for more SF because they don’t like fantasy.\u00a0 More Vatta!\u00a0 More Serrano!\u00a0\u00a0 Um.\u00a0\u00a0 I tried several times, but…nada.\u00a0 It’s not that there aren’t ideas, but they’re all ideas for scenes, and the scenes don’t go anywhere afterward.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Hence dying in chapter one or chapter two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So there I am trying to figure out what kind of proposal to put forth that won’t die in Chapter Two, while short stuff is sprouting up all over my mind, like greenbriar in a mowed pasture.\u00a0\u00a0 Greenbriar will never grow into a tall, shady tree full of delicious fruit, but it sure can pop […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[107],"class_list":["post-2221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-writing-life","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2221"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2221"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2222,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2221\/revisions\/2222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}