My God, It's Raining

First up, thanks to everyone who read my Halloween short story over at Jennifer William’s ‘blog, and additional thanks to everyone who commented (both positive and negative!).  It’s nice to know I’m not just throwing this stuff out into the darkness never to been seen again.  To paraphrase one of Lisa’s ridiculous (but brilliant) J-Dramas – as long as there’s one person who enjoys my work, I’ll keep writing it.

Not sure if that counts as a threat.

Anyway.  We’ve moved house now, and I *almost* have the writing cave set up.  All of our books are in here, along with both the PCs, a whiteboard for me to scribble on when I want to pretend I’m doing planning, and so far a single print – a Kay Nielsen illustration from East of the Sun, West of the Moon:

Tomorrow, I am starting my first ever NaNoWriMo project, which will be the first 50,000 words of a story called “The Thousand-Fold Blade”.  I’ve still got some tinkering to do to get the overall arc set but I now have a decent idea of where it all starts and where things are going to go.  Asked to describe what it was about at the York NaNoWriMo kick-off party, I said it’s about two men on either side of a brewing conflict: one is a master swordsman whose skills have been rendered obsolete, the other is a spymaster who has lost his memory.  There’s a lot more but that seemed like a good, if slightly teaser-y, way to pitch it to the room.

In other news, we are buying a slow-cooker.  I’ve been indifferent to the idea, but Lisa has wanted one for a while now and the consensus over on Ravelry is that they are the bomb*so – long story short**- we’re getting one.  Beef stewed in ale with dumplings sounds about right for a cold October evening, doesn’t it?

*but not actual bombs – if your slow cooker is at risk of explosion, you are doing it wrong.

**too late

For the Halloween weekend, the ever-lovely Sennydreadful asked for some stories to include on her ‘blog in celebration of the spooky season.  I said that I would chip in, on the proviso that I be allowed to write a Halloween story about butts.

Yes, I am that immature, and yes, there are a lot of butts in the story.  A lot.  You can read the story, and sate your desire to read more about butts at her ‘blog.

As a tie-in to here, I thought I’d do a second story, just for the hell of it.  It’s very short – a little over 1000 words – and deals with one of my favourite mythical terrors: the water-horse.  You can download it as a PDF or RTF here:

Hope you enjoy it, and have a fun Halloween weekend!

So far this month I have managed to finish up my short story for the Blizzard Writing Contest.  It’s quite interesting (and challenging) to write in someone else’s world.  I’ve tried it once before; back when I was playing WoW I wrote a short story about Arena PvP.  It only really struck me when I was writing my competition entry that I had taken a wrong turn back with that first story.

While there’s a certain minimum amount of foreknowledge you can safely assume in the average reader of tie-in fiction, I made the mistake of overexpectation on the part of the reader.  To anyone who didn’t play WoW, it might as well have been written in hieroglyphics.  Granted, if you explained everything in a detailed and precise way, you’d be writing a manual and the core audience would fall asleep reading, so it turned out there were a lot of tweaks that had to be done to balance the writing.

Also, it’s pretty tough trying to be original.  Some of the stuff that happens in my story just doesn’t happen in the game it is based on. I wanted something that would have an authentic feel to the Universe it was based on, but I wanted it to be more than just a re-tread of something you might have seen if you played it.  So I took some liberties.  The reasons they can happen get explained, but I can imagine a real hardcore fan might tut in disapproval reading it nonetheless.

Also this week I finished editing a Steampunk story, which is not getting sent anywhere.  I wrote it, edited it, scrapped it, re-wrote it, edited that until I was sick of the sight of it, and in the end I have to say I don’t think it’s strong enough.  It’s annoying, because I started out with a good idea – the difficulties a female inventor would face in the Age of Steam – and as I worked away on it I discovered it was much, much harder to say what I wanted to within the constraints of my word limit.

It’s not that what I’ve come up with is particularly bad. At some points, it’s about as good as my writing gets.  It’s just that taken as a whole I don’t think it stands well as a short story.  It feels like a fragment of something longer, and – havign considered the idea of writing something longer with it – it probably wouldn’t make the final cut.

The recycle bin isn’t really where it’s going, though.  It’ll get filed, along with everything else that doesn’t quite work, and maybe parts of it will come back in something else.

I may kill my darlings, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to waste the dismembered parts they leave behind.

Picture of a flower – I’m not sure what type.  Sweden, 2011