![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Hello, italics.
Mar. 23rd, 2007 11:06 amSo. Space opera. I've been referring to this thing as "the space opera" or sometimes as "Deportees." See those nice tidy little quotation marks around it? That means that, since it is for adults, it is to be less than 40,000 words long.
Except...I am not so sure that this is a reasonable thing any more. I am closing in on 10K at the end of this week, and the things I haven't even started doing yet, just from a plot standpoint, are legion. I am nearly a quarter of the way to the maximum word count on a novella. Am I a quarter of the way done with the stuff going on here? Not hardly. That means one of two things: 1) I am writing a novella incompetently; or 2) I am writing a novel.
It still could be #1. If things wrap themselves up unexpectedly tidily (example of necessary wrapping-up: "And then there was an earthquake; so anyway, they got people out, some of them."), I will go through and prune some of what I have now so that it is more suited to novella-length. Fewer digressions of interest, fewer developments of sub-themes, that sort of thing. But I suspect #2. I strongly suspect #2. I've done this sort of thing before. It feels like that.
And my brain is behaving exactly as it ought for #2, with the ability to sit down and rattle off a bunch of words without much effort early on. Books fall on my head. That's what they do. And eventually I crawl out from under them long enough to squint critically at them and notice that they are books and that they are going to need a heck of a lot more work before they're done, and that's fine, it's all part of the process, and we trust the process, right? Of course right.
But this thing wasn't really on my radar when I was sitting down and thinking carefully what to write next, and yet here we are. Books, she said with fond exasperation.
(I actually do sometimes tag my dialog like that in conversation. It sometimes startles people who have just met me in person but have been reading my lj. Also, people are surprised when I call![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
timprov "Timprov," which they shouldn't be, because it's his lj name because it's his name, not vice versa.)
So. Deportees, here we are. And it may change title between now and its ending, because I think "Deportees" is a better name for short fiction than for a novel, but it may suffice. We'll find out.
This is good. If you were wondering about the goodness of this? Yes. There is goodness. Whether it ends up being good to read is still up in the air, but it is good for me to be writing this right now.
Except...I am not so sure that this is a reasonable thing any more. I am closing in on 10K at the end of this week, and the things I haven't even started doing yet, just from a plot standpoint, are legion. I am nearly a quarter of the way to the maximum word count on a novella. Am I a quarter of the way done with the stuff going on here? Not hardly. That means one of two things: 1) I am writing a novella incompetently; or 2) I am writing a novel.
It still could be #1. If things wrap themselves up unexpectedly tidily (example of necessary wrapping-up: "And then there was an earthquake; so anyway, they got people out, some of them."), I will go through and prune some of what I have now so that it is more suited to novella-length. Fewer digressions of interest, fewer developments of sub-themes, that sort of thing. But I suspect #2. I strongly suspect #2. I've done this sort of thing before. It feels like that.
And my brain is behaving exactly as it ought for #2, with the ability to sit down and rattle off a bunch of words without much effort early on. Books fall on my head. That's what they do. And eventually I crawl out from under them long enough to squint critically at them and notice that they are books and that they are going to need a heck of a lot more work before they're done, and that's fine, it's all part of the process, and we trust the process, right? Of course right.
But this thing wasn't really on my radar when I was sitting down and thinking carefully what to write next, and yet here we are. Books, she said with fond exasperation.
(I actually do sometimes tag my dialog like that in conversation. It sometimes startles people who have just met me in person but have been reading my lj. Also, people are surprised when I call
timprov "Timprov," which they shouldn't be, because it's his lj name because it's his name, not vice versa.)So. Deportees, here we are. And it may change title between now and its ending, because I think "Deportees" is a better name for short fiction than for a novel, but it may suffice. We'll find out.
This is good. If you were wondering about the goodness of this? Yes. There is goodness. Whether it ends up being good to read is still up in the air, but it is good for me to be writing this right now.
