So. This is not Thursday. This is not a good beginning for a weekly blog post, to be a day late in the second week.
However! I do have a writing-related reason. I needed to post a story for critique today and I was working on it yesterday. (Yes, I could have done that earlier…)
What I’ve been working on
As mentioned last week, I am currently working on three different stories, of very different lengths and subject matter.
Dispersed
Over the long weekend (Monday was Thanksgiving in Canada), I worked on this, incorporating the comments I received in workshop.
I think it’s improving (a lot). It is also getting much longer, having gained over 2000 words in the last couple of weeks. It’s close to 7500 words now, so just on the edge of short story length.
The length is fine, it is what it is. The larger issue is that it takes that much longer to do each editing pass. And I will need to slightly adjust where I submit it. But I have a list for that already, so I have no reason to procrastinate on that when the story is ready.
Ideally, I’ll have this finished by the end of the month. Most of the developmental work is done. There are a few elements I want to tweak, but they are backstory and explanatory things, nothing central to the story or characters. Most of the remaining work is polishing.
There’s still laundry
This Story a Day story from last month is the one I submitted today for critique. It’s short (around 1300 words) and about ghosts adjusting to life after death.
I really like it (although I went through my predictable ‘this story is absolutely awful’ stage yesterday). Anyway, I’m looking forward to the comments I get on this and moving forward with it after.
The other story I’ve been working on is called (for now) Generation Pothos, about a generation ship and with a heavy plant theme. I didn’t get around to it this week. I’ll return to this once I’m done with Dispersed (and probably after November). I’m eager to get it to it, but I don’t think it will suffer from further back of mind thinking. The only strong thing about it right now is the premise, so more thinking about it will probably benefit the story in the long run.
What’s coming next
Next month is November and that means Nanowrimo, which I seem incapable of resisting. But I’m not writing another novel first draft (tempting though that always is).
Instead, I’m going to develop the (very) short stories set in my novella universe that I wrote in September into a collection. I have 15 stories and I have arranged them in chronological order. They’re all around 800 words and I plan on expanding them (2000 words on average) and then editing them (although not necessarily to completion).
Ideally, the stories will stand alone enough to be submitted to various places individually, but I am also aiming for a novella-length story collection that has its own internal logic.
That’s all for this week. Take care.
Monique Cuillerier 