Spent the last week prepping to send Wet Work into the wild–aka drafting the synopsis.
I may have mentioned in the past that I hate these thrice-damned things. I don’t know a single writer who doesn’t. (And just you wait. Now that I’ve said that, some smartass is going to tell my how much he/she loves writing synopses. Just you wait.) But the good news is that I already had a draft to work with, left over from the Codex novel contest. I tweaked and twiddled a bit, working in the changes I had made in the rewrite. It clocked in at just over a thousand words, which struck me as a bit too long. So then I did another draft, which came in at 500 words. For those who have never done this kind of thing, I gotta tell ya, it’s . . . instructive. You have to boil down your story to the absolute bare minimum of plot and characters, and hope that you’ve somehow managed to retain some flavor. I don’t know how successful I’ve been at this, but I suppose I’ll find out soon enough.
I also note that it’s now the middle of August, and I still don’t know what the next novel will be. Oh, I have some ideas, but nothing’s really gelled yet. I also became suddenly plagued by doubt about the one project I was leaning toward: really, why in the hell should I write another science fiction novel at this time? The SF novel market, quite frankly, sucks. Hard. I’d be much better off with some kind of fantasy story–but I don’t have any novel-length fantasy percolating at the moment.
So maybe I don’t do a novel this year, much as the thought pains me. Maybe I replenish my severely depleted stock of short stories instead. Maybe that makes more sense at this time. Maybe then I can stop making myself crazy.
Or not. Knowing me, I’ll change my mind in another week.
But I’m at least certain of this much: I’m sick of not producing. It’s wearing on me. I’m tired of just drifting. So I’m drawing a line in the sand: September 1st. Come that day, I start something new. That gives me the rest of this month to whittle my to-do list down to something manageable. And then, I draft. Something. Anything. Given that I’ve done no novel prep, this will likely be a short story. Or two. Or three. Whatever. Maybe this, if nothing else, will shake the new novel loose. But whichever way I go, be advised that something new is coming. Soon.
No updates for Write Club.
And I’m out.
