Hi all,
I finished the first draft of the science fiction/fantasy novella I've been slowly writing over the past few weeks. It is now called The Watchers and is just under 9,000 words. Hopefully I can quickly revise it before sending it off to my writers group to be critiqued. Which means I should make an effort to critique some of their stories in the coming weeks, unfortunately there have been very few new pieces placed on it to critique in the past few months. I'll see what happens.
I had a couple of moments of synchronicity last week. While trying to write some authentic period dialogue for my novella I read a story in the Macquarie Pen Anthology of Australia Literature that had the same sort of characters in it, thus expediting the end of the novella. On Sunday's Ockham's Razor Dr Michael Lardelli from the University of Adelaide gave a talk stating that the world had reached peak oil in 2008, that night I watched the second part of the mediocre mini-series Burn on ABC which had been about climate change but at the end dramatised the world economic collapse when peak oil was reached in 2009. Lardelli's talk said that we might not be able to prioritise the remaining oil for building the necessary alternative energy infrastructure to replace the lack of oil. So the world might be in for another, bigger economic collapse in the next few years as it recovers from the GFC and demand for oil is unmet. Another reason for starting to do something about climate change now.
I attended the coyote.com online speculative fiction writing convention on Sunday morning for a session on World Building by author Lynn Flewelling. The session gave me few things to think about when describing new technology in worlds I have created. I will put a transcript of the session up on my blog sometime later this week.
The convention goes for the whole of May and I am booked into four more sessions: Artificial Intelligence and Sexuality; The Book Deal and the Publishing Process; Brainstorming the Future of the Novel; and Survival for 21st Century Writers.
Nothing to report on ebooks this week, but next week I must do a check of the 100 bestselling kindle ebooks to see if there has been much change in their prices.
Hopefully life doesn't intervene in my writing too much this week so I can get through an edit of the novella and be back editing the novel next week.
Graham.
A blog about writing, science fiction, the future of publishing, books, and me.
3 comments:
Congrats on finishing the first draft Graham. Sounds good. I like the editing. For me I like to take a break before I begin, perhaps work on something else. Come back refreshed and ready to hack.
The online stuff sounds interesting too.
When you're writing a novel it is like going on a long trip to an somewhere you've never been before. You've not sure where you're going but you have a lot of fun getting there. Editing is like repeating the trip because you lost your camera and all your travel photos. You take pictures in the same place, but no matter how you pose, they don't seem to capture the original emotion.
I like yr analogy.. I agree that the initial journey is filled with excitement.. i also find it quite terrifying.. but i dont go back straight away.. after a good break I can see that some things just dont work.. and then im also surpised by what happens.. its a rediscovery.. its like getting to yr know yr partner intimately after those initial frantic, nervous encounters..
ive heard people compare it to hacking out a piece of granite.. then the editing is molding it into shape.. i do like editing because i can feel it getting better with each change.. it is more mechanical, no doubt, but i would say (almost) as important..
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