Things progress; if not exactly apace, well, at least they progress. Chapter 2 is 10 pages and getting longer, at about a third of the way done. I kind of expected this, though. It chunks, but I'm having trouble feeling the scene breaks, and that's slowing me down.
What's interesting is that I find myself refining the outline as I go -- not changing it per se, in that everything still goes in the direction in which it was originally intended, but beefing it up, rooting the supernatural stuff more thoroughly (and in a novel where your narrator is dead from word one, this is a Good Idea; I find that I am taking a way different tack from Alice Sebold in The Lovely Bones, and of this I am glad, for they are way different books) and, much more importantly, expanding the main characters' lives and foregrounding the world they live in much, much more clearly.
It's funny, too, because I know the world they live in -- erm, inhabit -- pretty well. I mean, I lived there for 24 years. But while Houston informs the story, it isn't a story about Houston, not the way that Space City is. The world I'm getting into is the world inside the characters themselves, an exanimate artist junkie and a couple of vulgarly-nicknamed yuppies and a secretive girl with a dead-end job and a double life and a cancer patient and a frightened drug dealer and a dead wallflower who can't bring herself to rest. With every secret I tease out, the details shift a little: new things become important, old details become unworkable or less necessary and fade into the background or are replaced.
Short stories do this too, but it still feels weird to watch where the dominoes are going to fall if I line them up this way instead of that way. Which is part of why I'm writing this novel and not another one; it's small enough that I can see where they're going to fall. I think once I get used to this perspective, I can tackle something larger, and then something larger. It may never get comfortable, but at least it'll get feasible.
And, hee, this one actually works kinda well with the tombstone game: Meredith L. Patterson's Disintegration.
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maradydd- Meredith L. Patterson
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Hey, I have a random question: Do you find it easier to keep focus writing short stories than longer ones? I've been trying to write forever, but I find my mind shifts around quite a bit and I often feel discouraged because I don't know where I want to go with the story (because there are too many ways to choose from, while I still have HUGE gaps I never quite know how to fill). Any thoughts, or words of wisdom?
The best advice I can offer, when writing any story, is to have a rough idea of at least the beginning and end. Having some idea how it all wraps up gives you a goal to drive to; you might go an awful lot of places in the middle, but as long as you're generally moving your characters in the direction of some end-state, it certainly feels like progress. :)
Personally, I find it really useful to keep a brief, sketchy "outline" -- short descriptions of high points in the story, as if it were a movie I'd watched and was describing to someone who hadn't seen it. "And then they went here, and tried to get into this building, but the bad guys found them and there was this big fight through all these winding hallways" -- that sort of thing. OTOH, there are a lot of writers on the mailing lists I'm on who complain that if they know what's going to happen, it ruins the surprise for them and they're not interested any more. (I have my own opinion of this attitude, but I'll sum it up in another post.)
It also isn't necessary to "outline" in order, either. If you know that you're starting at A and ending at Z, and that you want to hit H, M and Q along the way, start by noting that down. As you think about the story, you'll hit on how to get from A to H, and so on and so forth. The other advantage of knowing where you're going is that you can write non-sequentially; if you've written A, B and C, but the Muse doesn't feel like working on D today, you can skip ahead and work on E, or J, or whatever you like. :)
I have been considering taking a stab at short stories and see how that goes. :)
(The Icon that is.)
Someday I'll have to read something of yours.
Sadly, now that i don't have regular (well, more than twice weekly) internet access, I can't sit down and read something online.
I'll keep watching though, when I get the net back I'll remember to get URLs :D
I don't have a lot of material online, just stuff that's been published in webzines, but the Fortean Bureau and Strange Horizons have both run my stuff in the last couple of years.
*has only listened to Disintegration piecemeal... well, once from the CHSR vaults, but he was doing work at the time*