"You're mocking me, aren't you?"
Feb. 27th, 2007 12:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfs# find JournalEntries -type f -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 wc -w
557,204.
That's fully a quarter of my total output over eighteen years. I was looking through it last night and realizing just how much of it is missteps, abortive "Wouldn't it be cool if" stories, and a whole slew of scenes, snippets, and miscellany that I look over and tell myself that there's really nothing here, no dramatic tension, no literary value, not even decent erotic tension or revelation between many of the characters in the story.
Looking through my half-million words(!) of rubble, let's see: there's a story about the first starship designed to take dragons elsewhere, a germ of an idea about the Pendorians meeting a "United Federation" (a combination of Western libertinism, puritanism, and missionary zeal, Russian economics, Soviet organization, Arabian hospitality, and Chinese civil government; with just barely enough magical tech to keep median living standards marginally above early 21st century American upper class norms, with a teleological horror of "improvement" and "technological advancement," a society which actively works to restrain science from improving the human, uh, ritan model), a dead starship full of dead greys (which may harm Silver Rayne's chances), a novellette riff on The Machine Stops and The Naked Sun with rebellious teenagers, Sterlings (crud, that's 140,000 words right there, ain't it?), a Misuko & Linia vs. Cthulhu outing, a Brave New World riff, a Bottle City of Kandor riff, a mermaid story, Robots of the Deep vs. The Vampire Girl of Fallow Five, two different Encompassment stories, a discovery of who Pendor is at war with, a pair of Hell Simulation stories, some interstellar politics, a (really bad and not likely to see the light of day) riff on The Matrix that's another Hell Simulation story, a couple of Aaden, P'nyssa, and Wish stories, two Hellstrom's Hive riffs, and more!
And yet I can't seem to find most of this stuff interesting. I mean, when I look at some of these and see that the last time I touched them was three or four years ago, I wonder why I should bother.
Still, I have a couple ready for posting. I think my problem is simple: I find short stories easy, as long as their a particular kind of short story. In a post-abundance culture, the human animal has a problem: what do we do next, if anything? Many of my stories revolve around a simple theme: boys meets girl (or several other combinations) and convinces her (or him) that life is worth living, often appealing to various arbitrary atavisms (sex, food, whatever) for no other reason than that they're pleasurable and there's no reason to believe that post-transcendence pleasures will be any better.
It's when I break out into writing novels that I break out into a cold sweat. Novels are not in my comfort zone. And they shouldn't be. But I shouldn't be content to sit around in my comfort zone churning out porny love and redemption stories for the rest of my life. Which is why some of my work is reaching for that scale. It's just a little more intensive and nerve-wracking than what I usually do.
(Why is there no "whiny" mood?)
(Subject line explanation: In Toy Story, Buzz delivers that line, "You're mocking me, aren't you?" before he comes to realize that he is not destined for interstellar greatness but is, in fact, a limited, small, child's toy. It's a bit how I feel when I look at my working directory.)
557,204.
That's fully a quarter of my total output over eighteen years. I was looking through it last night and realizing just how much of it is missteps, abortive "Wouldn't it be cool if" stories, and a whole slew of scenes, snippets, and miscellany that I look over and tell myself that there's really nothing here, no dramatic tension, no literary value, not even decent erotic tension or revelation between many of the characters in the story.
Looking through my half-million words(!) of rubble, let's see: there's a story about the first starship designed to take dragons elsewhere, a germ of an idea about the Pendorians meeting a "United Federation" (a combination of Western libertinism, puritanism, and missionary zeal, Russian economics, Soviet organization, Arabian hospitality, and Chinese civil government; with just barely enough magical tech to keep median living standards marginally above early 21st century American upper class norms, with a teleological horror of "improvement" and "technological advancement," a society which actively works to restrain science from improving the human, uh, ritan model), a dead starship full of dead greys (which may harm Silver Rayne's chances), a novellette riff on The Machine Stops and The Naked Sun with rebellious teenagers, Sterlings (crud, that's 140,000 words right there, ain't it?), a Misuko & Linia vs. Cthulhu outing, a Brave New World riff, a Bottle City of Kandor riff, a mermaid story, Robots of the Deep vs. The Vampire Girl of Fallow Five, two different Encompassment stories, a discovery of who Pendor is at war with, a pair of Hell Simulation stories, some interstellar politics, a (really bad and not likely to see the light of day) riff on The Matrix that's another Hell Simulation story, a couple of Aaden, P'nyssa, and Wish stories, two Hellstrom's Hive riffs, and more!
And yet I can't seem to find most of this stuff interesting. I mean, when I look at some of these and see that the last time I touched them was three or four years ago, I wonder why I should bother.
Still, I have a couple ready for posting. I think my problem is simple: I find short stories easy, as long as their a particular kind of short story. In a post-abundance culture, the human animal has a problem: what do we do next, if anything? Many of my stories revolve around a simple theme: boys meets girl (or several other combinations) and convinces her (or him) that life is worth living, often appealing to various arbitrary atavisms (sex, food, whatever) for no other reason than that they're pleasurable and there's no reason to believe that post-transcendence pleasures will be any better.
It's when I break out into writing novels that I break out into a cold sweat. Novels are not in my comfort zone. And they shouldn't be. But I shouldn't be content to sit around in my comfort zone churning out porny love and redemption stories for the rest of my life. Which is why some of my work is reaching for that scale. It's just a little more intensive and nerve-wracking than what I usually do.
(Why is there no "whiny" mood?)
(Subject line explanation: In Toy Story, Buzz delivers that line, "You're mocking me, aren't you?" before he comes to realize that he is not destined for interstellar greatness but is, in fact, a limited, small, child's toy. It's a bit how I feel when I look at my working directory.)
