Sunday, 10 February 2002

Some progress on the non-lethal story. I've got 690 words. More important, I've made some progress in figuring out the end. I've rewritten the beginning to bring it in line with where I think the story is going. I'm fixin' to have a happy ending for this one. Maybe not everything the hero might want, but close.

I've been thinking novelish thoughts. I guess I mentioned that a month or so ago.

I did a quick find-by-contents search of my disk, to see if I'd mentioned that before. The search brought up some old journal entries, from before I put my journal on line. I haven't looked at them in years. Kind of interesting. A lot like this journal, actually. It covers the period when I'd just started on a novel, and then decided that I'd apply to Clarion.

Back in July, Geoff Landis asked if I had a novel in the works, and I gave him a rough outline of that one. He didn't think much of it. That might just be because I hadn't practiced coming up with a good, concise description of the novel, but I think it may be true. Not that it's a bad novel idea, but it doesn't really have a perfect hook. It might work great as a fourth novel, when I had a reputation that could get people to read along as I built up to something great. But a first novel needs a better hook.

So, I'll go through my old folders. I have some story fragments in a folder called "probably novels," for the stories where I wrote ten or twenty pages, and then realized that where I was headed was obviously not going to be short story length. I also have some novella-length stories that are much too sparse. None of them could expand up to a novel on the strength only of that, but several could be a major plot thread of a novel.

Or, I could come up with a completely new idea. I've been kind of suppressing novel ideas the past couple years. I'll start nurturing them instead.