Between driving my sister around town and helping her get her place ready for the delivery of a new bed, I spent a lot of time over the weekend working on a story called Cool Water. It features Charlotte and a small cast of characters I had never worked with before. The plot outline complete in ten parts and now I'm working on writing the story. While I'm still not 100% satisfied with the entire plot I am going ahead with it as is and work on rewrites when the rough draft is complete. I have to break the bad habit of getting mired down in the details before getting anything done.
The story revolves around a scheme by TranSolar Private Inquiries to lure Charlotte away from the relative safety of Cool Water, New Mexico under the pretext of acting as a wilderness guide for a government water diviner. The town's greedy mayor, Gillingham, is bribed into facilitating an introduction. Agents who have been pursuing Charlotte for many years without success are waiting in the desert to take her into custody and return her to the xeno-biology laboratory where she was created, but they themselves have been infiltrated by a darker force that has a greater motive to see Charlotte utterly destroyed.
Monday, February 27, 2012
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Changing Tack
The net will tell you what you want to know (most of the time), but there is no guarantee it will be what you want to hear. The same can be said of tarot readers and fortune cookies, but I put a bit more stock in the former. This morning I searched for "sci-fi agents" and the net suggested a page from Robert J. Sawyer's website. There was a brief line of advice there that depressed me a bit.
"It's very hard to get a good literary agent to represent your first novel unless you have substantial short-fiction or other relevant credentials." Not the kind of news a frustrated young(ish) man wants to hear. It would seem I have been making all the wrong choices with my writing career lo these many years. Instead of heeding that inner voice and establishing my name with short fiction I have been working in obscurity on the long fiction (or wasting my time perfecting my various character flaws). It seems I need to switch gears and try to come up with some shorter stuff to sell. In a hurry like.
A former co-worker of mine, long since gone, once suggested that I write short fiction based around the various major characters in the long fiction I want to publish. That's not such a bad idea and I have some general concepts in mind. If only those concepts would germinate and grow into some compelling ideas. One such concept is to write a collection of stories about Charlotte Hudson, Colbrit Niemeier and Henny Rodale that tells their backstory.
For a number of years I've had an image in my mind of Charlotte in her early twenties living in a post-apocalyptic city somewhere in the American Empire. I've had it for a number of years, but I've never done anything with it, never tried to flesh it out, never asked the question "Why is she here?". I had always assumed she was hiding, but from what? From whom? What did that time in the city teach her that she uses in her work for Praecognita? What relationships did she foster? What memories, good or bad, does she carry with her of that time? What kind of time was it for her? What kind of person did it make her? Is there any part of that person left in her?
I could try to come up with some stories for Colbrit as a rookie cop. I could also write about his relationship with his older brother and his father. What about his mother? This could go a long way to figuring out who Colbrit is as a man. Same goes for Henny Rodale.
It's very hard to get a good literary agent to represent your first novel unless you have substantial short-fiction or other relevant credentials. And a bad agent can be worse than no agent at all. Most authors sell their first novel by submitting it to publishers (one at a time) themselves; once they've got an offer in hand, they call up an agent.
"It's very hard to get a good literary agent to represent your first novel unless you have substantial short-fiction or other relevant credentials." Not the kind of news a frustrated young(ish) man wants to hear. It would seem I have been making all the wrong choices with my writing career lo these many years. Instead of heeding that inner voice and establishing my name with short fiction I have been working in obscurity on the long fiction (or wasting my time perfecting my various character flaws). It seems I need to switch gears and try to come up with some shorter stuff to sell. In a hurry like.
A former co-worker of mine, long since gone, once suggested that I write short fiction based around the various major characters in the long fiction I want to publish. That's not such a bad idea and I have some general concepts in mind. If only those concepts would germinate and grow into some compelling ideas. One such concept is to write a collection of stories about Charlotte Hudson, Colbrit Niemeier and Henny Rodale that tells their backstory.
For a number of years I've had an image in my mind of Charlotte in her early twenties living in a post-apocalyptic city somewhere in the American Empire. I've had it for a number of years, but I've never done anything with it, never tried to flesh it out, never asked the question "Why is she here?". I had always assumed she was hiding, but from what? From whom? What did that time in the city teach her that she uses in her work for Praecognita? What relationships did she foster? What memories, good or bad, does she carry with her of that time? What kind of time was it for her? What kind of person did it make her? Is there any part of that person left in her?
I could try to come up with some stories for Colbrit as a rookie cop. I could also write about his relationship with his older brother and his father. What about his mother? This could go a long way to figuring out who Colbrit is as a man. Same goes for Henny Rodale.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)