All of a sudden this is threatening to turn into a short story blog. Two entries ago I found myself writing a short story. Today I found myself editing they only other short story I ever finished. I won’t go into my natural preference for novel length this time. I’ll just point out that I wrote two short stories in the same time it took me to write 6 first draft novels.

This short story actually might have been a chapter one if I’d been able to take the premise further. When I was writing it originally I was struggling to keep it interesting, to keep things happening, at 1500 words. In the rewrite I did last night and today, a sort of spur of the moment thing, I managed to stretch that to 2500 words. But the premise (I know you’re not out to steal it but I’m paranoid so I’m not going to say what it is) really limits itself to a short story, there’s not enough going on otherwise.

Now that I’ve finished the rewrite (pretty much writing from scratch with version one as the outline) I’m trying a different editing technique on it: the famous reading backwards edit. If you’re not familiar with it this edit is basically to make every sentence work as a sentence. This is done by reading the last sentence first, then the second to last and so on, until you reach the first sentence.

Right now I’m three quarters of a page (single spaced) from the end, which means there’s more than three and a half pages to go yet. It’s a little early to be judging this thing, but I have to say that so far I do like it. I have to force myself to just do a sentence and not go back a couple of sentences each time, but it does force you to look at things almost totally out of context. Now I just have to hope it’ll actually be noticeable to the readers, when I get around to letting people read it.

How much range does laser communication ship to ship in space offer? I wish I knew because if I did my world building would be a snap. In stead I trying to crunch the numbers: how much can I let it offer in a sensible way. If make the range too long, then private but slow (lightspeed) communication becomes a common-place. If I make it too short no-one will ever get close enough to use it.

That’s just one example of course. The world-building I hadn’t quite locked down before includes all sorts of things, com-ranges, sensor ranges and weapons’ ranges. In the first draft of the novel I’m preparing to edit (working title Gordian Knot) weapons’ ranges especially were a problem. In one of the early chapters there were merely a few light seconds, some chapters later they were nearly a light hour.

I should probably have done this before writing the first draft. Maybe I will the next time I start a new science-fiction universe. On the other hand crunching these numbers (for humans firstand then for three other races) is such a pain at times that I probably won’t. Or maybe I’ll just copy my present numbers over, change the names of the appropriate systems, and apply the same multiplication factor to all of them. Given how I feel about having to do them now I’m pretty sure it’s going to be very tempting.

I wrote a short story the other day, and I’m still kind of shocked. Now it’s not that unusual for me to write the number of words, a mere 1400 or so, within a single day. My personal best for words in a single day currently stands at more than 10,000. I just can’t write short stories. I have six finished first drafts for novels and two finished (first draft) short stories, including the new one.

As you may have surmised from the above novels are pretty much my natural length. I’m fine with this and routinely ignore any writing advice that claims “you should work on short stories first”. I’m sure that’s worked for some authors, but if I concentrate on short stories first I’ll be sitting here this time next year with two short stories to show for my trouble, if I’m very lucky. I’m sure that concentrating on short stories has worked for many people, but I’ve pretty much decided I won’t be one of them.

My new experience, a story in a day, is nearly enough to make me reconsider that. Nearly but not quite. Because, well, I cheated. The short story I wrote could double as a bad prologue for Singer, the guilty bit of writing I mentioned in my last blog-post. More to the point it pulls the horrible trick of telling events set before the time of the novel from the viewpoint of a character who won’t be in the novel, he’ll be dead by then. But all my world-building etc carried over from the novel. Ironically it’s a new perspective on the scene, dreamed years ago, that sparked the ideas for the novel. I think I’ll call it a short prequel…

I once wrote, half joking, in my profile here that I’d addicted to writing; now I have a little story to tell about that. But first a bit of good news: Absolute Write seems to be fully back. Unfortunately I don’t currently have a lot of time to celebrate, I should be doing something else (other than writing this blog) but decided I needed a slight break from studying to keep my head from exploding.

Now on to my addiction, I’m beginning to think it’s even more real than I thought when I wrote my profile here. Singer is a case in point.

Singer is the working title of what was, until a few days ago, only an idea in the world-building stage. As of this writing its 1801 words of story, the start of a novel, with rather too little world-building supporting it. I broke two promises to myself in writing those 1801 words:
1) don’t start writing until you’ve done the world-building
2) edit/rewrite Gordian Knot before starting another project
But damn it felt good. There’s a unique rush from getting a new story flowing out. Just world-building can’t quite compare, however much I like world-building. Editing I don’t particularly love, though I like the result. Long story short: I really am addicted to writing something new regularly.

Still it’s not the end of the world. Fortunately besides having next to no world-building done on Singer (quite a few important points, but none of the details to make the world real) I have little idea where the story will go. I’m nearing the end of chapter one, and probably won’t write too much after that for a while. I’ll just let it sit at a single chapter and do my rewrite on Gordian Knot. Then I can hopefully sent Gordian Knot out to hunt agents while I get back to world-building for Singer and possibly editing something else.

Well I’ve now spent nearly 15 minutes of “I should be studying” time on this entry, which is probably enough. More to the point I’ve said what I wanted/needed to say. One final thought: if I had to have an addiction at least I seem to have picked a relatively inexpensive and inoffensive one and one that doesn’t usually demand very much time.