A Slurry of Possibilities

Here I am, posting late again and pretending I didn't. I should be done with all the crazy distracting stuff, so I can get back to posting on time next week.

So where are we?

I've been trying to get going on a new project, whatever that might turn out to be. But then I was thinking about old projects, through the novella lens. That is, stories that maybe I couldn't edit/expand into a full novel, but could probably make into a novella. I have a few rough drafts that range from 10,000 to about 26,000 words that have enough raw material to eventually turn into a solid novella.

One story in question is The Long Road, the NaNo novel I just did. If I wanted to turn that into a full-length novel, there would need to be a lot more stuff. Either more random things would need to happen, or those things would each need to take longer. Aiming for a shorter overall word count could help me tighten up the narrative. I've been thinking that fewer things need to happen, and they need to be more… coherent. Not in that they make sense in the real world, but that they make sense within the confines of the story. The events need to be connected in some way, though at first glance they appear to be random. I think the Hitchhiker is going to be the thread that runs through everything. In my initial draft, she shows up twice, kicking off two different series of events. Who is she, really? In my notes, she was meant to follow them through various realities, but that never really happened. That's a potential avenue to pursue.

At the moment, I'm kind of cursed with simultaneously a ton of ideas and no ideas. There's all these ways to maybe fix old stories, and write new ones about space cops with ranged weapons that go through people but not hulls. But then also this feeling that I don't know where to start or how to fit any of this together. It's like making a smoothie in my brain. All this stuff swirling around at high speed, and I'm trying to focus on one particular raspberry particle. And now I want a smoothie. And so do you.

This is the downside of living in a post-NaNo part of the calendar. No deadlines. On the one hand, yay, no deadlines. On the other hand, nothing is driving me do anything. Except for the fact I need something to blog about. And I've clearly been bullshitting about nothing for the past month.

Maybe I should set all my novellas and crap aside, and write a story for that local publication. Yeah, I write weird shit that they don't want to publish, but the deadline at the end of January would at least force me to do something. And maybe I could try not being weird for just a minute. *sigh* If I have to.

I'll see you Tuesday. Probably for real this time.