Frontier

I wrote less than 200 words yesterday, but I did a couple of important things with those words, so I’m not complaining.

They were:

• I broke the 10k mark on the new novel. Lets hope I can get the next 15 or even 20 k done in the next month.
• I started the third chapter, and did some associated outlining and note taking. These are really independent chapters, and sometimes starting a new one can be a bit tough. Good that its over.

Also on the writing front, I read the novella that I mentioned yesterday last night, when I was too brain dead to do anything else. (Note to self: read more before bed.) The novella was Alastair Reynolds’ “Minla’s Flowers,” and I quite enjoyed it. For those of you keeping track at home. In some ways the story was very much a “first contact/Prime Directive” tale about interference in lower cultures, and even though we have a succinct way of categorizing this story, it was fresh and added a good new perspective to the general model. And on top of that, the really rich “world” or setting was spectacular.

Though I fear that this makes me sound like a horribly trite SF fan, there are a couple of more complex appreciations here.

• Somehow I always think that because short form works are, well short, that you have to strip away anything that’s not The Plot, and The Characters, but to be honest, I think by proportion this and the Wolf 359 story I read the other day, had more “setting” and “world” than the long form stuff that I’m working on.
• There’s a huge historiographical component to this story, which I think is really cool, and makes me seem not so much like a freak in some of the stuff that I’d been playing with. But that said, I like the way that “cold storage” was used to make this happen, and how the short(er) work was able to both sand alone and work in a larger framework.

I learned a lot. So I’m happy. Time to make tea and actually get some stuff done.

Talk with you soon!

Onward and Upward!