After committing myself to publishing fiction for the rest of the year starting in October, I set out to find a way to unify my work, give it a center, or at least apply some sort of ordering principle. It would be a way to prevent my writing or outlining from ranging too far into the weeds, a meta-narrative that could provide guidance when deciding what and how to create.
It was a fruitless process for a few days. Even though I haven’t been starved for the raw creative material that gets processed in the crucible of my brain, not using my artistic muscles for such a long time has caused the skills I used to inspire myself to atrophy. I would basically sit around and think really hard, while sweat would bead on my forehead. I wanted to push myself, but felt my reach had far exceeded my grasp.
Frustrated and devoid of direction, I turned to the spirals I’d recovered from the February ice storm. There, I found shockingly detailed notes on worldbuilding, characters, story arcs, organizations, locations—the works. Across several major projects, spanning genres, time periods, secondary worlds, and even some of my own old meta-narrative stuff from when I was absolutely infatuated with the Cosmere (Sanderson is still good, I’m just a fan of only a few of his books).
None of this had been published, or even put down on the word processor yet. This was refined material ready to be molded into a finished product.
So I thought: hey, why not get a bunch of this stuff written, and try to construct a narrative through-line while writing it? It’s all as-yet-unmade fiction, why not make some of it and figure out how it fits together later?
Thus, I arrived at the title of this Lightning Round:
Excerpts From Unmade Novels.
They will be varied in form, length, and maybe even medium, but they will all be discrete segments from projects never truly put on paper, and they will have some sort of thread holding them all together.
Novel?
Novella?
Short story collection?
Not sure. I wanted to try something highly experimental but also familiar to me in form and function. Kaleidoscopic, pan-genre projects that still allow me to tell one story are my jam (52 is one of my top 3 favorite comics of all time).
Let me be clear: I have no detailed plans *as of me writing this sentence*. Things will obviously take on a more definite shape over the course of outlining and drafting this month, but as of this moment, things are a bit amorphous and intangible.
Alright. That’s the update. Probably won’t hear from me (or a fictional construct of me created by me to herald the beginning of the Event) until October.
Love you, hope you’re doing well, take care.