Well, here I am, back with the first writing update of 2023! I hope all you reading this had a restful and renewing holiday. I know I certainly did, at least in terms of writing: I was a bit exhausted at the time of the last update, but now I’m ready to get back to work on my endless list of projects again.
The story that’s taken up most of my attention through the holiday season has been The Ravage, a yarn I originally wanted to spin for that Dragonesque anthology I mentioned in a previous post. I read their criteria—write a story from the perspective of a dragon—and almost immediately, I came up with an idea I thought was really cool. The deadline was December 31; the word limit, 7500. And so, a few days before Christmas, I sat down and started to chip away. I wrote one short scene, stopped for a while, then came back and wrote another. Soon, I was making good progress, getting deeper and deeper into this story I wanted to tell, growing more and more compelled by the thrust of the narrative…
And, wouldn’t you know it, I passed the 7500-word mark. Blew by it, really. At first, I thought The Ravage would fit within the 7500-word limit quite comfortably: it’d end up being 6500, maybe 7000 words tops. Nope: as of yesterday evening, it’s officially crested 18,000 words, and I’m only maybe 2/3 of the way through. That, of course, means The Ravage has crossed into novella territory, which is unfortunate for me, because novellas are the hardest type of story to sell. I could try serializing it, I guess – passing off some of the smaller scenes as their own, self-contained stories, then just releasing a few of these – but not many magazines would be keen on that idea, either.
I’m still going to finish The Ravage, of course – I like the idea too much to just leave it twisting in the wind – but sooner or later, I’m going to be faced with a choice. I can either accept that this story likely won’t be published for a long time – maybe keep it in my back pocket for if an opportunity to submit novellas for an anthology ever comes along – or I can expand it into a novel. I’m not entirely sure how I would do that, or if The Ravage is even a story suited for a full-length novel format, but if it’s at all possible, that might be what I have to end up doing.
As for my other projects, I think I’ve kind of got an order of operations figured out for the next little while. This month (and probably into next month), once I’m done The Ravage, I’d like to finally get to work on that new Nightmares Inc. ending. If all goes well, that’ll take me a few weeks to finish. Once that’s out of the way, it’ll finally be on to another brand-new novel, an idea for a fantasy novel I’ve had for a little while. My thinking right now is I’ll work on that new fantasy book – book 1 in a series under the working title Chronicles of Usi – concurrently with my rewrite of Kosan.
Speaking of Kosan, I’ve had a lot of ideas about how to rework that story, how to deepen the world, how to tighten up the plot…but maybe I’ll talk more about that in the coming weeks! Anyway, that’s about all for this week. Until next time, have fun, stay safe, and keep reading.
