and a thumbs-up from Steve Perry. Thanks, Steve.
Counting words per line and multiplying, I came up with about 18,300 words: OpenOffice's word counter gets 18,770. Make of it what you will.
Showing posts with label clockpunk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label clockpunk. Show all posts
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Sunday, June 7, 2009
It's a wrap
So I finished the rough draft of Killing Time last night and put a few finishing touches on this morning. I'm still going to let it sit for a week and then go back and look-- but I truly don't think there'll be any substantial editing. It's an intense piece of prose.
It wasn't fun.
Less than a month from start to finish, and well over 3/4 of it in one weekend: Thursday evening, all day Friday, most of Saturday.
I'm going to send this one out to F&SF, if no joy there, Asimov's, then work my way through Duotrope's list of mags that take novella-length SF or fiction.
It wasn't fun.
Less than a month from start to finish, and well over 3/4 of it in one weekend: Thursday evening, all day Friday, most of Saturday.
I'm going to send this one out to F&SF, if no joy there, Asimov's, then work my way through Duotrope's list of mags that take novella-length SF or fiction.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Progress report
Well, I was right about the productivity and wrong about the intensity. I took yesterday off from work and spent most of the day writing. Same today. I'm cruising. Inshallah tonight or tomorrow, the first draft will be finished.
Then I won't look at it for at least a week.
Then editing. Of course I've done some as I went along.
I realized that not working on this was preventing from writing poetry. There's no way out but through. But God, I really, really didn't want this one...
Then I won't look at it for at least a week.
Then editing. Of course I've done some as I went along.
I realized that not working on this was preventing from writing poetry. There's no way out but through. But God, I really, really didn't want this one...
Friday, June 5, 2009
Bad and Scary
Killing Time is not like anything else I've ever written. It's a bad, scary, evil piece of shit. It's so easy to imagine how a person would go about manipulating other people, especially when they're already in the grasp of some overwhelming, irrational fervor.
I'm not, obviously, doing the intensive, words-per-day thing with this story. I've let whole weeks go by without writing more than a few paragraphs. I think I'm about to kick into a more productive mode and inshallah finish it up by the end of the month. But I'll never get up to anything like the 2000+ WPD I did on Drumheart.
There are a couple of reasons for that. One, the prose is much more intense, in fact more like poetry. That means I can't produce it nearly as fast. With simple expository prose, which is what Drumheart was mostly written in (there were a few spots of descriptive prose that rose above that level), the translation of idea to prose is pretty straightforward and tends to occur at a more-or-less fixed base rate. (It might be slower if I was tired, faster if I'd had extra coffee. But it seemed to me that those were physiological conditions independent of the creative process.)
The kind of prose I'm using for Killing Time takes longer to produce and requires a lot more... something per word. Energy. Creative effort. I want the text to come out spiky and brilliant, seductive yet uncomfortable to read. Disturbing. It's a matter of much more than just getting the idea across.
Overstylish? Maybe. But that's not uncharacteristic of clockpunk/steampunk/cyberpunk: always a very style-conscious genre, in a way that I think repudiated the style-neutral or even anti-style esthetic of earlier SF. Way back in the Campbell era, the Idea was the thing: niceties like plot and character development, let alone prose style, were actively denigrated. (There were exceptions, like the immortal Ray Bradbury, but Campbell's editorial influence pretty effectively marginalized newer writers with pretension to style. Look up Manly Wade Wellman's attempt to publish his novel about Leonardo da Vinci.)
New Wave authors like Zelazny, Delaney, and Davidson broke the style barrier, but the idea that style is important, that the form is part of the message, is still far from universally acknowledged in the field. Gene Wolfe and the aforementioned Bradbury (if you don't have Farewell Summer, the sequel to Dandelion Wine, go out and get it) are probably the pre-eminent (living) senior stylists around; John Crowley turns out amazing stuff; China Mieville and Jay Lake are some of the newer writers with style to burn and things to say.
(I guess that's what offends me the most about the Campbell philosophy, as a writer; the idea that there's a necessary trade-off between having things to say and saying them well. Put that way, it makes no sense at all.)
All of which is a long digression to keep me from mentioning the second reason Killing Time proceeds slowly.
I hate living inside that character's head. It scares me.
What to do with it? As I mentioned earlier, it's going to be an awkward length, probably unpublishable by normal means. I'm thinking seriously about selling it off my blog, for a fairly nominal amount, as a Word or pdf file. We'll see about that after I finish the damn thing.
I'm not, obviously, doing the intensive, words-per-day thing with this story. I've let whole weeks go by without writing more than a few paragraphs. I think I'm about to kick into a more productive mode and inshallah finish it up by the end of the month. But I'll never get up to anything like the 2000+ WPD I did on Drumheart.
There are a couple of reasons for that. One, the prose is much more intense, in fact more like poetry. That means I can't produce it nearly as fast. With simple expository prose, which is what Drumheart was mostly written in (there were a few spots of descriptive prose that rose above that level), the translation of idea to prose is pretty straightforward and tends to occur at a more-or-less fixed base rate. (It might be slower if I was tired, faster if I'd had extra coffee. But it seemed to me that those were physiological conditions independent of the creative process.)
The kind of prose I'm using for Killing Time takes longer to produce and requires a lot more... something per word. Energy. Creative effort. I want the text to come out spiky and brilliant, seductive yet uncomfortable to read. Disturbing. It's a matter of much more than just getting the idea across.
Overstylish? Maybe. But that's not uncharacteristic of clockpunk/steampunk/cyberpunk: always a very style-conscious genre, in a way that I think repudiated the style-neutral or even anti-style esthetic of earlier SF. Way back in the Campbell era, the Idea was the thing: niceties like plot and character development, let alone prose style, were actively denigrated. (There were exceptions, like the immortal Ray Bradbury, but Campbell's editorial influence pretty effectively marginalized newer writers with pretension to style. Look up Manly Wade Wellman's attempt to publish his novel about Leonardo da Vinci.)
New Wave authors like Zelazny, Delaney, and Davidson broke the style barrier, but the idea that style is important, that the form is part of the message, is still far from universally acknowledged in the field. Gene Wolfe and the aforementioned Bradbury (if you don't have Farewell Summer, the sequel to Dandelion Wine, go out and get it) are probably the pre-eminent (living) senior stylists around; John Crowley turns out amazing stuff; China Mieville and Jay Lake are some of the newer writers with style to burn and things to say.
(I guess that's what offends me the most about the Campbell philosophy, as a writer; the idea that there's a necessary trade-off between having things to say and saying them well. Put that way, it makes no sense at all.)
All of which is a long digression to keep me from mentioning the second reason Killing Time proceeds slowly.
I hate living inside that character's head. It scares me.
What to do with it? As I mentioned earlier, it's going to be an awkward length, probably unpublishable by normal means. I'm thinking seriously about selling it off my blog, for a fairly nominal amount, as a Word or pdf file. We'll see about that after I finish the damn thing.
Monday, May 18, 2009
A new ?
? because I don't know how long it's going to be. Probably not novel-length, but long for a short story.
It falls into the genre Todd and I have been referring to as "clockpunk", which is a variant of steampunk but tends to be organized around the image of a clock, or clockwork. Good recent examples are The Clockwork Heart by Dru Pagliassotti and The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia. Also the ongoing series by Jay Lake which began with Mainspring and continued in Escapement.
Clockpunk has interesting antecedents. Steampunk began as a spin-off from cyberpunk, via books like Gibson and Sterling's Difference Engine and Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. Cyberpunk itself was born out of what was then called the "New Wave", which included authors like Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison. (Dick, by the way, may bear the distinction of having appeared as an important character in more novels written after his own death than any other writer: for the most recent example see Pandemonium by Daryl Gregory.)
Ellison, of course, was the author of "'Repent, Harlequin' said the Ticktockman", one of the classic anti-authoritarian works of the genre. But the imagery of the clock as enemy, the clock symbolizing the devouring, dehumanizing nature of industrial totalitarianism, goes back further than that: cf. Metropolis, both the novel by Thea von Harbou and the silent movie version by Fritz Lang, and Chaplin's immortal Modern Times.
The story I'm working on right now was mostly inspired by The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson's fascinating account of the construction of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, and of the life and times of America's first documented serial killer, known in Chicago as H. H. Holmes. If you haven't read it, you should: each of his narratives is fascinating in itself. I wrote about it on KFI some time back.
Addendum: Jay Lake kindly points out Zelazny's Jack of Shadows as a clockpunk precursor. An inexcusable omission on my part.
It falls into the genre Todd and I have been referring to as "clockpunk", which is a variant of steampunk but tends to be organized around the image of a clock, or clockwork. Good recent examples are The Clockwork Heart by Dru Pagliassotti and The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia. Also the ongoing series by Jay Lake which began with Mainspring and continued in Escapement.
Clockpunk has interesting antecedents. Steampunk began as a spin-off from cyberpunk, via books like Gibson and Sterling's Difference Engine and Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. Cyberpunk itself was born out of what was then called the "New Wave", which included authors like Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison. (Dick, by the way, may bear the distinction of having appeared as an important character in more novels written after his own death than any other writer: for the most recent example see Pandemonium by Daryl Gregory.)
Ellison, of course, was the author of "'Repent, Harlequin' said the Ticktockman", one of the classic anti-authoritarian works of the genre. But the imagery of the clock as enemy, the clock symbolizing the devouring, dehumanizing nature of industrial totalitarianism, goes back further than that: cf. Metropolis, both the novel by Thea von Harbou and the silent movie version by Fritz Lang, and Chaplin's immortal Modern Times.
The story I'm working on right now was mostly inspired by The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson's fascinating account of the construction of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, and of the life and times of America's first documented serial killer, known in Chicago as H. H. Holmes. If you haven't read it, you should: each of his narratives is fascinating in itself. I wrote about it on KFI some time back.
Addendum: Jay Lake kindly points out Zelazny's Jack of Shadows as a clockpunk precursor. An inexcusable omission on my part.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
