A Quiet Week

Alas, work has intruded on my writing this week, although notes have been scribbled for future reflection.  I also spent a while this afternoon concentrating on brainstorming a plot for the limbering up exercise even though it is some way off. It is a bit of a magpie's nest of ideas nicked from here and there and it came out of my head significantly nastier than I expected.

I have to deliver some stuff in the real world in the coming week too but the holiday period should afford some opportunity to move things on.

In the meantime I am digesting Kurt Vonnegut's advice for aspiring writers: don't use semi-colons.

Added:

Bugger!. Bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger!

After that last paragraph I went back to my desk to brainstorm that limbering up novel some more.  What came out? A trilogy. Bugger.

It serves me right. The original in the nineteen nineties was intended as a parody of fantasy novels and nothing makes a fantasy novel more than a trilogy except, perhaps, a trilogy of trilogies. However I also came up with a solution. I said in my last post that the whole farago was a sub-Moorcock thing and I remembered that when Moorcock was writing his best known stuff in the sixties he was rattling out 15,000 words a day and had a novel every three days. Of course if you read them now the drawbacks of that approach are pretty obvious but it is a method.

In this age of fantasy novels the size of breeze blocks 45,000 words barely represents a chapter but in e-Publishing for adolescents with impaired attention spans, 45-60,000 words, even if only barely competent, might bring in enough $$ to buy a bottle of ink for my pen. That represents a first draft comprising a scene by scene outline then 5000 words a day on a second draft for a couple of weeks: polish it up and away we go.  With a pseudonym, of course, to spare blushes later.

Incidentally, what later happened was that Moorcock wrote a novel of some substance called Mother London which is well worth a read.