I’m supposed to be reassessing this weekend. Instead, I’ve being reading, cleaning house, being interviewed for a YouTube video…
That was a bit surreal. I have no idea how it will come out, but it will get some exposure (pun intended), and since we live in a highly visual time that might be better promotion than anything I actually write here.
Still, it was amusing. My interlocutor asked a few questions to set the general direction of my rants and let me go. He intends to edit it down to digestible bits and put up one or two 10-minute segments on Dangerous Intersection. Mark Tiedemann on History. Mark Tiedemann on Religion. Mark Tiedemann on Sex…
I should also have been doing more writing this weekend. Donna spent the night at her sister’s house, so I had the place pretty much to myself from about five on, and here it is seven in the morning and this is the first scribbling I’ve done. I am such a lazy ass at times.
Today is the Dante Group. The penultimate canto in the Inferno. We’ve moved through this in pretty good time. Next weekend we’ll do the last canto and then wait till ’09 for Purgatory. It has been instructive and I will probably, at some point, include some of what I’ve gleaned from Dante into my fiction. I want to do another Quill story. Quill is my pilgrim in search of meaning. The only one of his pieces that has seen print is Chasing Sacrifice, published long ago in the pages of Science Fiction Age. I’ve written one more since and it’s in submission now, but…
For some reason I’ve always had trouble writing short fiction in series. A couple decades back I tried it with a character called Mix Sentenni. Street kid who manages to work his way into the space industry and pull himself up. I managed to write three stories, one of them a reworking on an earlier version. One made it into print in Space & Time, the second one got me into Clarion, and the third was an updated, completely revamped version of the first one and sold to Tales of the Unanticipated. And that was it. Never came up with another Mix story, although you’d think it would be a great vehicle for further examinations of that particular setting. Imagination failed.
Quill is my next attempt, but so far…I guess I’d be terrible writing a television show.
The notion behind Quill is to explore religious questions in a space opera setting. I decided to do them at novella length to see if that helped. And as I say, I written two. If I can do three more at that length I’d have enough for a decent fix-up novel. But…
I have a title for a third one and some ideas are churniung in my hindbrain. We’ll see. It would be nice. But in this case, it’s also a matter of not wanting to grind axes on the page. I want the stories to fall out naturally, not turn into polemic. The Dante sessions are helping.
In fact…
