Friday, February 27, 2004
How does the refrain go? I'm not awake, I'm not awake, I'm not awake this morning...
I wrote a measly 849 words on "Rappaccini's Dragon" yesterday, only 849 words in more than four and a half hours at the keyboard. And I'm not even sure any of it's particularly good. This story is sprawling on me. Lately, the last couple of years or so, my stories have taken on an expansiveness, an expansiveness that I tended to avoid until sometime in 2001 or so. I look back at the stories in Tales of Pain and Wonder and there's such sharp focus, such a unity of time and place. And now I look at story like "From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6," The Dry Salvages, and, now, "Rappaccini's Dragon," and they're all over the place. It's hard for me to say if this is a good thing or a bad thing, in terms of the quality of the stories. All I can say for sure is that it seems to make them much more difficult to write. Instead of taking place over a few hours or a day, or a few days, at most, these newer stories want to encompass many years, sometimes decades, and that means that the overall narrative structure has to be far stronger, to support so much time. I think that after "Rappaccini's Dragon," I'm going to endeavor to return to the old form, shorter stories with tighter focus (and no more frelling first person).
The wintery weather which has assailed the South kept Bush out of North Carolina. That's kind of neat, sort of like an act of God, almost, were one to believe in such things.
Me, I prefer to think of it as the work of vengeful, gay weather pixies.
I also (finally) got around to uploading Chapter Two of The Girl Who Sold the World, as well as Leh'agvoi's second Nar'eth pin-up, to Nebari.Net last night (which led to a total of 8.5 hours in front of the iBook yesterday). To find Chapter Two, click Chronicles, then follow the link at the bottom of Chapter One. To find the pin-up, follow the manga link at the bottom of the first page, scroll down to the link for the first pin-up, where you'll find a link to the second. I know it'd be more convenient if I simply posted links directly to the new material, but doing it this way appeals to my sense of the perverse.
|
|
