Personal writing update

I need to remember to do these kind of posts more often, these recaps of where I am on my own attempts at writing fiction. As I've said before, I find that it motivates a little bit to make claims publicly about what I am doing.  A few weeks ago, I mentioned some projects that were in various stages of progress, some closer to completion than others. Some progress has been made:

1) The novel-in-progress, usually referred to here as Neglected Project, now has a tentative title: Shame. That may not stick, but it's the title by which I have been thinking of it for a few days. Aside from assigning this possibly temporary title, no real progress has been made toward the completion of the first draft lately. I open the file and stare at it for a while, maybe make a note here or enter a new paragraph there, but the real push toward major progress has not happened yet. I feel it simmering, however. 

2) The untitled pirate story that I have mentioned here before is much nearer to done. It needs a coat of polish and the possible deletion of a scene, but I am getting a lot happier with it. Hopefully I'll return to it and finish it up soon. It focuses on a female space pirate ship captain in a far-future milieu. She is obsessed with getting revenge for wrongs done to her family and has embarked on a startling course of action.

3) I tweaked a few things in my fairly new (as in written this year) android story titled "The Robbie." It's just plain too erotic for most sf venues except perhaps for M-Brane itself, but I am not considering inserting any of my own fiction into the zine. I may consider it for the queer antho if it seems there is room for it and if it seems good enough in contrast to the other content. It's plenty queer enough, let me tell ya. Or it may just never see the light of day. I could post it to the blog, but then I'd probably need to put up one of those WARNING! DANGER WILL ROBINSON! notices to run off readers under 18 years of age.  Also, I rediscovered a relatively new (written maybe last winter) werewolf story which has similar issues to those of "The Robbie." It's not sf, though, but more like horror or urban dark fantasy.

4) I found a fragment of another new story that I was trying to start for a possible contest entry a few months ago--I think from when I considered trying to enter something in the Baen contest but gave up. It seems to deal with the existence of some kind of amorphous cloud consciousness in Jovian space, but I can't make much sense of it. It does have, so far, some pretty good space station/spaceship scenery, and I might take another swing at it soon if I can figure out a plan for it.

5) I started and nearly completed in a single day a couple weeks ago a brand new short tentatively titled "'Hear Me,' Said the Mirror." It's set in some sort of future or alternate present and focuses on a father and his adopted son. Their relationship is complicated by the adopted boy's insistence that he somehow interacts with the lingering presence of the father's biological son...who is deceased, a casualty of a mysterious illness described only as "the wasting." It sounds like a ghost story, right? I guess it is in a way, but there is a science fictional underpinning to it all. I'm pretty happy with this one right now, but I haven't quite ended it satisfactorily yet.

6) I haven't yet done the revision that I was thinking about on "Fracture." That's the story that I have mentioned before that was based on the dream that I had in which J couldn't remember anything more recent than his tenth birthday. I've actually considered that one to be done for a fairly long time, but the last time I glanced at it, it seemed like it could use a little more attention.

So this is all pretty good progress for me. Even though nothing is really done and nothing has been shown to any readers, all of these items represent relatively new and fresh work. This is very good because I did basically no new writing for a long, long time before these projects surfaced. I may make another attempt to set some goals in terms of time to work on these things and move them closer to completion. The novel, in particular, really needs some discipline and rigor applied to it. I know the whole story line and even know what's on the last page, but I need to sit still and hammer out all the missing bits throughout. And that would be just the thing to be working on during the hours when I find myself disorganized and adrift between tasks.

I guess another thing that works against me is that I am not really out of this depressive phase that I have written about here a couple of times in recent weeks. But I'm trying to get out of it.

[The image is of the current crop of chile pepper plants growing outside our house. It has nothing at all to do with the subject of this post. Or does it somehow symbolize growth in these writing projects? Hmm. That's pretty dumb.]

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