Weekend of Writing

Sunday, August 4, 2019 at 6:15pm

I managed to get in a good amount of writing this weekend, adding 6,000 new words to The Other. This brings the first draft to around 32,000 words, and I suspect I'm somewhere between ⅓ and ½ of the way to the end, putting this novel at a healthy 60-70,000 words. For comparison, Schrödinger's City's final draft was about 78,000, and it wouldn't surprise me if The Other grows during revision to about the same amount, which is a number I would be happy with as it comes out to a healthy ~300 pages of text in my new print layout design.

Unfortunately, it seems that tonight I must go to bed with the very next scene I'm going to write in The Other still jostling about my head. It's going to be a really good one, and I can't wait to write it, but I've learned that there's only so much writing I should do in one day. Once, many years ago, I wrote all 10,000 words of the first draft of Voyage Embarkation's second chapter in a single day. That, I discovered is the point at which writing causes me physical exhaustion. Not an experience I ever want to repeat.

Another weekend endeavor was learning more about Scribus, which I find that, the more I use it, the more I enjoy it. Specifically, I did a redesign of the cover spread for Voyage Embarkation, one that I may roll out at some point in the future (although probably not for a year or more).

For the time being, I have a number of writing projects that I want to make sure I execute on. There's my current project, The Other. After that, I want to write another political novel. This is one I'm calling The Ghost King. Despite both novels being politically oriented, the two ideas are very distinct thematically. In a recent post, I described how the motivation behind The Other was to capture our political moment (post-Trump) in science fiction form. The Ghost King, on the other hand, is an exploration of the historical development of liberalism in fantasy form. I came up with The Ghost King's general outline while reading Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown back in March, but I've got a range of influences for it, including How Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen and most recently The Lost History of Liberalism by Helena Rosenblatt.

I've also had a new idea bobbing about my imagination recently. I'd like to do a sequence of connected short stories set in Palípoli, the setting for The Shipwright and Other Stories. These new stories would share the same protagonists, and this idea, as I tune it, may simply just turn into a novel. We'll see.

For now, I'm simply claiming victory over this past weekend in the form of high productivity. Despite the overhead cacophony. Seriously, I can't believe I actually pay for this out of my taxes.