Writing: Things I'm not writing right now
Sep. 21st, 2008 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
julesjonesI don't get the volume of fan mail that some of my more successful writer friends get (no, I'm not jealous *at* *all*), but I do get some. Mostly I answer it directly, but occasionally it sparks something that I think might interest other people. This by why of explanation as to where this post suddenly appeared from.
One of the first non-fanfic stories I ever wrote, and the first one I ever sold, was a fluffy (if steamy) little tale about a burnt-out dotcom millionaire meeting a mermaid, and thinking at first that she was a product of his nervous breakdown. She's puzzled that she doesn't have the effect on him that the old tales she knows suggests. When he tells her why he's not affected by her glamour, she introduces him to her brother.
A couple of years later, I wrote a short story about the sidhe, again drawing on old themes but seeing how they might work in a present day setting. That was "And if I offered thee a bargain", currently available in a back issue of the webzine Forbidden Fruit.
This generated the idea for a collection of short stories with a specific theme -- that they be British and Irish myths and legends, just like the ones I'd read as a child, but set in the present day. And not presented as fiction, but framed as if they had been collected as true folktales about things the tellers at least half-believed. I imagined a world where the things of fairy had been real, but had died out or withdrawn into another world as the magic they depended on slowly dwindled away. Here and there, there might still be odd pockets of magic, or occasional gate contact with another world, that would allow a few people to still encounter them as real rather than pure myth.
The next story I wrote in the sequence was about the silkies. Spindrift was supposed to be a short story, but it got away from me, and ended up as a 58 kword novel with an 18 kword sequel.
I didn't exactly abandon the idea of the collection, but after that I never got around to writing any more short stories on that theme. Dolphin Dreams sort of fits into the sequence, although unlike the others it's not based directly on existing British myths (being also influenced by the Greek and Roman myth collections I'd read). But Dolphin Dreams is also 101 kwords, and definitely not a short story or even a novella.
The frame story I had in mind for the collection means that in theory all of the stories happen in the same world/timeline, and it's possible that some of these creatures/people know of each other. In particular, when I was planning Dolphin Dreams I thought that it was likely that the dolphin shapeshifters and the silkies of the Spindrift series knew of each other, even if the shrinking populations meant that the current generation had probably never encountered each other. But I didn't explicitly write it into the book, and I reserve the right to change my mind. :-)
The other common feature these stories have as a direct consequence of the frame story I'd planned is that the first few were all written in first person. I normally write in tight third, but Gone Fishing came to me as a first person story. One of the odd phenomena you run into as a writer is that sometimes characters turn up inside your head and insist on telling you their story. That really is what it feels like, even if in reality it's a segment of your mind. In this case it was Pearl the mermaid, and I kept it as first person when I wrote it, although I switched it into the other character's point of view. That probably contributed to the concept for the frame story when I came up with it, because what the frame story involved was a character who had a good reason to seek out potentially real accounts of dealings with the fae in the present day. In other words, people's written accounts of their own experiences.
I may yet write more of them. I've mostly lost interest in the frame story, but the basic concept of the sequence is still one I find inspiring, and in fact one of the novels in the queue draws on it to some extent. Of course, one problem with the collection is that I'm writing modern day myths, not romance stories. Some of them have happy endings, but some of them don't. And that means I'd probably have to find another publisher if I wanted to collect the shorts into a single volume. Since I can be a lazy bum, and I know that most of my "short" stories end up being novella length or more anyway, I'm not trying very hard to make that collection of short stories happen.
One of the first non-fanfic stories I ever wrote, and the first one I ever sold, was a fluffy (if steamy) little tale about a burnt-out dotcom millionaire meeting a mermaid, and thinking at first that she was a product of his nervous breakdown. She's puzzled that she doesn't have the effect on him that the old tales she knows suggests. When he tells her why he's not affected by her glamour, she introduces him to her brother.
A couple of years later, I wrote a short story about the sidhe, again drawing on old themes but seeing how they might work in a present day setting. That was "And if I offered thee a bargain", currently available in a back issue of the webzine Forbidden Fruit.
This generated the idea for a collection of short stories with a specific theme -- that they be British and Irish myths and legends, just like the ones I'd read as a child, but set in the present day. And not presented as fiction, but framed as if they had been collected as true folktales about things the tellers at least half-believed. I imagined a world where the things of fairy had been real, but had died out or withdrawn into another world as the magic they depended on slowly dwindled away. Here and there, there might still be odd pockets of magic, or occasional gate contact with another world, that would allow a few people to still encounter them as real rather than pure myth.
The next story I wrote in the sequence was about the silkies. Spindrift was supposed to be a short story, but it got away from me, and ended up as a 58 kword novel with an 18 kword sequel.
I didn't exactly abandon the idea of the collection, but after that I never got around to writing any more short stories on that theme. Dolphin Dreams sort of fits into the sequence, although unlike the others it's not based directly on existing British myths (being also influenced by the Greek and Roman myth collections I'd read). But Dolphin Dreams is also 101 kwords, and definitely not a short story or even a novella.
The frame story I had in mind for the collection means that in theory all of the stories happen in the same world/timeline, and it's possible that some of these creatures/people know of each other. In particular, when I was planning Dolphin Dreams I thought that it was likely that the dolphin shapeshifters and the silkies of the Spindrift series knew of each other, even if the shrinking populations meant that the current generation had probably never encountered each other. But I didn't explicitly write it into the book, and I reserve the right to change my mind. :-)
The other common feature these stories have as a direct consequence of the frame story I'd planned is that the first few were all written in first person. I normally write in tight third, but Gone Fishing came to me as a first person story. One of the odd phenomena you run into as a writer is that sometimes characters turn up inside your head and insist on telling you their story. That really is what it feels like, even if in reality it's a segment of your mind. In this case it was Pearl the mermaid, and I kept it as first person when I wrote it, although I switched it into the other character's point of view. That probably contributed to the concept for the frame story when I came up with it, because what the frame story involved was a character who had a good reason to seek out potentially real accounts of dealings with the fae in the present day. In other words, people's written accounts of their own experiences.
I may yet write more of them. I've mostly lost interest in the frame story, but the basic concept of the sequence is still one I find inspiring, and in fact one of the novels in the queue draws on it to some extent. Of course, one problem with the collection is that I'm writing modern day myths, not romance stories. Some of them have happy endings, but some of them don't. And that means I'd probably have to find another publisher if I wanted to collect the shorts into a single volume. Since I can be a lazy bum, and I know that most of my "short" stories end up being novella length or more anyway, I'm not trying very hard to make that collection of short stories happen.