As the story inVengeance, My Heart shifts from setting tone and atmosphere to character evolution and development — and quite possibly as a result of changing focus from short, snappy bite sized pieces of the story and shifting over to giving the story more room to breathe — I’ve discovered more tolerance as the writer for longer episode fragments.
My goal up through the end of Episode 5, was to make sure there was a targeted max word count for each fragment/part/sub-episode to finding in Episode 6 that character development doesn’t work so well with those kinds of metrics. I don’t think it is a significant spoiler to say it is about time to move to that tone/color-setting of the early episodes to dig down into the motivations and explain, in drip-feed fashion, the previously unexplained.
I’ve been steadily jabbing at the keyboard for Vengeance, My Heart, this serial gothic western (/not-western) fantasy bit of writing some of you have been kind enough to read. Thanks go out to you who have. Your readership and comments are much appreciated.
As of last night, I surpassed the wordcount of my recent return to writing serialized fiction, a bit of occult noir that is part of the Vivian Locke world, which I may or may not return to — I haven’t decided yet, as my head is entirely in this world right at the moment. The posts haven’t quite caught up with the written wordcount, but that’s by design. It gives me a chance to go back and fix continuity issues (usually only a sentence, maybe as little as a change in a single word), something I neglected to anticipate when I first started writing serial fiction in 2001, which resulted in an insurmountable hurdle at the time for a truly rotten story.
I want to thank those of you who have been reading the first episode of a new writing experiment — or rather, it is an old experiment being approached from a completely new angle. It’s great to get the positive feedback you’ve been sending my way and it is encouraging continued effort on the longer experiment.
Next week will bring a new story from the stranger’s world.
A little bit of history and a smidge of road-mapping for those interested in such things…
Image generated by Gemini, with direction by Michael Raven
Well, Miss Vivian Locke had gone back to her life of not dealing with exorcisms, divorces cases and whatnot. Back down into The Gills with it’s static rain and Cookie’s coffee. Mr. Cross is not what he might seem on the outside, but isn’t that always how it is?
I had fun writing Sunny Day Parasol Co., but I will readily admit that it went off in a direction I hadn’t anticipated when I started writing the story. In fact, I thought it had maybe 10,000 words and was solidly in the short story realm when I started. Turns out I was wrong at more than double that amount (~ 21,500 words, roughly 65 printed pages on A4 — for those who care about such things).
base art generated by Gemini; text and design by michael raven
While Sunny Day Parasol Co., the serialized noir I’ve been posting, has been “in the can” for about a week now and the publication of the story has been winding up, I have not been idle with the spare time I have had at my disposal.
As many of you are already aware, I have been trying to create and add more prose content to the site after a very lengthy hiatus away from the habit. What many of you may not know is that Sunny Day Parasol Co.was going back to when I first started trying to post long fiction online around 2000. I had a small site I named after my spoken word salon in the Belltown neighborhood of Seattle in the mid-90s, “Sweet Immolation” and, at the time, I envisioned fiction in the age of the internet being an episodic or serialized thing.
Some writing thoughts from a diseased mind before they drag me off-stage…
Something I learned today: The “Vaudeville Hook” was not just a cartoon trope, but was used in real life. The “hook” (akin to a shepherds’ hook) used to pull off performers who had gone off the rails, were unpopular with the audience, or had overstayed their welcome. I had suspected that these were not a complete fantasy, having managed my own poetry “vaudeville” in the 90s and having occasion to wish for such a device to move things along for those very reasons.
What I didn’t know was that the hooks were part of the stage equipment, used to pull back the stage curtains at the start of a performance. Huh.
The last few prompts that have intrigued me enough to write about have a wee bit of a problem when it comes to the stated goals of including more prose fiction to this site.
As I work on the barebones outlines and start making headway into the actual writing of the stories based on the prompts, I discover that they are regularly exceeding the length of what folks normally consider to be flash fiction (<1000-1500 words by most standards; my personal limit being <2000 words).
With only the beginning scene for the occult noir story the prompt handed me last week, I am already at 1000 words, which makes it hard to have a middle and end in the next 1000 words. To complicate matters I only have the vaguest notion of where the story might end up, so it could easily be quite a bit longer by the time I’m finished.
But I’m enjoying this world that’s coming into shape and I don’t want to rush the story just to fit in with an arbitrary limit that no one but myself is imposing on me.
So, first-off, I will stop calling those prompts “flash-fiction prompts” and just call them “fiction prompts”.
Secondly, due to the added length, I’m going to post fiction offerings longer than flash-fiction lengths in episodic format to keep the posts within the average attention span. Plus, this particular story will benefit from the technique of employing mild cliff-hangers. I probably won’t post an episode daily when I do this, but I will try not to let it go longer than a week between episodes (I’m also taking additional editing steps that are not common to my posted fiction).
I also have a rough outline of a story that I may pursue for Jolene’s prompts, and that will likely also exceed my original limits (if I share it at all, it depends on if my take on the humorous tale feels right when it is done).
Just letting everyone know where my head it at and explaining my thought processes. The first episode from the files of Vivian Locke will post later today. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.
Okay, I’ll admit. I’m still working on the prompt from 12 February, and it might not be done until tomorrow. And, I’ll probably break my target limit for length on this one. You can’t win them all.
Unlike most of the prompts that I’ve worked on that feel like they fit nicely into the <2000 word limit, this one feels like it needs to breathe and be allowed more space to be told. I don’t think I’ll exceed 3000 words, but it may get to that if I need to. Three hours of brainstorming and researching elements of the story and two hours into writing, I am 1600 words into it. I think this feels beefier than the other tales because it fits into my wheelhouse a little better. Appalachian Gothic vibes very close to the pulp horror that I’ve always found to be a big influence in my writing (when not swooning over Kafka or Salinger). This story has more elements of the atmospheric to it, which take up more space.
I’m still plugging away and hope to have something posted by tomorrow (at the latest), earlier if possible.
But now, I need coffee and to start making dinner soon.
Sometimes you have to know when to just give something a rest and a rethink.
I was merrily pounding on my keyboard a story for the flash fiction prompt I posted earlier, having quickly developed an idea earlier in the day — when I came to a sudden impasse.
Two things went wrong.
My imperfect memory of the geography of Seattle was partly to blame. The light rail system did not exist when I lived there and my planned story relied on several elements that were just not the reality of the situation on the ground. When I grew suspicious I checked out a few details and caught that flaw.
That was a hurdle I probably could have overcome. Just change assumptions to fit the real world geography and modify a few words here and there. Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy.
