Well. If you read my last post, you’ll know that I’m now shopping a novel manuscript that I thought I had completed two years ago, but then got enough similar feedback that I decided to re-teach myself the fundamentals and hire an editor so that I could revise it properly.
Now that the shopping–and praying, hoping, begging, and negotiating with any of several greater and lesser deities–is underway, I am turning my attention to my next projects. Yes, plural. I can’t remember if it was something I read of Neil Gaiman’s, or something he said at his talk in Boston earlier this year, but I have this sense that he keeps two projects on the fire at any time. So here are are mine:
First, know that I have three other manuscripts in various states of outline and draft. One is a bit of an unconventional superhero story. The second is a supernatural horror and adventure tale. Both are interesting, and I’ll get around to them yet, but my priority novel project is a science fiction novel on a far away planet in the distant future. There is a global environmental disaster, a certain penchant for tradition, and a crashed battleship engaged in a war unrelated to the planetary inhabitants. There are three sisters, a brother, and whole lot of squabbling. And there’s a city, and a nunnery, and a cave in the mountains. And a great deal of mis- and non-communication. We’ll see how they combine together.
But while I’m working on that, I’ll also be working on a collection of short stories. See, it goes like this:
As I was searching for agents, one of them expressed a desire on her website to find the next Ray Bradbury’s October Country–a collection of macabre short stories that illustrate both Bradbury’s fantastic prose and, unfortunately, a 1950s mindset that doesn’t fare well in light of a modern understanding of human diversity. Human condition? Yes. Human diversity? No.
Now, this is not my first experience with October Country. Several years ago, I was actually in a stage production based on some of his more accessible tales, and on opening night he called us from his home in Los Angeles to wish us well and to break a leg.
So here I am, reading this agent’s website, reminiscing on the past, and thinking about my own pile of short story efforts that could use some crafting and rethinking. And I thought, well, why not? So I purchased a copy of the book and have been alternating between reading stories and crafting my own tales built from little kernels of idea stuck between the teeth of his prose. It’s really a joy to me, because I love his prose, and he, along with Ursula LeGuin and Neil Gaiman, command the style of prose I would most like to emulate.
So here, to celebrate my embarkation on my next writing journey, is the opening to his collection, a piece that we used to open our own play.
October Country
. . . that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain. . . .”
Before I slip off to the Dreaming this evening, I did think I would answer a question you might have on your mind: what will Nic do if the agent doesn’t accept his collection? Well, easily enough–I’ll shop it elsewhere. And yes, I’m trying to land the individual pieces in literary journals as I write them.
Nicanor Abbott 