What Am I Writing?

You may have wondered what I’m currently doing creatively. So have I, to be honest.

In an effort to start the new year how I mean to go on, I’ve been lining up some short story submissions to start working on. That means delving into various documents and notebooks of old scribbled ideas, bits of half-remembered dreams that seemed really cool at the time, and the like, to get some actual inspiration.

But I’m taking my time, because I want to actually get some good ideas and, crucially, plan out the whole thing before I start. Because this is a weakness of mine: I see a cool quote or think of a cool concept, and just start writing without really considering overarching plot, or character development, or an ending. I just go, and keep going.

On the one hand, it’s quite liberating to just write, coming up with everything on the fly and seeing where the story takes me. On the other hand, most of what I write like this inevitably ends up being three times as long as it should be and meandering all over the place before it finally contorts itself into a somewhat unsatisfying ending. Case in point: the original draft of Nightingale’s Sword, which before several months of editing was 40,000 words longer and half as coherent. Likewise suffering are Salvage Seven (which I have not forgotten about, I promise) and The Scar, which I paused a while ago for lack of ideas.

Does that stop me doing it anyway? Absolutely not. So while I come up with ideas for these short stories, I’m currently merrily plugging away at a completely unplanned project based on a quote from a William Gibson book. I have no idea where it’s going, I have barely any clue what it’s really about… but it’s fun.

“Sufficiently perverse and titanic arseholes,” he said, “can become religious objects. Negative saints. People who dislike them, with sufficient purity and fervor, well, they do that. Spend their lives lighting candles. I don’t recommend it.”

William Gibson, Zero History