Palate Cleansing

I need to cleanse my creative palate.

I’m well into Boiling Seas 3 at this point – with a bit of luck I’ll have the first draft done by the summer, which should keep me on track to actually Do Editing and have it out in the autumn. (As long as it’s not December by the time it comes out, I’ll be happy.) But after 50,000+ words of this adventure, I find myself in danger of waffling. I have a decent outline for the whole plot, and I’m sticking to it – but, as I always do, I’m thinking of cool new things along the way to slide in… which leads to things starting to feel a bit bloated. And I really don’t want that. Apart from anything else, it makes Doing Editing that much harder.

So I’m taking a brief break and throwing together a shorter piece or two. Different world, different plots, different characters; something different to channel my jungle-hacking, find-the-plot-as-I-go-along tendencies into that’s not the third book of a trilogy that needs a tightly planned ending to resolve all the dangling threads. I can (within theoretical word limits, anyway) just go for it and come up with something fresh to give my brain a break. And if it’s good, maybe I’ll submit it somewhere.

I think it’s important to do this every so often – it is for me, anyway. I try to only have one Big Project (i.e. a novel) on the go at a time. At least in terms of writing it; I have lots of Big Projects stuck in the editing stage. Some of them might even escape it, one day. But it’s one book at a time for me, otherwise my tiny brain gets confused as to who’s meant to be where and what they’re doing (a risky business when I switch readily between sci-fi space and lasers and fantasy swords and sorcery). So I’m creatively focused on just one story at a time for quite a long time. It takes a while to write these things, y’know. Thus, the inevitable period, about halfway through, when I’ve been on one thing for so long that I need to step back for a little while and reassemble my original, much more coherent thoughts and ideas. My ‘just make up cool stuff as you go along’ instincts need to be restrained, especially here with BS3 when everything needs to make sense by the end. Not restrained, really – more given another outlet so I can stay focused with the main project.

I want this third book to be good.

So: random short story time. Our protagonist is currently in a desert, on a horse with a name. (He himself doesn’t have one yet; he may never have one.) I have a very vague idea of where he’s going and what he needs to do. I know very little else other than that. It’s a solo protagonist in an empty world, with no threads to resolve other than the ones I make up along the way – about as different to Boiling Seas 3 as I can make it, basically.

I’ll be back on the book, and soon. I just need a little brain holiday. So let’s see where it goes.