What I'm Currently Working On

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As a writer, you get used to it. An old friend says hi, and then immediately follows up with, "What are you working on?"

 

When I'm partway through a novel, the answer is easy. Because writing a novel is an all-consuming thing. I might be able to squeeze in a short story, written piecemeal in those random bits of dead time when I'm not researching, writing, editing, or revising the novel. But it's just a sideshow.

 

Right now, however, I still haven't decided what my next novel should be. So, pictured above, is the stack of files containing close to everything I'm working on at the moment. That comes to: 

 

Four novel openings, ranging from 8 to 49 pages.

One essay.

One book introduction (for a reprint of somebody else's book).

Two beginnings of collaborative stories that may or may ever happen. The Eileen Gunn one will have to wait for her to finish her novel.

Five partially written short stories.

A file of six (one to two page) story openings: "Saint Jerry the Hermit," "Two Riders," "The Werewolf in Winter,""Dinosaur on the Moon," "The Water People," and "Mercury is Hell."

 

"The Werewolf in Winter" may well get written someday, just because that's a nifty title. The other brief story openings, probably not. The rest (with the exception of one-to-three novels) will all certainly be done someday, though it may take quite a while for some of them.

Right now, I grab the stack of files, look through it to see what I feel like working on, then sit down and add a page or six, or possible a paragraph, or else, like Oscar Wilde, I may laboriously remove a word I'd previously spent a day inserting. This is the glamour and magic of an author's life.

It's not the best way to write. (It can't possibly be!) But it's the one I'm stuck with.

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