Black Candy

New Project Update

PETERMBALL Works in Progress ,
Meet the new project du jour destined to occupy my evenings:
Black Candy Draft
Projected Total: 80,000
Total Words to Date:9,466
Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period: 609
Deadline: July 23rd

Yep, I’m taking another stab at the problem dubbed “Peter Doesn’t Have a Finished Novel.” This became the most likely candidate because I have a basic outline of what happens (care of the sketchy-novella-length draft I wrote at the start of 2007) and it’s total comfort-zone writing (Noir SF with squicky sex). I may have overburdened this with to many ideas for it to actually work as a novel-length MS, but I figure it’s the best starting point I’ve got to get a feel for writing at that length.

Morning.

PETERMBALL Works in Progress

There is a very peculiar quality to the light outside my study window today. Very white, a little too midday for this early morning hour, and it leaves the view (such as it is) a little bleached out. And although it’s cool and pleasant in my house there’s a very nifty heat-haze rising up off the corrugated iron roof of the neighbor’s place. Soon the cloud cover will shift a little and it’ll all disappear, but right now I’m amusing myself with looking out the window and taking notes.

Junked the Black Candy draft last night after long hours of debating its various merits against its various elements of wrongness. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom for new novel writers and will probably come back to haunt me in the near future, but I’m more-or-less convinced it was the right call – I have a novella that shows my love of The Big Sleep already, I don’t actually need an SF novel that shows the same love in the same way, albeit with different window dressing. Especially when the thing on the plan after this is another noir novella that draws influences from Raymond Chandler and talking cat stories.

Now I’m off to start over and validate last night’s decision by getting a lot of stuff done.