2023 Resolutions: Spring Update
24K words down
Hi! I hope you've been enjoying my stories! Big thanks to everybody who's given feedback or shared appreciation, it means a lot.
This year I made two resolutions. You can read about them here, but they were: Write a novel and hit 135 pounds. The second goal is going swimmingly (125 -> 131!), but this is a blog of fiction, so more on the first:
It's going well! Like I wrote in January, I want it to be a novel of interconnected short stories. That idea has since developed and I'm 24K words in. Here's where the idea is currently at:
There will be four main stories at 10K+ words each.
These will be science fiction stories set in a future world of ours, separated by hundreds of years.
There will be lots of tiny stories in between them to flesh out the world.
They are 'about' different responses to finitude.
I feel really excited by all of the stories and am happily puttering away on them. I still have some relatively big uncertainties though:
The stories get cheerier as they go and the first is very dark. Right now the novel is chronological, but should I jump between stories in a more complicated way to distribute the mood more evenly?
How long is this going to be? My current best guess is that the main four will end up being ~15K words, but it's conceivable that they'll all end up at 20K.
How much should I share publicly along the way?
These will probably resolve this quarter and probably should resolve this quarter. Anyway, I'll keep sharing stories weekly, let me know if you're having fun reading them!
Conor
Hi Conor, for question 3 how much to share publicly - I recently came across the idea of "Building in Public" and "Learning in Public" as ways to simultaneously get feedback from a growing list of followers/subscribers so that you are genuinely getting good useful feedback from an audience that is also growing in size and people engage more because you are appreciating their feedback...I think it's a brilliant way to both grow your audience and get very useful feedback. I'm just beginning to try it, but I think it will work for me because I've always created little feedback/advisory groups IRL, as I so value collective intelligence, so hopefully it works online too.