This new novel, for the time being known simply as the name of the planet upon which it is set, Corianna, is turning out to be a bit of a pain in the nuts.
I was feeling very ambitious when I first had the idea (it was only supposed to be three inter-related short stories) and the first 10,000 words had 5 main characters. Which is madness enough, but now it’s up to 8 mains and about 8 supporting characters, and all of this squeezed into a book that’s going to be maybe 150 pages (35,000 words) long.
Not that I regret it, and I think it’s going to be a very cool book when it’s done, but man does it need a lot of brain work and planning—something which I have zero headspace for.
One of the reasons I usually stick to shorts and novellas with a single main character is that they are very easy to tell 100% sequentially. That is, there’s no figuring out what happens to whom and when and fiddling with the timelines to get everything to fit and make sense.
I don’t love leaning on flashbacks, but I kind of have to here. But the sense of spacetime is intentionally very loose (it does a lot of jumping back and forth between people and places in the same moment in time), so it should all work out.
I usually free-associate an overall plotline and then keyboard-vomit out the whole thing in one go, adapting old scenes as I have new ideas. But there’s something about this one that makes me feel lost and wandering in misty twilight. I can never remember who’s supposed to be where and doing what and when, so I can never get rolling because there are a bunch of different plotlines to sync with, but I can’t remember which ones.
It’s coming together though, it’s just going a lot slower than I would like it to. But, then, the most I can ever write in a sitting is about 1/10th of a novella (10 to 15 pages), so any given story takes me multiple sittings to get down on the digital. But this one is taking me twice that because I just end up flicking through files trying to remember what in the fuck is going on.
I’ll get there. And it’s going to be worth it, I think.