31 Short Stories - A post in which I try to briefly describe my current projects, largely to see if they make sense

31 Short Stories is my NaNo project from last year and for this year, its goal to produce a body of short fiction that I can try to polish, compile and sell as a Kindle or other ebook format. Currently, I am considering the possibility of running out a couple of stories as a free preview, and if that goes well pitching the full collection at the 70% price threshold, but honestly the tiny amount of money I'm likely to make is a secondary consideration to putting myself out there.

Of last year's 27 stories (I ran short), I have nine that I think are strong enough and five that are maybes, as well as two that I am going to rewrite completely this year. I have the stories out with three friends for reviewing, so we'll see if their expectations match up with mine.

For this year, I have 43 concepts to work on, although in all honesty I know already that some of them won't work out; that's why I've gone for 43 concepts for 31 stories. They range from fairytale retellings to time travel comedy, and a couple of shots at satire within the SF, fantasy and horror genres.

As ever, with NaNo, the initial target is 50,000 words in the month of November. After that, we shall see if I have something I can run with.

Another 31 Short Stories

For this year's NaNoWriMo, I've decided to revisit last year's 31 short stories idea. I will aim to write (on average) 1 short story a day, +1 for luck, totaling over 50,000 words.

I am then going to ask some people to look over what I've written - this year and last - and give me constructive feedback, and aim to whittle my various outputs down to somewhere between a dozen and twenty prime picks, polish them up, and publish the results in some kind of ebook format in the first half of 2014.

So, obviously I am posting this partly because naming a goal makes it harder to wimp out and partly because I am asking my friends to help me by:

1) Suggesting titles or themes for this year's 31 short stories. I have a few ideas, some part of larger pieces I'm trying to get my head around, but I am aiming for range, in part to get to grips with what I'm good at and what turns out as self-indulgent waffle.

2) Reading what I've written and providing me with honest, constructive feedback. I'm not fishing for compliments, but I'm not looking to get kicked to the curb either. Suggestions on how to improve are more useful than just noting flaws, but more than that, I'm very aware that I lack emotional resilience, so I'm looking for people who are confident in their ability to constructively criticise.

3) Offering sound advice on e-publishing and promotion of e-publishing, based on experience, or introductions to people or web sources who can provide the same either on an informal basis or for a modest sum, since I can't afford more than modest.

Camp NaNoWriMo - Musings on an SF Setting

The event: Camp NaNoWriMo, July 2013.
The target: 25,000 words, since I've got other stuff I'm doing.
The real goal: To see if the SF setting I've been percolating for nigh-on two decades has legs.

So, yeah, this is me using my eighteen-and-change years old SF setting and trying to write a story in it. It's a setting that has undergone a lot of changes in various phases, most recently in the past few months.

It started out beyond generic, I'll own to that, and the idea was an enlightened, alien-led Federation bordering a prejudiced, neo-feudal human Coalition, with the focus on the Federation. Then I got interested in the history of it and, in creating that I began to feel that the super-sophisticated Federation was actually less interesting than the Coalition, and my focus began to shift.

Then the alien antagonists got a bit of their own culture as I began to wonder why they were as aggressive as they were, and realised that they didn't make a lot of sense, culturally or economically. I treated the first as a bug and the second as a feature, and that's where gods, of a sort, came into the picture.

More recently, the neo-feudal structure of the Coalition, largely informed by all that Star Wars I watched as a kid, has been replaced with a more varied set of political systems. I've proactively gone through and tried to balance out my tendency to 'go with what I know' in terms of names, since that inevitably and unintentionally leads to a very white universe, and usually one overfull of Jameses and Marks. On the other hand, I didn't want tokens, so I am trying to make it all make sense and a part of that has been to develop the history from a 10 page timeline to something nearer 70. I also want to do at least one more run through and try to introduce more of a shift towards toponyms and patri- and matronymics in the aftermath of my 'this is why no transhuman evolution' reset Apocalypse, replacing to an extent modern racial distinctions with a sense of a very different cultural base.

The last run-through also saw a move away from direct SF cliche. I've known for a while that I wanted to maintain a mysterious genetic link between humans and what used to be the dog- and cat-people; something ancient and conspiratorial. On the other hand, dog- and cat- and snake-people was increasingly out of place and just kind of there 'cause it's how you do. My brainstorm was to ditch the non-mammalian examples - they'll become something else in the final pass - and say that the three races all evolved from a common, possibly engineered, primate base, but by different routes, so that whereas on Earth the dominant hominid species descended from valley-dwelling apes, on the other worlds a baboon-like primate and something more like a forest monkey took the lead.

This also tends towards losing the tails, which just works better in space suits.

I've also removed any use of actual extant religions, albeit a little bit by filing the serial numbers off. The big theocratic power is still a weird mix of Catholic and Anglican administration (I want my interplanetary church to have a curia and big hats, but also deans and chapters, and a Barchester-esque touch to its ecumenical politics) with an expansionist slant. I think I do tend to bias towards (mis)representing the Abrahamic faiths, and maybe some touches of Hinduism, perhaps because I feel that they are big enough and old enough to look out for themselves.

So, that's a rough account of the evolution of this setting. Later posts will probably expand on some details.

Oh, and at some point I got Cthulhu on it; as you do.