Whew! Well, I recently mentioned (warning, spoilers if ye dare follow ye linke) commencing work on this piece, and now I’ve finished (the redraft, though not all of the necessary polishing and darlings-killing) that’s one more “trunk” story totally disassembled and reassembled from the ground up… and it turns out I estimate the length within about 15 words (of actual wordcount, anyway): the current draft, which is v10.0, is 6484 words long, and I don’t anticipate much in the way of addition. There’s a minor subplot that might get axed — we’ll see whether the sprawl adds or detracts, depending on my feelings in a week or so, and depending on subsequent feedback from my trusty gang of readers, but I think if it isn’t pulling most of its own weight at this point, or will need significant additions to work, it’s just gonna get the axe instead.
One lingering problem: the title and the epigraph. They fit the previous version of the story a little better, I think. So I may need to find a new title, and ditch the epigram, which is too bad: it’s from Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, which, in more than one way, fits the story, but — perhaps — not in tone. Hmmm.
Well, we’ll see. Anyway, that’s one more story completed, as you can see on the progress meter, but also, I might add, one more Trunk Story Reassmbled, which brings me to 3/10 on the progress meter. Not bad, if I may say so.
Anyway, next up: my Northeast Asian superheroes story, which has a (allow me to stress this) WORKING TITLE of “Jangguk and Kim Noh Wang (The Madman of Pyongyang).” I’ve got it currently listed at a little over 10,000 words on the current progress meter, but I’ll have to rewrite a lot of that. (I still expect it to come out as a longish story, probably close to novella-length if not well within novella range.) While I will be able to preserve most of the plot, after thinking the whole thing over today in the light of the current issues at stake in Northeast Asia, I’ve got a much clearer sense of what needs to happen in the story, who needs to be doing what, and how that can be dramatized. Which translates to a lot of reworking.
But before that, I have a bunch of student outlines to read through, and I think I’ll try get some recreational reading in as well. I think I need it. I’ve worked hard, pumping out a total redraft of a story ending up at 6500-words in just over three days, while, you know, working, hearing about nuke tests in the country next door, and even preparing a somewhat disappointing lecture on the history of the English language in India, and some history of Bollywood. (More about that lecture, and the reason why I think it turned out that way, another time.)
Anyway, what I am saying is that I am not planning to dive directly onto the Shoopah Heroes story tonight, though I’ll probably be on top of it by sometime late this weekend, or maybe early next week. (And I’ll hopefully be sending it out soon after that, while the issue is still relatively hot in the North American media.)