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Moura — Drafted! (Finally.)

Whew! I finally got a draft done of a story I’ve been thinking about writing since 2006, and researching for the last few weeks. (Working title: “Moura” — the one about H.G. Wells’ last lover, and about… well, I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you, now, would I? I don’t think the title will change, by the way, but who knows…?)

I’m going to show it to a few friends and get some feedback, which is something I haven’t done so much lately with stories. But this is a different sort of story than I’ve written before. For those who are giving me feedback, you might not want to read on until after you’ve read it. You’ll be hearing from me soon, I just need to get a few Russian words from a couple of my Russian exchange students and weave them into the appropriate spots in the story.

For those who are reading on, I’ll try explain what I think is different about this story, and why I wrote it this way.

Okay, things I’ve never really done in a serious story before, which I did in this one:

As anyone can see, I’ve gotten myself into a lot of hot water with the task I’ve set out for myself here. The biggest problem is that my ending may or may not seem absurdly flat

I think the next few writing projects I’ll be working on will be revisions, since I’ll need some time for “The Tale of Baejjanggi & Gaemi” now that I know what kind of a story it’s going to be: a kind of cross between Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” Aesop’s fable about the grasshopper and the ant — one one narrative stream, that is, while in the other stream it’s kind of a mashup of Letters from Iwo Jima/Flag of Our Fathers and Charles Stross’s The Glasshouse. Not that the tale is in any way pastiche, except insofar as it is a retelling of the Aesop, and is a war story. The influences are ones I’ve come up with after the fact of starting to write, though I’m now thinking I should probably read Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front — recommended to me by my friend Ian McHugh — soon.

Oh, and it’s centered on a posthuman economics of processing cycles, and on disagreements of interpretations of the expected utility model, reference to which I ran across in… wow, I can’t even remember now! Little surprise, though, that an alternate working title of the story is “The Bernoulli War.”

(In fact, the story is two narratives experienced by the same character, and each of the working titles is for a separate story which originally was thought up individually, but which I since have realized ought to be fused into one tale. that;s why there are two working titles. I’ll be trying to mash the titles together somehow, though “Ant and Grasshopper: The Bernoulli War” sucks and “The War of Bernoulli and Gaemi” is a little too meh. I may end up going with
“Bernoulli’s War” or something instead, if the mashing fails — but I need to get a lot of research done to write the thing, and writing will precede titling, I think.)

But all of that is some ways away — for now, the next stuff in my queue is the revision of a couple of academic pieces I need to get sent out and published ASAP, and the drafting of a couple of abstracts for shorter papers I need to get working on in the next few months. Then story revisions while I work through some research, and then drafting the academic stuff. Maybe I’ll get some free time to work on this newer story by the summer. I hope so!

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