grisaille in virtual ink

Okay, so finally, an update! I should warn you, it's on the convoluted side.

So, a few weeks back I was talking about having two short stories coming out next year, for Torquere's new Color Box line. Actually, it turns out, they're a minimum of 10,000 words - so the stories are now just "stories" and not so much with the "short" part - but more about that later.

More to the point, in the last post I was really struggling to come up with some way of summarizing my story - and I figured out why. The story wasn't working. And sometimes you get the feeling a story isn't working, and it's just not working for you right now, and you learn not to drop a story because of that and to push on. And that's an important lesson to learn. But the one that comes after that one, that sometimes, no, the story really isn't working, and it's time to drop it and move on, is also important. (Maybe not just as important - because learning to finish things is probably the most important thing you can learn to do as a writer.)

It wasn't that the story was bad - it was actually quite good, and there were a number of directions I could have taken it in. I thought at first that that's were the problem was, that I wasn't entirely sure which direction in which to take the world building, and that's where the problem was. So I continued with the writing, ingnoring the big world building questions, and just concentrated on the character scenes. And it still wasn't working. And I finally figured out why, and knew it was time to do something else. Nothing was going to make this story work.

So I could either restart the story, and hope the new version worked (that seemed unlikely), or start a completely new story. One of those sounds like a lot more work than the other, but it really depends.

The major issue here was that I had signed a contract, with a title, for a specific theme. I'd had a story in mind when I did that: could I come up with something else that matched the theme and title?

Actually, yes. Nearly as soon as I dropped the story I knew I couldn't write, I had a new idea. A few hours later, most of the world building was done.

But I only had ten days left to write the story. A bit of pressure, sure, because I also had other things I was supposed to do, but far from being the end of the world. The story was only supposed to be 10K long (remember, at this point, I'd missed the small detail that it could be much, much longer).

I wrote that 10K in the ten days I had. But I still had more story to tell, and no time to do it in, and no idea how far over the 10K I could get without it becoming a problem for my editor.

So I emailed my editor, asking for an extra couple of days - she gave me fifteen, and reassured me that 10K was a minimum, not a maximum. I was elated.

I got the story in, but man was I glad for those fifteen days - the story continued to grow. And I'll be honest, it could be longer. It's just over 18K now, and there were some scenes I'd have liked to write, but couldn't, and one that had to be removed because although it was a nice scene, it didn't really make sense if you didn't include some of the other scenes I didn't get to write. I don't know - I might be able to add some of that back in in the editing phase - I'm still very new to all of this.

But at the moment, it's 18K long.

The working title is still Grisaille in Brown (it does have another title, but I'm keeping that one under my hat until I know whether it will be the final one). It comes out in May 2010, I do believe, and it's sequel, Grisaille in Grey comes out in September. And if Brown is any indication, and my editor has no objections, I think Grey might very well end up novel length, which is very exciting for me.

Coming up with a non spoilery summary is still a problem. In any case, Grisaille is sci-fi (and male/male).

I should point out, this is the sort of sci-fi where Earth does not figure into the story at all - like in Star Wars, for example, there is no Earth. Also, like Star Wars, the characters are human. I won't pretend that this is the most rigorous piece of hard sci-fi, but I did attempt to lean to the hard side. This is not, by the way, a slur on sci-fi fantasy, which I adore - I mention this only as a way, I guess, of describing where on the continuum of sci-fi this particular story falls.

Grisaille in Brown is entirely told from the point of view of Corvo, a historian with his homeworld's (Tiberia's) Bureau of Diplomatic Affairs, and describes his journey to Biryan, and his meeting with the young soldier-slave Ardán, and of how they come to fall in love. Grisaille in Grey will (well, this is the plan at the moment - and book plans, like those for battle, do not survive contact with the enemy) - Grisaille in Grey will not follow on immediately from Brown, but be set a little into the future, and a little more into their relationship, and will be told entirely from Ardán's point of view.

Aside from their love story, Grisaille is also a story about war, and diplomacy, and violence, and language, and history, and duty and family and obligation, and I'm very much looking forward to writing the next part.

(I'm actually even looking forward to doing the edits, that's how much I'm enjoying this story.)

So, update!

Oh, there might actually be another post today/tomorrow - I think there's something I've forgotten. But I will add a reminder that I will be hosting the Torquere Social Happy Hour on Torquere's livejournal next week, on Tuesday the 22nd, and there's a very short story in the works in honor of that (I'll cross post it here, as well), and I will probably be willing to write a little flash fiction to prompts, too.

Okay, that's the update.