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| It's like Die Hard 2, but without snowmobiles. |
I seem to be back in the fiction mood, much to my chagrin. I enjoyed it while it lasted the first time, though I gave it up 10 years ago when it began to look too much like real, actual work. But I made the mistake of throwing my fiction out as a freebie over at Vox's a while back, and the universal feedback was that a book is judged by its cover. The
Tales of the Red Brethren cover was subpar for a number of reasons, but perhaps mostly because it does not match the stories within. When I envisioned the stories years ago, they all existed in a world where the Red Brethren ruled m/l, but they never took on the quality of a whole.* The three stories Beth saved and published she published under the name I had intended to use in the end. That was probably a mistake, but it is one that can be remedied.
So I decided that I would re-work the book, or at least re-name it. I made a new cover based on the last story which, while not my favorite,** can probably make the best cover.*** Then I cleaned up the intro and bio - the preface, written by my daughter, remains untouched - and then a very bad thing happened. I re-read the stories.
I knew that there was a typo in one of them, but I did not remember where. I found it, but in the meantime I also found where my minimalist narrative style of yore didn't quite give the feel I was looking for. So in 4 hours or so today, I added about 10% to the stories, little changes which I think bring depth to the characters and illustrate their motivations a little better. You know: more disappointment, more tragedy. It's now about 20k words and I think if I went thru it for another 3 hours, it would be closer to 23k.
But I'm not sure if I should do that - left to my own devices, I would never stop editing - or if I should just write another story to bulk it up a bit. I had one about a dragon who was so sick of a mouthy princess that he had to beg the handsome prince to take her away. That one's lost, and I fear that if I try to re-create it, it will never be as flippantly good as the original. There's another one I remember about a thief's quest - that one's lost, too, plus it doesn't really fit the book, even though the main character later served as inspiration for the cynical old guard, Fossick, who appears in both
Strumplets and
Ruinstone. Or I could just go the easy route: write another story about a magical girl who saves the day (MGWSTD), which means that three of the four stories would follow that theme, while the fourth would still follow the self-sacrifice-to-save-the-world theme.****
I'm actually setting a date of Friday for myself to decide, because I want to decide to leave them the hell alone. But I'm not sure that's going to happen. I keep assuring the lovely and gracious Rogue that there's a fine line between interest and obsession; she keeps assuring me that I'm on the wrong side of it.
UPDATE: 20,460 and I'm done with it. I have an idea for another story - which does not include a MGWSTD - that I may add in at a later date. We shall see how that works out.
* Think of "evolution" explained by a few monkey teeth and trilobites and you have the general idea.
** Strumplets, being the first story I ever wrote for fun, remains my favorite. But not necessarily because it's the best of the lot.
*** A sublime exercise in circular reasoning, or at least in going too far the other way.
**** Chicks dig MGWSTD and suicide stories. And Dzhokhar.