Thursday Thoughts

Anatomy of an Idea post tomorrow, because I'm tired and lazy and I have to find my Golden Bough CD that has the full words for Song of the Swan Maiden. I'm sure everyone is crushed. Ha.

I posted my big news two days ago: Scylla and Charybdis is complete. The overall arc and the general shape of the plot is very close to what I thought it would be, but the details and subplots seemed to create themselves ... and the emotional arc grew almost organically. In some ways, it's a Coming of Age story, wrapped around an exploration story with a dose of a high stakes and a cast that came together much better than I could have hoped.

I look at both Journal of the Dead and Scylla and Charybdis, and I see that both tackle the themes of, "How do you know if you're doing the right thing? How can anyone expect to know?" in different ways and different prominence to the plot. I wonder what that says about my mental state from whenever it was I started Journal forward to present?

SaC will need to sit a while before I even think about reading it for editing, but I know that the post-completion multi-point outline I did for Journal of the Dead will be crucial here, and I think I will end up doing what I ended up shrugging off last time: making a wall sheet of it so I have the global picture (literally).

And of course, I can't help thinking ... what's next? Back to fantasy, of course ... this was a great stretch, but science fiction isn't quite my home. And it will come down to a choice between The Project (which is a massive, immense tangle of pros and cons) and a series of other ideas, all of which I think are more unique, but ... well, it's a long story.