A while back I mentioned that I was thinking of posting, in small pieces, the novel I wrote late last year. It’s still tentatively called “Sewing Oats.” Several visitors said they’d read it, and I haven’t forgotten about it. My unexpected trip to Tulsa just pushed the timeline back a bit. In the project management game, that’s what we call “renegotiating our deliverable dates”.
In fact, just last night I completed the second draft of the novel. This pass mainly consisted of cleaning up typos and clumsy language (to the extent of my ability) and making lots of notes to myself about structural issues and plot changes. I also have a handful of completely new scenes to write. The plan is create a new “Writings” section on this site and publish the third draft of the novel here. In its current Microsoft Word format Sewing Oats is just over 200 pages and 55,000 words, but I’ll post it in easily digestible chunks of around 1,000 words each –nothing you couldn’t read in a few minutes while you pretend to work or study. I will also greatly desire feedback on the story, stopping just short of actually begging for it. So, look for this grand experiment to start in the next few days.
And speaking of writing and experiments, I also recently finished a short story called “Good Deeds” as part of The Great PlanetCrap Writing Experiment, Round 2. I’m not a regular on the PlanetCrap boards (those people scare me), but the event was organized by two people I know from GameSpy (Hellchick and chris) and the concept is great. Each month a vague theme is generated. Last month it was “A man sees a woman every day on the bus for several years. One day, she’s not there.” This month, the month I’m first participating, the theme is “Two people are talking, when one turns to the other and reveals something that they have never told anyone else.”
Once they have the theme in hand, participants just take it and run with it, interpreting it in any way they like and ending up with a short story. They post the stories, everyone reads them, and we offer feedback. I’m a bit hesitant about putting serious work out there for a bunch of strangers to dissect, but what the heck. Once the stories are posted on Hellchick’s site I’ll post a copy of mine here, as well.
So, I hope you all are still interested, because I’ve written my fingers to bloody little stubs for you.
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