This new short story is threatening to become not-so-short. Judging by the short stories I have completed so far, I apparently like to hang in the 2-3,000-word range for a piece, but I’m past 2,000 words on this one and things haven’t even started getting strange; and they are supposed to get strange.
I discovered a genre term last week – “Slipstream” – which describes fiction that is not overtly sci-fi or fantasy, but blends elements of those genres with contemporary and/or “real” settings in order to create an overall effect of strangeness or slight surrealism. I like this term, and I like that I have written a couple of pieces that feel like a fit for this term before I even knew said term existed. The Centaur piece (see the link to BloodLotus Journal on the sidebar), Tourist Trap (the Paradigm link), even to a certain extent The Staring Man (just a first draft right now, haven’t submitted anywhere yet), each does seem to favor creating an effect of strangeness without fully leaving the planet Earth behind.
This story will be falling under that heading; I can already tell. It’s about the distress of unemployment, but also about detached limbs and voodoo. It seems sure to pass Marvin Karl‘s 4,200-ish length, and the only prose fiction longer than that which I’ve finished was Century Club, which at around 13,000 technically qualifies as a novella. I wonder if I’ll ever dust off that piece and fix it up; I think if I lopped it down to 10,000 there might be something good in there.
If I had to guess, I’d say this one’s going to land in the 6,000-7,000 range, but I really can’t say for sure yet. I’m just following the idea where it goes. It occurred to me today that I may have to make a fundamental decision about the language style which may impact the length.
Due to rehearsals (*full disclosure, I am going to be performing in a local production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, but I swear I’m still not an actor) and then the amount of my weekends that must be devoted to catching up on all the life that gets put on hold during rehearsals, I am only managing about one writing session a week right now, which is making me itchy.
All work on the novel appears to be on indefinite hiatus, which is not my doing but not bothering me, either. I delivered half of the latest chapter to my partner, which he was supposed to finish. He hasn’t; but I’m paid for the work I’ve done, and wouldn’t have much time to do anything else even if he was expecting it. I’m not ready to declare the project dead, but it is definitely out of my present consciousness.