No More Cowgirls

October 23

A very eventful weekend. On Friday I wrote 3000 words to finally, finally, finally finish “The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl.” I spent months on that story… and, granted, I wrote 16,000 words, which is no small thing, but it took far too long. I celebrated with nachos and ice cream and card-playing. I need to cut the story by at least a third, if not more… it just got out of hand. I followed every interesting digression and irrelevant sub-plot (a short story with subplots! What was I thinking!), which I admit I enjoyed… if I thought it was worth stretching the tale into a novel, I’d do so. Maybe I could transform it into one of those nice old 180-page sf novels without succumbing to the Needless Bloat, but I couldn’t possibly push it to the more fashionable 90,000 words… better to clip it down to 10K or less, I think. It’ll be sleeker and stronger after the surgery.

On Saturday I went furniture shopping with Scott and our other soon-to-be housemate, who I’ll just call the Queen of Cats, for now. I bought a nice couch for cheap, and a coffee table, and a couple of bookshelves. I also got a really lovely desk. It’s blond wood, very pretty, extremely simple. It has this airy, open frame look, and yet it’s quite substantial. In the past my desks have either been secondhand behemoths, far too huge for my needs—I had this massive gray metal desk in high school, and the table-top surface was about as large as my bed-- or fiberboard laminate things that always looked like crap and weren’t big enough and didn’t last long, either. My new desk is perfect for my needs, not too big or small, and it’s quite attractive. It didn’t cost much more than my scooter did, either (which says more about the costliness of my scooter than the cheapness of the desk, I fear).

Sometime this week the carpets are getting cleaned in the new house, and after that, we’re free to move in. I’ve already got my desk put together (and it was very intelligently designed, too, so assembly was simple and didn’t involve screws or nails going into the wood) and in place, beneath a little stained-glass window in my room. I’m going to like my new room very much. Scott bought a nice dining table for us…

Saturday night I made notes and a partial outline for a book I’ve been thinking about. Not the big project, the one that takes on Lakota culture and mythology as well as Medieval French stuff (and which will require about a zillion hours of research), but another more action-oriented, fun book. If any of you have read my stories “Dr. Nefarious and the Lazarus Project” or “Captain Fantasy and the Secret Masters” (both still unsold-and-circulating, but some of my friends out there have read them), this novel features the same protagonist. My mission (if I choose to write it) will be to create a novel taking all the most fun elements from both the super-hero and the super-spy traditions, everything from X-Men to James Bond in terms of influences… with a serious backbone of revolutionary thought—that is to say, thoughts about revolutions and revolutionaries and revolutionary politics. So it’s a gonzo action book with a serious head and heart. Kind of like the two stories I’ve already written about this character, though the themes are different. I’ve got some fun notions for this novel, and it’s an idea that’s been percolating for some time—and unlike my half-finished novel Ferocious Dreamers, this one has more than a cool beginning and promising premise—I know the whole story arc, though some of the details are still pleasantly fuzzy and undecided. I want to write it fast and not necessarily dirty. That could be a fun next project.

On Sunday I put my desk together, and writingwise I read the entire text of a novel I wrote in December of 1998/January of 1999, called Infants and Tyrants. That novel takes place in the same universe as “Dr. Nefarious” and “Captain Fantasy,” but about thirty years before those events (meaning my recurring protagonist Mr. Li is as-yet-unborn). It’s a really cool book—superheroes, gov’t conspiracies, exploding babies, giant robots. The book holds up pretty well, too—I haven’t looked at it since I wrote it, it was sort of a spur-of-the-moment, what-can-I-do-over-Christmas-break project, but I might actually send it out. There’s some obvious flaws, in the logic and in the plot and in the prose, but none of them are tear-the-book-apart debilitating (unlike Raveling, which is like a beautiful mansion with a rotten foundation at this point; for that book, I’m trying to fix the underpinnings without bringing the roof down, and it’s damned hard). I think I could get it in shape in a month—it needs maybe 5 or 6,000 words of new writing to flesh out a limp bit in the middle, and beyond that it’s just line-editing and better scene-setting; the essential structure is quite sound. So I’m going to work on that, too.

I need to prioritize.