The Planning Phase

It's late, and today was a pretty long day. But I wanted to at least put an update out here.

Looks like my Forces of Geek premiere will be after the 4th. Woe! Hopefully it won't be over the weekend because I think it won't get a lot of reading. We shall see!

I have sketched out ideas for the next two columns. One is about the complications of near-future SF (with some examples for recent literature) and the other is about the elasticity of "SF" in the speculative fiction sense and how that fires us up as readers. The former bounces off of an idea I've been working on for a couple of stories and also off of some recent debates (such as one between David Williams and Jerry Pournelle, which can be viewed here). The latter will probably get some input from my trip to Readercon next week and some discussions of genre proliferation, such as the debate over slipstream fiction.

The ideas are coming pretty fast; now I just need the time to start writing them.

I am also starting to think about the formal process of submitting to short story markets and (once it's got more depth and polish) showing Aetas Nex to a few agents. That is a little farther down the road, but I've been doing some research about it and I think that by the time I feel ready to do I'll have a better idea about the best approach. I might put some of those ideas up here a little later.

As part of this growing plan, I am likely going to stop opendrafting Aetas Nex soon. It gets very little commentary and I feel that I am getting more comfortable with my writing process. I started doing the draft this way to perhaps get attention (at least from friends) and maybe some feedback and encouragement as I got back into the writing groove, but given that I think more about how it is not being read, it makes more sense to continue the draft the old-fashioned way.

More thoughts tomorrow, and a bit of nanofiction as well!