Week of 29 January to 04 February
Sadly, I did not end up submitting the broken story I mentioned in last week’s post for the January Elegant Literature competition. Nor did my December submission, The Arch, the Centering, and the Keystone, achieve publication or even an honorable mention. That’s the way it goes, and I already have a thousand words written of a story for February’s contest, which I’m tentatively titling Ship in a Bottle. Now to stick the landing on that one…
You hopefully saw this week the official announcement about my Impressions project. I pushed out another five thousand words or so on Impressions this week, putting me a little past halfway on chapter 5. This story has a deliberately slow pacing – think along the lines of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn – but we are finally coming up on the story’s first, major inciting incident, which I expect will occur in chapter 6 or chapter 7 based on how the plot is progressing so far. It’s probably unconventional these days to have over twenty thousand words of story take place before the major inciting incident, but there is a method to my madness, and it’s not as if nothing is happening in those pages. For the way the plot is intended to work, I think the lengthy build-up is necessary.
Not a lot of other writing to report this week, although I did set up In My Defense to publish here on the site in a couple of months after deciding not to submit it elsewhere. You almost had a Saturday post about a study purporting to study a neurological basis for political reactions, “Shared neural representations and temporal segmentation of political content predict ideological similarity,” but I decided more discussion would be required to do the topic justice, so perhaps that will appear in a later Tuesday post. Most likely, I will plan to release The Arch, the Centering, and the Keystone here on the site in a few months, as well.
The upcoming Tuesday post is a particularly interesting one about linguistics and psychology, which happens to be of especial relevance to writers, so I hope you give that a read. Thursday’s book review is for The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England, which was an excellent book from both a history and a fantasy writing perspective (meaning that it is useful to fantasy writers, not that it is in some way situated in that genre – it is firmly nonfiction). The book has informed and textured the writing of Impressions in ways that I hope will make the story richer and more immersive for readers. By next week’s update, I hope to have finished a draft (or two) of Ship in a Bottle, and be starting on Impressions‘ chapter 7, so be sure to check back and see all the newest developments here at IGC Publishing.
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