Monday, April 24, 2006

Musings on my writing

One of the things I've been doing over the Easter break is consider what I should be writing next. The only thing I can say for certain is that I need to stop procrastinating and write something; at the moment I'm concentrating on a couple of (non-sf) short stories, while deciding which of my various novels in progress deserves most of my attention.

The problem I have is not a shortage of ideas; it's that I feel I need to do something completely new in order to come up with something saleable in science fiction.

Recently I've been working on an alternate history story; I think I've got a new angle, but it's a subject that's so well-trodden I won't be putting the bulk of my efforts into it until I'm convinced it stands out from the crowd.

I think I will return to my time travel epic at some stage, but that too got sidelined as the section set in Gospel times couldn't compete with The Third Day.

Another WIP was shelved a while back, a sort of cyberpunk allegory, but in these post-Matrix days it looks terribly derivative, despite the fact that all the work I've done on the project pre-dates the Matrix movies. Is cyberpunk too 1990s, or is that about what the Christian market is ready for?

All of which leaves me with the sequel to Countless as the Stars. Since there are things, with hindsight, I would do differently with Countless, I could use the opportunity to see what I'm really capable of in the way of a science fiction novel. The same problem exists here though: to make sf saleable I think I need to add something to the genre, especially if I base the story on existing Biblical narrative. Nonetheless, this is the only one of my WIPs I feel compelled to work on at the moment, so I'm going to see where it takes me.

1 comment:

Elliot said...

Sadly, I think the Christian market is often five or ten years behind the mainstream market, so yes, the more Matrix-derivative it sounds the better!
:-(