Eating elephants

It's said that if you want to eat an elephant, the correct way to proceed is to take a spoonful at a time.

That's an approach that works really well for writing. The blogging that I'm doing over at Hypno NZ is gradually getting me the elements of a nonfiction book. I've already assembled one series into an ebook on personal change techniques, and another series, on Health Behaviors, is just about to wrap up. Together, and with a bit of expansion and incorporation of other blog posts that weren't in the two series, they should make a decent book.

The other good thing about the blog format is that it encourages you to write new stuff instead of procrastinate by revising what you've written so far.

I'm also writing Gu on another blog. Again, it's a good way to write. I've never been very good at short fiction, because my ideas want to expand. This way, I get to do a long-form work that consists of short-story-like vignettes of about 1500 words each. The short story on which Gu is based was 5500 words, but I've reached - I'm estimating here, because Blogger doesn't have word count - about 24,000 now simply by expanding the embedded stories in that story. (That's based on 16 posts so far at about 1500 words. The early ones are probably a bit shorter, the later ones a bit longer.)

Unfortunately, at the moment I can only see about another six posts or so in what I still have to cover. (I have a sort of hit list of ideas.) That would take me to about 33,000, which is short of the 40,000 words that the SFWA counts as a novel, and the 50,000 that most other definitions use.

Still, 7,000 words short is definitely spitting distance. Even 17,000 is probably achievable, though I don't want to just pad it out for the sake of it. I'm especially wary because it's told as a documentary - it doesn't have a plot as such, in the sense of characters doing things - and I don't know how much of that people can put up with. I have kind of a sense of how I might incorporate story into it, by following the documentary maker, Susan Halwaz, as she lives out her everyday life using Gu. Silent, mostly, with no dialogue. And then after each such sequence (or before?), an interview with some expert about what she's just experienced.

I'm not sure why I feel the need to make things harder for myself by doing experimental stuff like this. I mean, a novel which is puportedly a blow-by-blow description of an immersive documentary, told in the second person, in which large sections have no dialogue and most of the rest is talking heads? But the fact is, because this is a completely noncommercial project - nobody has bought it, I have no publisher who cares if I can sell 5000 or 10,000 copies and wants me to write a series of three books - I can do what interests me and what occurs to me at the time. Artistic freedom, huzzah!

It also makes it more difficult to actually sell it, of course. City of Masks suffered from not being in any recognizable genre, so it's hard to identify a market for it. A wide variety of people who have read it have all responded favourably, despite its odd language and journal format, which encourages me that it is actually good and would do well if only anyone knew about it. And I'd tell them, if I knew where they were.

Gu has a more identifiable market: Science fiction readers who like Charles Stross or Neal Stephenson. (One person who's reading it has also compared it to Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, mainly for structural reasons.) And such people are open to new ways of doing things. So maybe I will be able to sell it after all, who knows?

Who cares? I enjoy doing it. Even though this blog post is an attempt to procrastinate working on it, because I have minor writer's block about what I'm going to write next. So I should just start writing and see what comes out. That's basically what I'm doing anyway.

Current Status

I think I'll do this from time to time, as much to give myself a record as anything. What's taking up mind-space or life-space or just in progress for me at the moment?

Writing:

• City of Masks is with Macmillans for consideration.
  
• The Journey in Four Directions I've just signed up with an agent who will represent it at some book fairs in Europe.
  
• I'm thinking about sending 'Gu' to a magazine, maybe today.
  
• Restarting the Alphabet is drafted up to the first third ('Maiden'), and sitting at the Glyphpress forum.
• Topia has been stalled for a while. I've finally realized what one of the main themes is: Letting, or not letting, your disabilities define you. I need to rewrite pretty much from scratch, I think, which doesn't sound like fun.

Games:

• City of Masks has had one playtest and I've included it in the MS I sent to Macmillans. It needs more playtesting.
• Errantry needs playtesting too.
• The unnamed third game is stuck while I try to figure out the mechanics.
  
• I'm signed up for Fred's Amber play-by-wiki game, starting at the beginning of April.
  

Spiritual Practice:

• I'm doing my Transforming Practice every morning, usually in the shower. Erin used it yesterday (when she got to work but before she left the car) and said it helped with her crappy day.
• I'm doing the rosary on my commute. It's good.
• Centering prayer about 5 days out of 7 (in the evenings). Mostly I get the kind of good where you call yourself back to attending, more than the kind of good where you are attending.
• Tai Chi with a bit of Qi Gong - I count this as spiritual practice, partly in order to defy Descartes. I'm probably doing that 4 or 5 nights out of 7.
• I've given up buying books for Lent, which I've been on the verge of regretting a few times but have managed to stick to.
  

Websites/Programming:

• I'm working on getting my online booking system set up on hypno.co.nz. I'm now at the boring testing and perfecting bit, so progress has slowed.
  
• After that I'll turn my attention to finishing Unfolding Forms.

Hypnotherapy:

• I'm waiting for Roger to come back to me with a date for my interview. I strongly suspect, from what others have said, that I'll end up getting the diploma because I pass the Association exam.
• The Association exam is at the end of April.
• I'm reading Maxwell Maltz's Psycho-Cybernetics.
  
• On the business side, I've set up a bank account and got business cards and my room is pretty much set up. I'd like to get a better chair for myself, and a rug for the winter, and I want to get a standalone drive case so I can use the CD writer with the laptop to give people CDs of the suggestions to take with them at the end of the session. After the start of the financial year on 1 April I'll start spending money again on this stuff. Also a wireless network setup.
  

Reading:

• I find I'm tired in the evenings, so I'm mostly reading light stuff (and finding good light stuff hard to come by - I read too fast and the best authors write too slowly).
• Psycho-Cybernetics is interesting; "Man is not a machine, but he has a machine", namely the subconscious, which is a goal-seeking mechanism according to Maltz. It's programmed by the various messages we receive but we can take conscious control of the process and reprogram it. I'm not sure I totally buy it, but it's interesting.
• The Tribe of Tiger is the other non-fiction I'm reading at the moment.

Forums:

• I'm chiming in a bit on both "I would knife-fight a man" and Story-Games. Racism is one of the current hot topics at both.