Novella Update

Work has now begun in earnest on my novella project (deadline end of January 2005), although it's going to have to share vacation time with a long and convoluted short story for a different publisher (deadline end of September) and two talks on science fiction and the Bible for the Greenbelt arts festival (respective deadlines Sunday 22 and Monday 23 of August at the very, very latest).
 
Apart from all the usual -- writer's block, inability to settle, a tendency to get distracted by arsing around on the internet and writing weblog entries -- I'm finding it surprisingly difficult.  Its projected length is barely a third that of Of the City of the Saved..., but it's in many ways a more sustained piece.  The narrator is a novelist, closely based on a real-life author I studied for my thesis (but not Philip K. Dick this time), and I'm making an effort to imitate closely his rather sententious period style.  It isn't easy.  Each chapter of OtCotS... had a different voice from the preceding one -- none have "narrators" as such (well, one strand has, but only the one), but the eighteen viewpoint characters' voices inflect the third-person narration seen through their eyes.
 
Admittedly I sometimes darted ahead along a single character's "thread", writing several sequential chapters in the same voice, but a) I always had alternatives if one voice was getting tricky, and b) even the most prominent such threads only amounted to some 18,000 or so words.  The novella is to be 35,000 to 40,000 in the same style, and that tone is one that isn't coming all that naturally to me.
 
So... it's all a little tricky.  That said, I've managed to revise the sample chapter, play around with the themes so that they make a little more sense, and complete a second chapter before starting on the third.  That's taken me a week, and there are nine chapters and an epilogue to go. 
 
At some point I'll talk about pastiche, parody and homage, and what distinguishes a metatextual appraisal in fiction of an author's work by a trained scholar, from a shameless rip-off by an unimaginative hack.  Er, possibly.