Sharing My Solipsism

Work on The Novella continues to progress reasonably well. I managed to write around 4,000 words this weekend, which hits the chapter-a-week target rather well... except that one of the other things I did over the weekend was to overhaul the book's structure entirely, such that what used to be a whole chapter is now, in most cases, half of one.

Still, I'm on course, all my protagonists are where they need to be, know the things they need to know and so on. More pleasingly, I'm past the halfway stage: some 21,000 words are now written, with only circa 17,000 (five weekends' work, with luck) remaining. This makes a big difference, psychologically: it's all downhill from here.

I've also written an Afterword, putting The Novella in the context of the work of the Great British SF Novelist whom I'm ripping off critiquing metatextually. Today I've used my work's subscription to the online OED to confirm the 1950s period authenticity of half-a-dozen words, including "poltergeist", "ecological niche" and "Cro-Magnon".

One comment which has sometimes been made about my novel Of the City of the Saved... (sorry, sudden change of subject here, but it becomes relevant) is that the protagonists don't seem to do all that much -- they mostly just move around from place to place, experiencing things and having revelations made to them.

Which is pretty much true, although it doesn't apply to all the characters -- Godfather Avatar's pretty proactive, for example, as is Gnas Gortine.

However, I'm not convinced that this is actually a problem, unless you enter the novel expecting a conventional S.F. thriller. OtCotS is essentially an S.F. picaresque, a "planetary romance" without the planet[*]; and the experiences of and revelations to the characters, rather than their actions, are what these strands of the storyline are about. This is quite deliberate: all the "action" occurs on the level of the City's various gods and godlike figures, and the humans are pretty much their puppets.

(The one character for whom this does seem anomalous -- at least in terms of how I wanted the novel to work -- is Laura Tobin. As a private eye, she brings certain genre expectations with her to the novel; and the fact that she does little to shape her own plot strand beyond solving the murder mystery -- in what some readers have rightly considered a rather sudden and poorly-grounded flash of inspiration -- is, in her case, rather jarring. This is admittedly unfortunate, as she's OtCotS's chief protagonist.)

The reason I mention all this is because, if this is a flaw, The Novella's going to suffer from it too. It deals with character -- you could even call it a character study -- but the sympathetic viewpoint characters don't drive the action, which instead happens at the whim of the powerful, remote and alien ones.

I say this now purely so as to avoid disappointment.


[*] Well all right, just the one planet.