As-yet untitled SF story that I'm working on
I've finished the first four chapters and I'm planning the fifth this week. My schedule's sporadic - I basically post the latest one up as soon as Ive planned and written it. I have a clear idea of where it's going (the ending's already written!) but unfortunately writing it on the fly like this means glitches in continuity creep in now and then. I guess it's like some personal NaNoWriMo, except it's running to a personal timetable that's dictated by my own creative process. I'm not a professional writer, so have no idea whether I'm making a decent job of it or not.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Intermission (background/flashback segment)
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
It's a bit of an experiment in that I haven't mentioned the names of the lead characters yet; I'm trying to see if it's actually necessary to include them! Sadly, I still haven't thought of a title for the whole thing either. The chapters themselves are named after songs in my music collection so it appears I'm really lazy with the names thing. Anyhow, thoughts welcome because I've not received any feedback from anyone about it yet.
Pretty good. A little disjointed in places where it shouldn't be, but otherwise, rather well written. Definitely very cyberpunk, which I'm a fan of.
As I was reading through it, though, the sequence of events reminded me very much of the beginning of my own cyberpunk novel-in-progress, Post Black. You didn't by any chance happen to read what I've posted of it somewhere, did you? I'm just curious, as I see a lot of similarities between the two.
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It takes a village to raise an idiot, but it only takes one idiot to raze a village.
@Zokk: thanks for the input. Much appreciated. By 'disjointed' are you referring to stilted dialogue or general 'flow'? I'll be trying to get things off the ground proper with the next chapter, so want to tighten up the writing as much as possible. I'm very (overly?) conscious of it being not readable enough.
I'm afraid I've not read your work yet so any similarities are coincidental (honest!). I'd like to read it if you have a link to what you've done so far though. I must admit I was influenced slightly by William Gibson and the 'ecopunk' of Paolo Bacigalupi's The Wind-up Girl - I've grown to love cyberpunk in recent years. I think a bit of Kinoko Nasu crept in with the character dynamics (he's more of a fantasy/horror writer but I'm a huge fan of his work too).
Yep. Just a few subject transitions here and there (like three or four at most, I think) that I didn't quite follow immediately, but nothing major. It kind of adds to the dialogue in a way, though, because people's thought processes and conversations do sometimes jump like that when there's nothing else to say about a certain subject. Just don't do it to often, or it'll get confusing.
Here's what I have so far for my post-cyberpunk novel-in-progress, Post Black:
Prologue
Chapter 1
For reference, here's what Damien and Kath (the two main characters) look like to me, in my mind.
It's influenced a bit by the style of William Gibson and a whole lot by the style of Richard K. Morgan, who drew on Gibson's style to begin with.
I've amassed a total of about thirty thousand words of material so far for the entire novel, but it's all disjointed scenes; the prologue and the first chapter are the only chronologically coherent sections I have so far. I still need to go back and update them with what I've come up with since I posted those sections I just linked to, though. The prologue's grown to be about five pages long now (it's only three in that link) and the fist chapter has grown to be about ten pages (that link is only six-and-a-half).
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It takes a village to raise an idiot, but it only takes one idiot to raze a village.
*BUMP*
I've now written and uploaded chapter 5. There was also a short skit I did fairly recently, which features the same two main characters but doesn't feature in the main storyline.
Both of these were inspired by a fun game that a Twitter acquaintance came up with: he posts a photo of a sentence or phrase that he's written out using fridge magnets, and challenges other people to incorporate those words into a short piece of creative writing. It's a lot of fun actually, and gave me the kick up the backside and add more to this.