As I write this, the sixth (or eighth, depending on how you count things) draft of Zeki’s Folly is being given one last once-over for typos. With any luck, I’ll be finished with that by the time I post this. (EDITOR’S NOTE: I did! It’ll be posted here.) So how is it? I give it a “meh” out of 10. I’ve taken to calling it a dorodango–one of those polished mud balls that they make in Japan. That’s my honest opinion: I polished the piece fairly well, but at its core it’s fairly… well, weak. As I transition to my next project, that means I have to do something rather unpleasant: introspection.
Oh boy, here goes nothing!
When I started Zeki’s Folly, I wanted to do something different from The Second Lord’s Madness. That had been a fairly conversational piece of work, one with a fairly tight point of view and that was primarily character driven; I found this type of story very natural to write. As I’ve said before, I am not (and do not wish to be) a professional writer–but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to improve. Since you (mostly) grow by stepping out of your comfort zone, that meant Zeki’s would have to be the opposite: a detached, third-person tale, with events occurring at a much larger scale. In retrospect, this was probably a tad overly ambitious. The paradigm shift was abrupt, to say the least. As a result, a number of my first few drafts were technically garbage, haphazardly drifting between half-baked, overly opinionated reportage and the original conversational writing. I mostly purged these deficiencies from the text, but it took me a solid four-to-six drafts. Even now, I’m still not quite happy with the result. In some areas, the prose became stiff, and in others the casual tone still every-so-slightly pokes through. However, I’ve been editing this beast for so long that I had to call it good enough.
Actual technical difficulties were only half of the problem. The other had to do with the plot. I had a fairly clear idea of what I wanted to write about: the founding of a colony. A premise, in other words, but not much else. Shortly thereafter, I tacked onto that what I then called the chromatic folk, my strange attempt to rationalize away the existence of humans with anime hair and eyes. (Looking back, since I’m basically writing weird fantasy, I’m not sure why I thought people with naturally green or pink hair needed explanation, but oh well.) Next came my characterization of Nulvatch as a despotic hellhole; then Zeki as a green bureaucrat; and so on. Hopefully you get my point: I was making it up as I went along. I had no clue where the story would end, or even what its middle would be.
Pantsing–what I was doing above–is a legitimate way of writing. However, it’s my understanding that very few people practice it in its purest form. Why? Unintentionally, Zeki’s Folly became a study of that question. What I determined is that pantsing lends itself to emergent stories. By that, I mean that you have some number of well-defined agents–maybe characters, maybe factions, maybe even the world itself–which you then drop into some scenario and let loose. In effect, you’re running a quasi-simulation. Of course, if you just run a simulation, the story can very easily wander into areas you have no desire to write about. In my case, I didn’t want to stray from my original premise all that much, whereas my agents wanted to do anything but. The end result was that my first draft was a hot mess of contrivances, inconsistent characterization, idiot balls, and straight-up plot holes. Patching these was a rather horrific ordeal–and I refactor code for a living. Ultimately, I didn’t quite succeed. There’s still an idiot ball or two scattered about, along with a few pieces of characterization that were introduced out of the blue. I think I got all of the plot holes, though.
So… yeah. Zeki’s Folly was an utter bear to write. I’m long past ready to move on. But move on to what, you ask? Well let’s see:
- I have two short stories done (or at least almost done) that I’ve mentioned before. One is about the “planar ships” mentioned in The Second Lord’s Madness and (spoilers) Zeki’s; the other is sci-fi horror, kind of. Neither has been edited in the slightest, though, and I’m quite sick of editing right now, so expect some delay before I release them.
- I’m a few hundred words into what will probably be a short that is primarily a roast of the show Designated Survivor. It’s not a fanfic; just a humorous, more legally accurate take on a similar scenario. I had a blast writing what I did, but it’s been two months since I touched it. We’ll see if I can revive it.
- I have a number of building blocks and set pieces for a mystery that’s kind-of-sort-of-maybe set in the universe Second Lord’s and Zeki’s share. However, I’m missing one key part: the actual mystery. That’s something I really don’t want to pants. I imagine it’ll be a lot of work to build that up from scratch, even though I do love everything else I have.
- I started outlining a memetic hazard thriller, set in the near future. I’m pretty sure just about everything I’ve written has included some unexplained reference to memetic or antimemetic threats, so I’ll probably use this as my chance to introduce these topics naturally, without saying, “Read this Wikipedia article, skim over some SCPs with the memetic tag, and then read QNTM’s stories.”
- Sometime soon, I’ll get around to writing an isekai spoof where the MC arrives and befriends the local nobles just in time for the world’s equivalent of the French (or Russian) Revolution. That idea has been bouncing around in my head for a while, but whenever I try to even sketch it out I seem to kill the humor that I think the setup has.
As you can see, I’ve got quite a bit in the pipeline. I’m not even going to try setting out timelines; I learned that lesson well enough when I said Zeki’s would be done in April. Still, I look forward to getting them out and experimenting more with my style.
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