Choose Your Own Adventure

[truepenny]

[Storytellers Unplugged, September 29, 2008; found via the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]

(Thanks to Leah Bobet for suggesting this topic.)

Corambis (which, yes, I have turned in and even been paid for--loud cheers) is the fourth and final book of a series I’ve been working on, one way or another, since 1993. Now that it’s done, and my brain has grown back a little, I am faced with the quandary of: What do I do next?

The problem--I should make clear--is not that I don’t have ideas. I have at least thirteen ideas for novels floating around in my head, ranging from a modern reworking of Webster’s White Devil to a novel about the first integrated human-elvish baseball team. But, unlike Isaac Asimov, I can’t write more than one novel at a time. So I have to choose.

The first stage of the winnowing process is easy. Several of these ideas are things that aren’t ready to be written yet. They need more time to ferment in the compost heap. I have one novel that would take place in the same world as the series I just finished, and I’m not writing that right now because I need a vacation.

So then it’s down to the things that are ready to write--or, even better, already partially written. Ideally at this point, that would be one thing and there, voilà, the decision is made. I have three, and how to choose between them is in fact a dilemma. First strategy: is there one that I know everything I need to know, it’s just a matter of doing the work? Sadly, no. Of the three, one is stalled out three-quarters of the way through because I’d been cataclysmically wrong about where the plot was going; a second has a complete draft (as in, there is a beginning, a middle, and an end), but it needs a ground up rewrite–and that’s stalled out at the beginning of Chapter Two because my protagonists need to discover a Thing, and I don’t know what the Thing is. And the third, for which I have a complete outline of the plot, is and has been refusing to give me either which decade of the twentieth century it should be set in or which voice it should be told in. These are not insurmountable problems, any of them, but certainly no one of them is any easier to solve than the other two.

Now I tried to fob the decision off on my agent--since that could be a factor in the decision; I am a professional novelist, and if one of these ideas seems more marketable than the others, that’s at least something to consider--but he replied with the, “I love them all equally in different ways” defense, and I was right back to square one. So I consulted the oracles put up a poll on my LiveJournal.

Now, the interesting thing about this as a decision making tool is the fact when I get an answer, there is a very distinct reaction in my head: either, “Yes, that’s right,” or “No, that’s wrong.” So it doesn’t matter what the poll says; what matters is that it says something. In this instance, the poll says The Emperor of the Elflands [published as The Goblin Emperor--Ed. 03/13/2016] and the inscrutable workings of my brain say, “Yeah, that’s the one.”

This is an arbitrary decision, and that’s okay. If it turns out to be wrong, I can change my mind. But in the meantime, the important thing is that it is a decision, and I don’t have to stand here, miserably stalled out between my three bales of hay, until I starve to death.

Now I just have to figure out the plot.

Comments

[heathwitch.livejournal.com]

Just to say, I love the Doctrine of Labyrinths still. Are there any plans to re-release the series as Kindle/ebooks at all, please?

Thanks x

[leoboiko2.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much, poll & brain.

[acrossthelake.livejournal.com]

Oh my god, yes. (If you have another poll will the mentioned sequel/follow-up to TGE be an option? I know a large section of people who would be ready to vote for it with a vengeance.)