There's this truism which says a story is finished when the thought of revising it one more time makes you cry.

I'm about at that stage with Jessamine, which is on its fifth draft and was my Clarion West application story, but since I last looked at it, I know I've improved as a writer and my CW instructors did have a few things to say about it which could nudge me in the right direction toward revising again. So now I have to decide: is it finished, or not?

Questions, questions. I may just try to finish Year of the Rabbit and possibly rename that, and come back to Jessamine when I've developed a taste for wine.

Whee... long time no blog.

I have been writing, though, and while my progress on most things has been slower than I would have preferred, I am making some good progress on a variety of things in the Ulan universe. (Jessamine, The Lion And The Lizard, Incarnadine, White In The Moon, and now Nrima and the Ten Good Things.) The problem is, the more I work in this universe the more I realize that its plots tend toward the epic. Jessamine, for example, I'e been resolutely cutting down and cutting down and has finally reached the point where I've gotten it to 7,000 words... and I'm realizing that its plot and character development demand a much longer story. Something along the lines of 20,000. Which, while I'm sure isn't unpublishable, does tend to make things difficult.

So, assuming that you have a variety of stories, none of which are quite children's or young-adults' stories (but of which none are necessarily adult-only), most of which seem to be heading toward that awkward ten-to-twenty-k-words mark, all of which are set in or around the same city... what do you do? Publish a collection of related stories or a chronicle of the city as a novel? Sand them down as much as is possible and try to submit to magazines? Try to find a story that would work as a novel, work on that, and then work on the horter ones as adjuncts to that?

Questions, questions.

The SciFi I grew up on was overwhelmingly Star Trek with a light edge of Star Wars. I watched through every episode of The Next Generation, and for a long time could identify most of them by name based on a vague summary of the plot. In fact, Star Trek was probably one of the most important of my media influences--inside or outside the genre.

So it's kinda weird that I've wound up thinking of SciFi as rigorous (or at least somewhat diligent) science-based fiction; I try to research whatever I write, even if it is only Wikipedia research. I try to stay within the bounds of reality except for what I need to stretch to make the story work--FTL travel and the like, for example. (I don't know nearly enough about physics to make up plausible explanations for FTL; I mostly just handwave that.)

Is there still a place for the magic-science fiction of Star Trek and Doctor Who? (In an episode of TNG, they mention that the Enterprise's sensors can't cut through "the thermal radiation." In an episode of DW, the Doctor remarks that a space station blocks "SONAR, RADAR and scanners." These despite the fact that the Enterprise routinely scans suns, and SONAR uses sound to scan.) Is there still a market for soft, technobabble-filled works, where you can make up things as you go and as long as you allude to a logical explanation you don't have to make it terribly logical at all? I'm sure there must be, but I don't know what it is.

I may or may not ever write something like that. I tend toward harder sci-fi, because I like the texture of it better. It's become something of a prestige genre in my mind. But who knows; someday, for nostalgia's sake, I may want to try something so soft as to fall apart under inspection--and it'd be nice to know where that goes.

Machina went out to Analog today, and I have another story up on OWW. It's called The Last Flag, was written in two and a half days, and shows it. White In The Moon was by comparison a lot more refined, fresh out of the fingertips. We'll see how many drafts this one goes through before submission.

Well, Machina got rejected from F&SF, so I'm going to shoot it off to Analog tomorrow. Fortunately, I think my skin is getting thicker. I got the note, marked it down on the calendar and in my database, looked to see what markets I didn't have things at yet, checked Analog's guidelines, printed off a copy, a cover letter, and a SASE, and got the whole thing packaged and ready in under a half-hour.

Oddly, the only things I've ever sent to F&SF have been science-fiction regardless of the fact that I may actually write slightly more fantasy. I think that somewhere along the lines the bit of their guidelines that reads "We receive a lot of fantasy fiction, but never enough science fiction or humor" got interpreted as "Hey, SF GO HERE" and has never been overwritten. Of course, now I have to find something else to send them that 1) isn't out at another market, and 2) I haven't sent them before.