A Little Late, But Here It Is

For a while, I couldn’t decide which of two final versions I wrote had the better pacing, and this week was a wild week anyway. So it took me a bit longer than expected. But here it is:

Ouroboros

Just follow the link to Twitter. Enjoy!

Blurb

If you liked Green Tape and Antidroma, you might also like Jay Martin’s new nanonovel Ouroboros. Nominally it’s a murder mystery, but it has its share of action and ambiguity, and the genre is, once again and quite deliberately, not altogether clear. It starts with a murder and ends with a murder. But you will soon see that the latter might make it necessary to reassess the former. And only then it becomes clear that Ouroboros is, after all, a murder mystery and not a thriller: because in terms of solved cases and solutions, it all comes down to what we consider psychologically possible.

Author’s Note

If there had been more space, I would have dedicated Ouroboros to Robert Coover and John Barth. The idea is based on a story-within-a-story, told by the character Inspector Pardew in Coover’s Gerald’s Party. There, a murder case strikes the Inspector as “too simple” and “too self-referential,” and things turn out to be not quite as expected indeed. Coover gives Pardew’s story a clear-cut ending, but this story-within-a-story rather functions as a pseudo-allegory in a postmodern environment that seems itself “too simple” and “too self-referential” to be fully trusted. From John Barth, additionally, I took the concept that “in order to progress, you have to go back where you started”—which, in a more classical environment, is also true for most detective stories: following the chain of events, the solution will often be found at the beginning, at the scene of the original crime. Or, in postmodern parlance and with a salute to Edgar Allan Poe, even before that: at the scene of writing.

Green Tape by J. Martin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Some good news, some bad news

Okay, bad news first: my serial I submitted to Green Tentacle doesn’t suit their needs. Nathan E. Lilly wrote, “What I’m really looking for is a serial that takes place over the course of a month.” I’m not entirely sure what he means by that, but we will find out soon I guess. If you aren't following @thaumatrope yet, do so now and get your daily dose of nanofantasy & nanoscifi!

Anyways, I won’t publish my serial on @nanonovelist (a twilot & 13 twepisodes) because that’s not the right thing to do. It’s always a bad idea to start self-publishing rejected texts that were intended for submission; the many reasons I don’t think I have to elaborate on. It’s not a professional thing to do, and it isn’t psychologically healthy either. Also, it’s the “nanonovelist,” not the “nanoserialist.” (Granted, I did reserve that either—but the whys and hows I’ll come back to in a later post.)

Alright, so what’s the good news? I sort of finished my little murder mystery which, I don’t know how this always happens, again turned out to be a bit more bloodier than I would have expected. I still have to write the blurb and an author’s note, but my next nanonovel is on its way and should be online by Wednesday, at the latest.

On With the Novels!

Now, finally, I’ve finished my series and actually submitted it to @thaumatrope, where the submission queue kindly re-opened some days ago.

Although I worked my behind off on this series (twilot and 13 twepisodes), success is by no means guaranteed. @thaumatrope had terrific contributors from the get-go, and with increasing popularity, I expect the competition to be stronger than ever.

However, high time, really, I wrote another nanonovel!

A basic idea came up which I hope to be able to convert into a rough sketch over Pesach, or Easter. It’s a murder mystery, but a kind of postmodern murder mystery. If you happen to have read Robert Coover’s Gerald’s Party, you might remember Inspector Pardew’s curious case? About the “famous historian in the field of prehistory” who had been found, hand and feet bound, and strangled to death with an ancient Iberian garotte—but which, for a robbery, “had seemed too simple, too self-referential, if you take my meaning”? (p.200) Well, something like that :-)

חג שמח everybody! I’m getting to work now, with my scratchpad, another cup of coffee, and my immensely helpful little plush bunnies, on my balcony out in the sun.

My Own Shortened Nano URL

On this here blog, I cannot possibly not post about this:



http://is.gd/nano | http://is.gd/nanu

Mother —

What are the chances that it is me getting the “nano” URL from my favorite URL shortener service?

And what are the chances that I’d have it shortened to link to an image related to Alien/Aliens, my favorite science fiction universe ever? (Even if this particular movie was crappy?)

And what are the chances that the shortened URL for the second link to the second image spelled “nanu” which might be best translated, from German, as “wait, what?”

Does not compute.

Now What’s Next

Actually, I’m not in the process of writing another nanonovel right now. Rather, I’m working on a series to submit to @thaumatrope as soon as the Green Tentacles people deign to open up the submission queue again.

Story, plot, structure, characters, and several details are fine already—I’ve worked on this project, on and off, for about six weeks now. What I need to do is get the pilot and at least the first three or four series in shape so I can shoot it off the moment the submission window opens again. I think this will keep me busy for another two weeks, maybe three.

Which, theoretically, shouldn’t interfere with thinking hard about my next nanonovel. But this series keeps getting in the way on the subconscious level; ideas aren't coming in at the usual rate.

So it looks like I have to get this done first before my subconscious connects again with me in its capacity as my trusty nanonovel generator proper.

My Latest Nanonovel: A Science Fiction Romance

Well it isn’t quite the idea I started out with for my next nanonovel, an experience that’s rather new to me, even if some basic features have been retained. Instead of an epistolary nanonovel, please welcome now a science fiction nanoromance:

Antidroma

Just follow the link to Twitter. Enjoy!

[Note: It seems the Twitter “solution” to wrapping problems I referred to in the context of publishing Green Tape has been fixed. So tweets can be seen again as they were meant to be seen! :-)]


Blurb

Not so much science fiction but romance in a science fiction setting; not so much a nanonovel but a nanodrama in disguise: Antidroma features, in form and content, cross-overs in many different ways. For romance, meet two star-crossed lovers and their peculiar predicament—a predicament that seems puzzling at first, but becomes clearer as the plot progresses. For drama, see how these two lovers cope in the face of utter inevitability—and how they will not be swayed. Antidroma will make you want to read it twice at once: from cover to cover and back again. Prepare to be gripped.

Author’s Note

Originally, I set out to write an epistolary nanonovel, but I didn't want to set it against some tired historical backdrop or other. Instead, I wanted to set it against some tired future backdrop or other! Which raised an interesting question: why on earth would people in a possible future convey messages to each other, fall in love, and not meet and tell each other their innermost feelings in person? Of course, they could be separated by a thousand light years, for example. But to sketch a setting that would allow messages to travel over distances, but not people, or, alternatively, devise new & retrogressive social restraints to prevent my lovers from meeting up, that would have swallowed way too much space within the confines of a nanonovel. Not much would have been left for the letters. So I changed plans. The letters became dialogs, and the science fiction setting warped into a time-travel premise. I wrote a story once, actually, about a not-too-bright first person narrator who wakes up one day to find himself moving backwards in time. Next thing he does is walking into a bar, trying to have a drink, to hilarious effect. So I took this idea and adapted it to develop a nanoplot that was part romance, part drama. Antidroma “crosses” indeed into drama, and—certainly tongue-in-cheek—high modernist drama, at that. It doesn’t have any stage directions. The lovers do not have names. The lovers are not even gendered. It’s somewhat Beckettish, and also somewhat Finnegans-Wake-ish, in ways that will be immediately clear when you’ve read it.

Antidroma by J. Martin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Yet Another Project With In-Built Resistance: An Epistolary Nanonovel

Since I published my latest nanonovel Green Tape, I’ve been mulling over the idea to write an epistolary nanonovel.

Of course, epistolary novels are not generally known for their prominent appearances on the nano scale, from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa to John Barth’s Letters. Whereas the latter’s mere 800 pages look, compared to the former, slim.

I already sketched some ideas, but what seems to be most difficult here is to establish a dramatic tone.

The quick succession of ultrashort dialog lines, the “letters,” somehow always produces a feeling of facetiousness, jocularity, drollness. Granted, Barth’s epistolary novel is at times droll, and it’s supposed to be. Its tagline, after all, is “An Old Time Epistolary Novel by Seven Fictitious Drolls & Dreamers each of Which Imagines Himself Actual.” But there’s enough drama in the novel to make up for it, and in a nanonovel, there’s just not enough time for that.

To not sound droll in an epistolary nanonovel, to develop a dramatic plot seems not enough. Maybe the words as such might have to be more weighty than usual, to make up for the inherent drollness of ultrashort dialog. I’ll give it another week or so. If I can’t come up with a working solution, I might try and write an epistolary nanocomedy instead.