Drunken Owls and Other Delights

So ends the eleventh month of the year, and where do I stand in terms of writing?

NaNo still remains elusive to me. November was a crazy month workwise, and writingwise I had other plans. I may yet do it in the future, but it'll probably be quite far into the future, if at all. I'm not bothered by that.

It's been quite some time since I've actually written anything truly new--that is, something unrelated to the Bridgetown trilogy, unrelated to any current or backburner projects I'm working on. Possibly a few years, really. Some time ago, probably even this time last year, I may have been bothered by that fact. However, in the year and a half of major trilogy revision, I've actually written more on a daily basis than I have in the last few years. I've also learned a lot more, and made great strides with perfecting my writing. I'm glad to say that my prose is a hell of a lot better than it's ever been.

Revision work on A Division of Souls started sometime in 2012 and completed earlier this year; I'm about ten chapters from finishing the revision of The Persistence of Memories, and if I can finish this off by the end of the year, that'll give me the start of 2014 to work on revision of The Process of Belief. [Side note: I've been contemplating changing the title of Book 3, but I'm yet to come up with one I like. My only prerequisite is that the phrase is similar to the other two.]

One of the interesting side effects of spending over two years on major trilogy revision is that it's given me all sorts of ideas for related stories and novels set in the same universe. I've always wanted to do that since about 1995--I like the idea of discovering new twists and turns in a history of my own making, over multiple generations. The background isn't dense in terms of rules and regulations, but there are quite a few points of historic interest that could be used as fodder for other focused ideas. The maiden alien landing in Bridgetown two hundred years before the setting of the trilogy (and a hundred years after first audiovisual contact) could be a standalone novel itself. McCleever District just begs to have a novel or two written about it. This is all aside from the spiritual relations construct I created for the trilogy, which also has endless possibilities.

Will this mean I'll never get around to some of the other novel ideas I came up with in the past? Will they become trunk novels, some that haven't even gotten to "novel" status yet? Who knows. For now, a lot of them have fallen by the wayside, worth looking into much further in the future when I have the time. And I'm okay with that.