Okay, back on the train. Headed home! Finally. I think we've passed over into North Carolina at last, and now that my seatmate and her human-sized bag she was straddling from DC to Petersburg, VA, has left (she crowded over onto part of my seat's leg room, so I was all twisted up trying not touch her and give her cooties and stuff), I've got room to stretch out and write a bit. I'd love to squeeze in a thousand words or so to keep up my current pace started at the con.

I've got a lot to think about with my writing and where to take it. First, obviously, I wanna finish up my three current novels. I've got a wacky plan to do a chapter every three days for the next three weeks to finish up the SF novel's revised ending. I think I can do that -- I'm looking at each chapter as a short story of 4,000 to 5,000 words, but it's easier than a story because I'm not creating new characters each time out, and I've got the outline all put together. I'm on a roll right now, after writing almost 1,500 words a day with the distraction and fatigue of a con-in-progress picking away at me, so it should be no problem for me to finish up the novel in the next 18-20 days or so -- it's not like I'm working right now! I've got to do this for myself, to prove I can do it. Just need to push.

Then I'll get back to the Blackbeard novel, focusing on the narrative voice of that as well as the romantic elements. We're going to be at the Outer Banks for almost a week for Thanksgiving, so I'm planning on taking a trip to Ocracoke, where that novel takes place, and maybe even make it over to abandoned Portsmouth Island, where the infamous love scene takes place! I hope I can do that. And the whole trip is research, so it's all tax-deductible!

Finally, over Christmas, I want to reread the urban sorcerers novel and make sure the focal character is Kelley, the 14-year-old girl who discovers the new type of magic that trumps the magic of the old-fart sorcerers still hanging around. I'm making that one strictly young-adult, so Kelley will need to come to the forefront, and possibly be in more scenes and chapters. We'll see. It's an ensemble piece, so that can't be helped, but I'll see what I can do. And I know there's a YA contest deadline coming up at the end of the year to keep me on task for that.

And then? For the new year, I'm thinking of a new direction with my writing. All the talk this weekend about interstitial writing and slipstream was really intriguing to me, and it made me think that now that I've figured out how to write a story and am on the way to figuring out novels, I need to work on my writing voice and style. I'm way too traditional, I think, which I think harkens back to my poor reading skills (I don't know when this happened, when I started having trouble reading, when it became like work; maybe it all started when I went to college and had to read novels I didn't want to necessarily read, and retreated into reading comics for pleasure instead of novels? I need to analyze this more. And I know I read way too analytically now, trying to study the author's workings when I'm supposed to be just having fun.).

But no, I'm not setting out to write something interstitial (something that falls between the cracks of genre) or slipstream or whatever. I do want to go farther with what I've done so far. I feel like almost all of the dozen or so stories I've got out there now are mostly second-tier stories, that I've not really broken any new ground. That's my next challenge to myself. To break new ground. I think I already started doing that with my most recent chapter in the novel, switching perspectives and showing something from a different point of view. There's more I can do. I've only really scratched the surface.

This interstitial stuff is interesting, though. I like the ideas of "Fiction Without Borders," (a slogan on one of the buttons at the Interstitial Arts group were selling for five bucks at the con Friday night -- I didn't buy it) -- writing that sort of breaks apart the familiar tropes and settings of say SF or fantasy, writing that pulls heavily from the mainstream and approach genre issues and topics from a radically divergent perspective. Like making a character's internal landscape part of her external landscape, as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" supposedly did (I guess I may have to watch some repeats, sigh...) -- if a girl's boyfriend is acting in a monstrous manner, he turns out to really BE a monster. That sort of playfulness is fun. It's sorta post-modern, but I hate that stupid term. It's poking holes in expectations, and that's what I need to do more of. My stuff feels way too tame and predictable.

So... what should I write for this next novel? I'm thinking I'll need to start completely fresh (I played with the idea of reworking my first novel from a totally different slant, but that would be silly, really). I don't really have any existing novel ideas that aren't steeped in genre. The closest would be the All-Nations Team novel idea, which I think may work in a Sarah-Canary sort of way (I say this without having even read that novel!), plus I can play with the tropes of baseball novels... hmm...

The rest of my ideas are too genre-bound. Damn -- this train car doesn't have outlets, and my battery's almost dead. Craaap!!! And I didn't even get to write more about the con and the party and all. Stupid train. Didn't get a chance to talk about the issue of ARGOSY and the awesome Jeff Ford story in it, or the other novels I should write. Argh. This hasn't been my day...

Later.