I am (for better or worse), always working on several writing-related projects at once. I don’t even really think in terms of “projects.” I’m not that organized or intentional most of the time. However, there comes a point after I’ve written several stories or snippets where I begin to notice a shape or a theme or set of themes and I realize I have a “project” and then I try to do something useful with that mess.
I am currently working on five things (a technical term for book type project) that I’ll share with you.
1. The Novel: Things I Know About Fairy Tales
I wrote a short story a little more than a year ago, and published here at Necessary Fiction that stayed with me. There was more story there waiting to be told so I decided to take the plunge and turn that story into a full length novel. Things I Know About Fairy Tales is about a Haitian daughter of privilege who is kidnapped by a gang and held in the Bel Air slum for thirteen days. The novel details her ordeal and the aftermath, while playing with the idea of fairy tales and what happily ever after means when your understanding of the world is changed in such a significant way.
The book is divided into three parts (Part I: Cinderella Stories Always End; Part II: Among Beasts, Among Men; Part III: Down, Down the Rabbit Hole) and the narrative (as many of mine are wont to do) goes back and forth between past, present and future. I’m excited to really dig into this after I defend my dissertation at the end of the month. That’s what’ I’m holding on to. The novel is my carrot. The dissertation is my stick.
Of course, I’ve never written a novel. I don’t know how to write a novel. It is intimidating to go from writing short stories to writing the same story for thousands upon thousands of words, and do so well. I’m pretty terrified.
2. The Short Story Collection: Strange Gods
Turns out, I have a lot of stories and some of them would work together pretty well. Strange Gods, is a full length collection of those stories. I’d tell you more but then I’d have to kill you.
3. The Novella, Sort of: This Is Our Family Portrait; This Is Who We Are Beneath the Glass
One day I started writing these little vignettes about a family only they all ended up contradicting each other and I thought those contradictions were really interesting so this book is a series of family portraits, each 100 words or less, about the same family seen in different ways. It’s a strange little project where I’m really stretching myself because there’s no plot or discernible characters. The narrative style is repetitive almost to the point of obsession. This is one of those books that’s going to require a very special publisher to love it and pet it and call it George.
4. The Chapbook: Some Hearts Are Fainter Than Others.
I have a series of short stories that are very confessional in tone. The stories are about obsession and impossible people and impossible situations. Many of them (will) use the second person point of view, my favorite point of view, really. I’m very fond of this little collection. It’s intense and a little raw and very intimate. That sounds a bit pornographic. Stories like this and this and this and this are part of the project. This book just wants to be loved. And finished.
I’ve changed the title of this book eleventy times.
5. The Chapbook: What They Do When They Are Together
You know how sometimes you think you have a great idea on your hands and you work on it and work on it and no matter how hard you try you can neither remember why you think the idea was good nor can you find a way to make it work? This is that idea. I’m struggling with this project but I refuse to give up on it. The idea was to write a series of very short stories all written from the collective point of view. I think where I went wrong is that I wrote the stories from the third person POV when they might have worked better in the first person (we) but the thought of taking all these stories and writing them in the first person is a bit overwhelming right now. At the same time, I don’t know that the first person would work. I think a distance is needed. I also wonder if the conceit works across several stories.
The stories I’m currently working on are: Girls at the Bar, Men at Home, Pussy on Parade, Boys in Drag, Bad Waitresses, How the Video Hos Go Go, Models Always Fall, Nerds at the Prom. Other stories are as of yet unwritten.