Relief

It's a relief to have finally driven through the finale for 'Oneiromancy', even if it is slightly bodged. Yes, it is bodged, or cowboyed, or finished at all costs, but that will be fixed eventually. Maybe. The curse of the serial story is that tone goes up and down like a yo-yo, massive pieces of narrative get left out as ideas strike you, and then strings of episodes go by while you wait for the next inspiration and fix the previous holes. These are all things that are potentially dealt with in the 'fix-up', when the fix-up finally happens of course. The list of waiting fix-ups is getting longer, and longer, and longer...

A 'fix-up', and I know I've written about this before, is a procedure used a lot back in the golden age of fiction, where serialised stories and sometimes entirely separate short stories were mashed together into novel form to add books to a publisher's and an author's catalogue. My favourite examples are, I think, the two Dashiell Hammett novels 'Red Harvest' and 'The Dain Curse', which are great fix-ups both for the finished product and for the obviousness of their natures as fix-ups. That 'fix-up' quality is worn on the sleeve somehow, which is refreshing. In the purest sense of an already muddied term, my serialised stories won't be fixed-up exactly, but it will be similar.

What stories need to be mushed together so far? There's the first one, 'Night Trials', which was a troubled write but a good first attempt at a serial blog story. Then there is the first phase of 'Triangles', which was a much better beginning concept, and after that 'The Disappearance'. 'The Disappearance' was based on something so goofy that I'll love it forever, the concept of the plain chocolate digestive detective. Ah, such a rocky roof of prose over a goofy premise. After that? The first phase of the high concept 'Wordspace' and then the just finished 'Oneiromancy'. Taken together, and ignoring my own ability, or lack of it, for producing the stories, that's an impressive list of ideas. A science fiction Western before I'd ever heard of 'Brisco County jr' or 'The Wild Wild West', a parallel universe story based in Aberystwyth, a time travel detective story based around biscuits, a story set in a world where all the characters are literally words and the landscape build on subtext, and an adventure in the collective unconscious. What a set!

Gosh, they really are very slow to identify crackpots, aren't they? If only relief could extend to the mathematical part of my activities, but it doesn't quite yet. Maybe, given time...

O.