Showing posts with label Unity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Unity. Show all posts

Friday, July 04, 2014

The Story Behind Three Kingdoms

Happy Independence Day, Americans!

My story, Three Kingdoms was just published at Kaleidotrope. It's number 95 of The One-Thousand. Go read it here: http://www.kaleidotrope.net/home/three-kingdoms-by-matthew-sanborn-smith/ and then come back and read what went into the making of the story after the jump.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Friday, February 15, 2008

What Novel Writing Has Taught Me

I’m a short story writer.

Twilight in Mumbai is the fourth novel I’ve gotten more than two-hundred pages into and each one feels the same to me. A big hairy mess. They have all stagnated in varying states of disrepair. If I had a stove with a middle burner between the front and back burners, that is where this novel would go. It’s no longer going to be a primary focus, but I will be working on it regularly. So I don’t expect it to be done by October 31st like I had originally planned. I told some of you that I would definitely be doing NaNoWriMo again in November of 2008. I’m not so sure of that now.

See I’ve got my mojo back, but it’s because of short stories. I spent a good chunk of my vacation working on a short story (Unit One) and I was extremely excited to be working on it and that hasn’t happened since early last summer. So, that story being completed, I’m moving on to another, with a working title of Process Five, from comic book scripts I wrote for an unpublished series I created called Unity, which some of you may have read.

I’m still keeping a hand in Twilight. Don’t ask me why, but the entire novel was squashed into five chapters. Have you ever read a five chapter book? Neither have I. I’ve broken it down into seventeen much more manageable parts and I imagine it will grow more chapters in time.