EOFY 2011-2012 direction

I have been giving some serious thought to all the bits and pieces; the clues. The grand puzzle of writing before me. The recent Writers Surgery outcomes were valuable, and I have used that in conjunction with a quick survey of how I write and the massive amounts of material I have managed to save over the last 20 years.

My model of what a writer was has significantly changed since I last investigated it some 20 years ago. It no longer works sufficiently to assist, so I need a new model that works.

I found an interesting idea - something akin to the PhD-by-publication that occurs these days in academia. The general concept is that a thesis is the product of the PhD. It has a summary, and a conclusion and some guff in the middle.

The standard academic model of a PhD-by-publication is (extremely simplified and genericised):

1. Three or more papers are published on a specific theme in reputable and relevant journals.
2. The papers are ordered to form a thread.
3. An introduction is added to frame the thread and guide the reader through the papers.
4. A conclusion is added to summarise the thread and provide the reader clear conclusions and completion information, often including bibliographies and appendicies.

I then considered a novel, or one of my universes, as akin to a thesis.

Again, I acknowledge extreme oversimplifications. Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. Thanks, George!

A novel would then have an introduction and conclusion wrapped around a set of short stories with a common theme. These common themes would be character based and, often, chronologically and causally linked. Thus you have a novel generated from a set of short stories. My universes are broader than novels and are composed of both short story bits and novels, novella, and probably some micro-fiction.

Why is this so important? Because I use what I have always termed "snippets" to get into characters or scenes. ALL of my novels have the first two or more chapters removed after I get the characters and style/feel for the novel.One of my novels, I have an entire "novel" of 10 chapters I wrote until I sorted out the main character was not the person I should be following... so there is a second novella told from a completely different perspective.

These all fell into the zone I humbly title CRAP in my documents. At some point bits are removed (sometimes whole chapters) to the CRAP folder. Some of it, no doubt, is crap. But some of it could easily be transferred into short story format for publication. These can be quite interesting as they often tell of different sides to characters. I have stumbled upon some of these gems over the years and found myself caught reading them with fresh eyes - never even remembering I had written it... but there it was in my system (akin to my own handwriting).

So, I have been looking at my universes as thesis, where the stories I have identified are individual chapters that need to get published somewhere. They may or may not link. They may or may not have characters that are used elsewhere. I need to conisder at a later stage if I would "re-write" key historical aspects if I happen to describe them prematurely in the universe. Additionally, I had a chuckle when I thought about establishing some sort of semantic network engine to screw with (watch this space).

After all that procrastination, what I really need to do ... is write.