This whole house needs dusting and sweeping urgently. Every time they open a wall or ceiling -- and they've done that quite a bit -- everything in that immediate area gets covered in chunks of plaster and dust. They pick up the chunks, but the dust remains. I can't bring myself to clean until they're well and truly done, though, because what is the point in cleaning up the dust if they just come back two days later and make more dust?

I packaged up the Hallowe'en story today, to release on the first of October, which gives me three days counting this one where I don't have a fiction project running. On the first of October I start work on Sleeper Squad 61, and I need to clear out the dust from the previous issue, and figure out the exact plot of this one. I really don't want to do that just yet. I mean, three days' extra lead time is not going to matter that much.

As I noted elsewhere to Iain: There are three stories left to do this [heavily scheduled] year -- SS 61, the final Coldpoint, and a Christmas frivolity -- and I'm not feeling enthusiasm for any of them.

What I really want to do -- well, what I really want to do is just play Control for the next three days and not think about fiction at all, and that probably is what I will do ... but in terms of stories, what I really want to do is go work on some outre one-shot fetish fiction for a while.

It is entirely possible that next year (which will most definitely not be heavily scheduled; I'm going back to catch-as-catch-can, it's better for my mental health) I'm going to be less concerned with Sleeper Squad and more interested in one-shots, including Quitclaim (yeah, it has continuity, but each story is supposed to more or less stand alone). I feel like I'm currently drowning in plot. Sleeper Squad has so much plot that it's got a whole concordance's worth of notes, the Coldpoint stories have far more plot than they were originally intended to have, and even the Hallowe'en story had tons of plot.

This digression is too long for a pop-in -- in fact it's longer than the entry proper -- but too bad, that's how it works sometimes. If you'd like to get "back to the point" (as if there were ever a point), skip to the final orange line for the not-so-thrilling conclusion.

Universes tend to happen whether I want them or not, unfortunately. I never wanted any larger continuity in Quitclaim, and I am still trying to avoid it, but the problem is that Randa is not a cipher. That is, she has a personality and people are interested in her. You may think that's not a problem, but it is. Because, see, if you make a character real, then suddenly that character has a backstory -- or, rather, suddenly readers demand that the character have a backstory, and that means suddenly there is continuity, and before you know it, you have a universe.

But the penalties for making Randa a cipher may be worse. Randa has a distant predecessor who, in her two stories, we never got to really see any internal glimpses into -- and that was on purpose, because like Randa, she doesn't want to show you any of that, she isn't the kind of person who does disclosure.

Randa would rather you think she has no past whatsoever; she wants no anchors, no connections, no history. She wants to be a Lone Wanderer. But, authorially, I have to give you glimpses of those once in a blue moon, whether Randa likes it or not, because otherwise the character is simply not compelling to most of you.

I love protagonists who are emotionally detached ciphers (see also: Jessica Gray), which is one of several reasons I like writing hard-boiled detective types so much. But I find that many people do not share my joy. (I also love writing protagonists who are basically not there so that the reader can insert themselves instead, and yet, despite evidence that we have whole swaths of people who are literally incapable of consuming fiction unless they can self-insert, I am told repeatedly that this is unacceptable.)

Anyway, I hate building universes, because then you quickly get to where you have fifty thousand words of notes (I've never actually done a word count on my Sleeper Squad notes, but there's six pages and they're long, long pages that have to have index headings just so I can get quickly to what I need to get at). But sometimes it happens anyway. At least with Sleeper Squad I knew I was going to end up building a mountain of continuity almost from day one. Coldpoint was an accident.

Coldpoint, like Quitclaim, was supposed to be episodic; each of the nine stories is supposed to stand by itself. Unfortunately, if we'd done that, then the political situation in the stories would have to stand completely still and never change, and since the political change is the basis of the major arc that sweeps these nine stories, we can't do without that. And thus we must keep track of What Happened Already so we can do What Happened Next.

I would love to be able to not have to keep track of What Happened Already, and yet. Even in some of my fluffy holiday stories! As soon as I like some characters enough to bring them back (I'm looking at you, Gladys and George and Natalie and Jenny), I have to keep track of what happened to them last time. For example, if you've read more than one of the stories with Natalie in it and I didn't give her at least a little bit of rabbit-related PTSD, you'd wonder about that.

No, no, I said the final orange line. We're still digressing. Digressions R Us.

We don't mention a certain hate-funding bigoted children's fantasy author here by name, nor her books -- as far as I am concerned, she has been chiseled off the stelae -- but I will tell you a story that I've told before, something that I'm not sure anyone who's not an author would ever notice.

The first two books in the series were small and self-contained, and it was clear that was the structure she had planned on: Our Heroes arrive for that year at school, there is an antagonist, the antagonist is dealt with, Our Heroes go home for the summer, the end. Seven years at the school, seven books. Episodic and simple.

It didn't work out that way. By the third book, even this particular author -- who is one of the worst universe-builders ever to exist, it is absolutely her weakest point and she's not all that strong a writer to begin with -- could not ignore the fact that there was a larger universe here and it insisted on being tended to.

The third book is actually the best book. (It's also the best film. But of course we are no longer reading these books or watching these films, so it's moot.) It hits the sweet spot: no longer quite as simplistic and episodic, but not yet the massive unedited tomes from the fourth book on where the universe got to the point where it required so much tending that it almost squeezed the life out of the stories.

This is what happens if you let yourself drown in your own universe. It serves as a cautionary tale to me ... especially since I also do not have an editor. (In her case it's because she got big enough that no one dared edit her; in my case it's because I can't afford one.)

Every time I need to remind myself of the realities, I go downstairs to the bookshelf and contemplate the fifth book in the series, which is two inches thick in UK hardcover (and is probably thicker in US hardcover because Scholastic printed them in a larger font -- Americans apparently need bigger words -- and with spot illustrations).

Two inches thick. There are probably works of hardcover fiction that are two inches thick which didn't have any fat to cut, but surely not many. (An Instance of the Fingerpost, which does not contain a single superfluous word, is a bit under seven hundred pages hardcover, and Order of the You-Know-What is about 760 ... but the former is probably printed in a smaller, denser font, so it may not hit two inches; I don't know, I only own it in paperback.) Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon, which probably also needed editing but Pynchon is impossible to edit (I can't say for sure, because I also find him impossible to read), isn't two inches thick. There is no Neal Stephenson tome that's two inches thick, and he practically invented the Overwritten Big Universe.

Anyway, so, too much plot. I have plot fatigue.

I feel like maybe I just want to back away from plot for a while and write something that doesn't have much more point than the kink. Like, the entire plot is "aliens mind-control the human population," the end. I need an extended breather from plot.

There is just the wee tiniest speck of a chance that this may also have something to do with Too Much Happening in the real world on a constant basis, but I won't swear to it.