Monday, January 02, 2012

A pretty good explanation (I hope!)

Okay, so my last post of 2011 was on October 31. Why so much radio silence?

Although I didn't end up doing NaNoWriMo, I was inspired nevertheless to kickstart my creative writing again. Having just finished reading Michael A. Burstein's excellent sci-fi anthology I Remember the Future, I decided to return to science fiction myself and wrote "Bibliophile," an 11,000-word short story about a librarian at the edge of the galaxy.

I wasn't even a few hundred words into the effort when it suddenly hit me- why not write a whole collection of sci-fi shorts where librarians are the central characters? As an homage to Ray Bradbury, I'm going to name this anthology "L is for Librarian" (after Bradbury's own collections "R is for Rocket" and "S is for Space"). I'm already working on the next installment, and am busy brainstorming the stories after that.

The breakthrough for me on this particular project was that I realized that of the several science fiction short story ideas I had gestating, the common theme which ran through most of them was that they all somehow involved a library or librarian. I know, what are the odds? Even the ones which didn't feature a librarian, however, took on a new creative life once I started to re-imagine them with this new focus. Which just goes to demonstrate the inherent awesomeness of librarianship... I wonder if I manage to post a copy of "Bibliophile" and sell it before ALA Midwinter, would I be eligible for The Great Librarian Write-Out Award?

I promise to share the first story in L is for Librarian in the near future (getting my writing organized and for sale online is a big part of Make It Happen 2012), but in the meantime I thought I'd let you know what was keeping me away from my blog for all of these weeks. I hope you'll agree that it was a worthy cause, but I promise not to keep you in the dark about such matters for so long in the future!

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