Bleeding Fiction

Writing the Fables is a strange sort of project. I try to write ahead as much as I can. Before the holidays I had about two weeks "backlog" and was posting stories I had almost forgotten I'd written or would talk with someone about the Fables, make a comment and realize "oh, no, that hasn't actually happened yet, has it?"

This, combined with the way I skip from story to story, means that it might be a long, long time between writing two installments of the same storyline. Today is a great example. "Snake's Daytime Occupations" is a direct follow-up to "People Watching With Snake and Fox," but I wrote them three weeks apart. My memory isn't really that long, so I usually end up reading a few stories over again before I write the next in that series.

This is a good thing.

It helps keep continuity, of course, but also... Since the beginning, I've been "seeding" the Fables with strange little images and ideas, apparently throw-away things that add flavor or irony. There are a lot of them. But when I write them, they're not usually relevant to anything going on in the story and, due to the time-lag by the time they might be, I've mostly forgotten what they are.

(Hell, it took me two months to get to the tragic conclusion of Sheep's story; and it sorta bums me out that no one commented on that, incidentally.)

That makes re-reading the Fables a process of re-discovery. I spot things I'd forgotten about and get to put them back in later, which makes the thing seem more seamless and intentional than it really is. It's sort of like writing the second draft at the same time as writing the first. Sort of.

At some point, maybe when the story's finished, I'm going to print it out and re-read the whole thing at once, see if it makes any sense. I hope it does.

(For the record, at 42 entries of 500 words each, the Fables currently clock in at 21,000 words, which would make them, when collected, a novella.)