Serial Saturday: Pause for Orange Hat Day
This Poor Sod Didn't Wear an Orange Hat
I’m taking a brief pause here, like I did with the first Serial Saturday offering, to go over lessons learned so far. As I said before, I try to keep this sort of literary navel-gazing to a minimum, but heck, its been months since I indulged in it. Also, it is appropriate to pause on this day, when I change from wearing a brown hat (or no hat at all), to a stylish blaze-orange one when I walk the dogs. Always a day for quiet contemplation.
I see, looking back at my post about the first effort at writing a weekly serial installment, that I went on at some length about how difficult it was to race along just barely ahead of my deadline, working on something without knowing how everything was going to end. Well, that was a piece of cake compared to the Nightmare Engine of Doom. In part, I think this is because I foolishly engaged in NaNoWriMo shortly after beginning this serial. I had the best intentions of getting out in front of things by putting six or seven installments of the serial in the can before November, but I think I managed one, which I used immediately.
Really, though, what makes Nightmare more difficult is that stories about JT Quinn practically write themselves, since I have a good feel for the characters and it is all in a setting only a degree or two off from the real world (maybe three). This story, about our unnamed narrator are trickier because I don’t know him as well, and he uses rather fussy language, and doesn’t live in a world all that close to mine. Also, it is harder to be amusing (or at least what I hope is amusing) than action-packed. Of course, I kind of knew all this would be the case, but I thought it was worth stretching a bit. And it isn’t like I’m forcing anyone to read the serials, much as I’d like to, so if it doesn’t work no real harm done.