A series of pulpy short stories, sort of a Dark Americana / weird fiction thing. Noir, magic, existential dread, horror. Warming up for a novel in a completely different genre but I wanted to iron out some of my own shortcomings and stretch some muscles before I write yet another 100k words on a project I'm unhappy with.
I'm trying things a little differently right now, by plotting/writing, then revising in between the next set. Think spaced repetition for writing. Every story needs some drawer time before it's revised and edited. I anticipate a small anthology of sorts being ready by the end of the year.
That's right up my alley. I've been thinking about writing something in this style but with a jazz biome twist (kind of like steampunk but with a jazz-centric world instead of steam power). Do you use a specific text editor or git workflow to manage your work?
That also sounds super fun. I love it when things get hyper-specific like that. If you ever need a beta reader, let me know.
I use a mix of things. For a long time I used vim with some plugins to emulate iA Writer, along with vimwiki for general notes. Now I use Obsidian for notes (general stuff like character bios, tags, ways to track relationships, worldbuilding stuff).
I use iA Writer for a quick outline and first draft because it's simple and distraction-free, and I like its focus mode. Again this can be done with vim, I can send you my .vimrc if you're curious. I just wanted to support the company.
Once the first draft is done, I spin up Scrivener. I put in the notes from the outline into the corkboard view, then paste the draft. I read through it front to back and take notes, usually in iA where the outline was. Then I create a new version of each doc, one by one, and do line edits or rewrites where I see fit. Sometimes I rewrite something wholesale, or split it into multiple scenes, or delete completely.
Scrivener is very handy for this type of work, especially with the corkboard view, which lets you slide things around and see a story from a higher level than headlines or chapter / scene titles would.
I know Scrivener has a focus mode, but I use iA specifically to remove distractions. If I have Scrivener open, I'm tempted to fiddle with things in its UI, or try to take that high-level view too early. iA is for drafting because drafting is supposed to be a single-minded enterprise. There's no room for second thoughts and any loss of momentum kills a story for me.
