The blog story takes off...dammit.

Moregone was supposed to be a short spurt every morning, taking about as much time and thought as I do on my blog.

Rightly or wrongly, I don't do a lot of editing or rewriting this blog. I don't think about it too much. I just sort of write whatever comes to me. Nevertheless, I noticed over time that I tend create beginnings, middles, and ends to each blog, sometimes ending up in places I didn't expect.

So I just wanted to take that same energy to the "blog story."

Yesterday, I decided that after only six entries I was already in danger of falling into predictable patterns. In other words, stories tend to have predictable arcs, whether conscious or unconscious, and I wanted to try to avoid that. Not only do I want to surprise the reader, but I want to surprise myself.

I went into my office and started pulling books off the shelves at random, looking at pages at random, and came across a picture of the cover to Tea for the Tillerman, an album by Cat Stevens, which shows an older gent sitting at a table and a couple of children in a tree.

And thus, the Boy in the Crabapple Tree was created.

But then the story wouldn't leave me alone the entire day, and I was still writing in the dark in my car at 9:30, after my walk in the desert. It even started coming at me while I was trying to go to sleep. I pushed it away, as I always do, because if I let that happen, I'm doomed.

Anyway, the story has obviously taken over, and that's both good and bad, but apparently I'm not capable of approaching a story without it dominating my thoughts. 

The main thing is I'm having a lot of fun writing this and I want to keep that going. My original intention was to do nothing but 30K novellas for "Tales of the Thirteen Principalities" but I've decided that any length will do. Whatever the story requires. Not being forced to write novel length is freeing, but that doesn't me I don't have to write non-novel length either.

I might even come up with short stories, who knows.

The idea is that each "Tale" is a standalone story in a common world. That is, the Tales can be read in any order.