Hi there. I'd like to welcome you to my new writing blog. I've been posting my writing for the past few years to a blog called Notes For a Future Novel. So why a new one? Well, I was never quite happy with the blog’s name, and since I’m resurrecting the novel with that title as part of Collected Works, it makes even less sense.
Now that I am rebooting my writing career with the imminent publication of my first book, it seems appropriate to rationalize my online presence with a site more appropriately name that also has better searchability. Thus, The Writing of Chris Ernest Hall. As Homer Simpson might say, it’s named after what it is.
The goal of this blog is to be a place where I give updates on my various writing endeavours, offer extracts of published works, and post my thoughts on writing, should I have something interesting and non-obvious to say. I won't, however, be serializing my work, as I had been. Although posting sequential extracts from 1989 A Novel was fun while it lasted, and a good way to force myself to keep writing even when dealing with the demands of a day job, I finally decided that I was doing a disservice to that work, and ended the project last fall.
1989 A Novel was never written with the idea of serialization in mind, and that means that the the individual scenes and chapters don’t end with cliff-hangers or suspenseful gaps, the way a television season is divided into episodes, or the way a writer like Charles Dickens would structure his works. Indeed, I wrote 1989 A Novel with exactly the opposite in mind, that it would be a work in which the reader immersed themselves in a different time and place--granted, not one as obviously exotic as the British Navy during the Napoloeonic Wars or a 21st century lunar colony rebelling against their Terran masters, but nevertheless, a different world than the one we live in now. It’s a novel that demands immersion, and intermittent updates of four or five pages each don't really serve that goal.
Thus, I've decided to start publishing my novels and other written works as what they deserve to be–books. Fortunately, with the advent of self-publishing services such as Blurb, Lulu, and CreateSpace, writers no longer have to depend on the traditional publishing model to get their works out to the public, but can instead provide them on an on-demand basis, outputted to whatever format the reader desires, whether it be a traditional printed volume or an ebook for reading on Kindle or iPad.
Over the next few years I'll be publishing all of my works in this way. The first volume I’m releasing is what I've dubbed Collected Works, which contains all of my solo writing from the years 1988 to 1993, including nearly all of my short stories from that era, my screenplay Therapy and the aforementioned Notes For a Future Novel.
For you 1989 A Novel fans out there, I will be returning to that novel. First, though, I have to finish Collected Works, and after that I am planning a rewrite of The Deep & Savage Way, another long-neglected work that I never quite finished. After that, I will finish 1989 A Novel, I promise! Although it pains me to delay completion yet again, I think by getting closure on the works that led up to it, it will give me a better vision of how to shape the huge mass of material I have already accumulated.
