KNE

Back in August 2004 I was kinda stalled writing-wise. Up to that point I had, under my belt, the first draft of a novel Kirana, and about a half-dozen short stories. But in May of that year we bought our first house, and that whole summer I was forced by a knife-wielding pregnant lady to paint the whole thing before our first child was born the following September.

Yeah, so I had massive major writer's block. Still do, but don't we all? Anyway, by the beginning of that August I had most of the painting done and the game of furniture shuffling from room to room was over. All that was left was to paint a mural on my expected's wall. (Rumor got out that I can paint artistically; a rumor I flatly deny whenever it comes up.) So that tail-end of summer was devoted to painting farm scenes on the baby room's walls. I was also immersed in Wagner's operatic Ring cycle, and was racing to finish Lincoln by Gore Vidal. But the most inexplicable part of that time was that I wrote a novella called Kenny.

Or maybe it's KNE. After all, the protagonist, a little boy of about ten or eleven, is a robot. It's a couple of centuries in the future but the future's scarily like it was thought to be in 1950s SF lit. The human race is at war with snail-like critters and Kenny lives on an outpost near the front of the conflict. His dad's the security computer. His best friend may be a real human boy, I haven't decided that part yet. But Kenny and his friend Tim steal a state-of-the-art rocket ship and wind up on the snail alien world. What happens? Well, you'll have to read it ... but first I have to finish it. Never did.

The weirdest thing was the writing process. I literally sat down at my desk on August 8, powered up my laptop, and with a completely empty head began writing. And it flowed. With no preconceived story and no preconceived goals, it just flowed. I was truly surprised. I had never written in such a manner before. Dialogue always came easy to me, but firing out of my fingertips were vivid descriptions of a whole new world I never imagined before, yet somehow was sitting there, untouched in my subconscious, for all these years. And it just came out. Situations, concepts, names of starships and planets and bureaucracies and futuristic social orders and the alien world ... with no self-imposed demands, it just burst forth.

I wrote 13,453 words in 21 days before I stopped. Maybe it was Labor Day weekend; maybe we went somewhere before the baby was born. I don't remember. But in any event, I never completed the story. It's probably half-finished, and if I devoted a month to it I could probably complete a first draft and do the final. Our second child's due in two weeks. I decided to tackle this project as my re-entry into the writing world, having written nothing (except this blog, of course) in the thirteen months since I finished The Whale of Cortary.

Because now I know the secret of writing a story like KNE.

It's simple, straightforward, and involves only the process. The outcome is not even to be considered at this point. Only the writing process:

It's gotta be fun!