With the Q1, 2006 deadline for the Writers of the Future contest looming, and too many problems with The Adjoa Gambit to fix that quickly, I managed to write and polish The Strange Case of Lionel Turnway, almost 6000 words, in one week. I love when the words come flying out of me. I wrote at a pace of about 1200 words an hour, and half of it was written on my little iPAQ. A very fast pace for me. The result is, I think, one of my best stories to date. It sits in the mailbox waiting for that December postmark.
I know at least one other Codexian and fellow 2005 boot camper who is also submitting a story for this quarter. I still haven’t heard the results from the Q4 2005 contest, for which my entry was What a Difference a Day Makes. The two stories couldn’t be more different, despite them both being written in first person. The POV character in Difference is a cajun, and in Lionel Turnway, he is a prim and proper butler.
I picked up a copy of the February 2006 issue of F&SF. David Gerrold has a very different kind of novelette in this issue. I’ll leave the content for you to discover for yourself, but I will say that he did a great job with some unusual style choices that were disorienting at first. It is written in present tense, a choice which I rarely like, but it worked here. Few sentences start with capitol letters, and there is very little punctuation at the end of sentences. The effect was a great enhancement to the overall neurotic feel to the piece.