Writing...

I find if I actually state what I am working on, it helps me to feel some pressure to follow-through and complete it.  Right now I have a few stories in the pipeline...

• A Child's Image of Her Father - This story is more familial/ real life than SF, though it has an element of the weird.  I like this story a lot, but it is wanting for a closing scene and a bit of fleshing out.  The good thing about having many projects going at once is that it gives me time to pull back from a  story like this and let it ferment for awhile.
• Nilay, Among Mermen - The story of what happens to the ship's foreman and 'Evar's crew' during the events of Elegant Threat.   Takes place inside the shell-like corpse of a spirewhale.  I intended to submit this to the Future Lovecraft anthology, but didn't complete it in time.
• Human Rain - Occasionally I get an idea that is so close to another property that I consider if it's worth writing.  I had the idea behind Broken Vessels long before I saw the DW episode Blink, but after it aired, I almost didn't write that one because I felt it'd be treated as derivative of Blink.  Not that the trope of the inanimate thing that moves only when not seen hasn't been around for years.  Again with Human Rain I have a concept to take place in Sol System in my Elegant Threat universe, where the posthumans first demonstrate their antigravity tech.  The crisis in the story ends in a climax that hipsters will cry foul for resembling the game play mechanic in  a certain popular video game, never mind that I'm using a trope used by Niven, Simmons, and many others besides.  I'll still write the story, because it is all in the telling.
• Steerpike's Folly - A story that jumped almost fully formed from wherever stories jump.  This follows the titular ship (again in my Elegant Threat universe) on a trip to perform a 'burial at sea' on the moon, Shanama.  Bad things happen, involving daliphants, the deep sea bulges, and the Posthuman's formative final city, where something hunts and some well-meaning would-be rescuer has placed a mechanism that encourages humans to becomes wolves to each other.
• Bakhara - the tales of Amr & Pristina from Elegant Threat continue, now on Oasis, where one follows the call of dead men, and the other hunts the man who killed her family.  More daliphants, the New Madhi, news of Cancer, and vengeance (none of that sissy Jedi 'I'm too noble for vengeance's stuff for these slicks.)
• Toro - The concluding Elegant Threat story.  I need to write Bakhara to know exactly how this one goes down, but on a thematic/premise level, I want to deconstruct the whole idea of nobility as presented within the stories to this point.  And I'm using the most cliched plot I could come up with: the big character who everyone thought was dead, but isn't, so the others come to the rescue.  
• Return to Themis - An Aether Age story written in a  picaresque style similar to the Dying Earth stories from Vance.  Features two characters, a Kemet and a Helene, whose travels lead them further and further out into the Aether from the orbital Titan, Themis.  Might just be for my own enjoyment since I promise not to publish my own story in anything I edit in the future, but I'm looking forward to this one.

Working on Fantastique Unfettered, I find myself focused more on my own SFnal ideas.  Or maybe it's just that I need to work out the Elegant Threat story to its conclusion.  :)

B