| Story | Started | Published |
| "Prague '86" | 1987 | 2008 |
| "The Big Climb" | 1997 | 1999 |
| "Doors and Windows" | 2006 | |
| "Late" | 2006 | |
| "Method of Loci" | 2007 | 2009 |
| "Definitions" | 2009 | 2011 |
| "Olga, December '76" | 2009 | |
| "Fractals" | 2010 | |
| "Dreams" | 2011 |
When the first draft was put together, the editor put the stories what seemed chronological order of their settings. They stories weren't quite written in that order, as you can see from the table, and "Prague '86" took over 20 years to be published in a magazine. Some repetition between stories became evident. Rather than remove all the overlaps I decided to organise them so that there was a controlled daisy-chain of links between the stories. The diagram shows a snapshot of my intentions some months ago, before "Dreams" was added.
As well as repetition of objects, there's some repetition of theme. For instance, in several of the stories ("The Big Climb", "Late", etc) one of the significant characters is absent.
This is an interesting wee chart. I might be tempted to do something similar for my short story collection when it gets published if I ever finish revising it—I’ve just finished my twelfth read-through/edit/draft. It was my first beta reader who pointed out the connections to me. The stories were all written within a few weeks of each other and so you’d expect a bit of overlap but once I started looking closer I was quite shocked. I had, for example, three characters all called Stephen, two Eves, a couple of Morags and two Davids. He’d assumed these were the same people (which was not the case) so some changes had to be made. I’ve always thought about my short stories as a complete unit, not a novel-in-short-stories as such but there’s a definite feel to the collection. I expect to get round to your book in the next couple of weeks but I’m not doing much at the moment apart from working on this book. Just about the start my thirteenth crack at it. Wish me luck.
ReplyDeleteI'd have sent you a copy had I known you were interested. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteLinking is popular for commercial reasons. Aesthetically I'm not so sure. Pointing out the links is one of the more valuable tasks a beta reader can do - I missed several of my links.
Good luck with your re-writes. I've found 2 typos in "By All Means" this week ...