Try for a book or do a bunch of short stories?

[Graham]

I'd try to make the short stories work as best they can as short stories, having prepared an outline of the setting to keep things consistent. Then, once you've got the stories see if they can be arranged into a novel arc, but I'm pretty sure an idea for a new novel will develop from the work.

Like Geoff, I was going to mention Asimov's Foundation series as a good example.

Graham

[Dr. Drib]

Another example to see how it's done, which is a classic in the field of SF:

City - Clifford D. Simak

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

Another example to see how it's done, which is a classic in the field of SF:

City - Clifford D. Simak

You could say Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" is an example as well. He wrote a bunch of stories and only later realized that they could fit together to form a book length manuscript.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by crich70

You could say Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" is an example as well. He wrote a bunch of stories and only later realized that they could fit together to form a book length manuscript.

Yes, along with "The Illustrated Man," as well, which uses a frame to connect the stories.

[Katsunami]

Thanks for all of the input

I've been reading up on episodic novels, and have installed the latest version of Scrivener. At first I'll import all the snippets, organize them, and finish the short stories; then I'll see what happens. It'll only take another 10 years or so, I think...

[arjaybe]

Well, if it's worth doing, then it's worth taking a really long time to do it ... Wait. Is that right?

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by arjaybe

Well, if it's worth doing, then it's worth taking a really long time to do it ... Wait. Is that right?

Yes, it's right.

[It takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And] We never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say it.
-- Treebeard.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by arjaybe

Well, if it's worth doing, then it's worth taking a really long time to do it ... Wait. Is that right?

Not if you're near death.

[Katsunami]

On October 31st, I've entered this writing stuff into Nanowrimo.

Even though I can cheat a bit (one short story is already written; it needs a big rewrite in some places, but I think rewriting is a lot faster than starting completely from scratch), I fully expect to fail this challenge, as writing 1667 words a day is huge. Thats more than four complete A4's, or 8 pages in a paperback.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

On October 31st, I've entered this writing stuff into Nanowrimo.

Even though I can cheat a bit (one short story is already written; it needs a big rewrite in some places, but I think rewriting is a lot faster than starting completely from scratch), I fully expect to fail this challenge, as writing 1667 words a day is huge. Thats more than four complete A4's, or 8 pages in a paperback.

How many words are you figuring per page Katsunami? I use 250 words/page as a rule of thumb and it comes out to only 6.668 pages.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by crich70

How many words are you figuring per page Katsunami? I use 250 words/page as a rule of thumb and it comes out to only 6.668 pages.

The short story I've wrote 2,5 years ago (as part of the anthology attempt here at MobileRead) has just short of 8000 words (+/- 7850), and it's exactly 13 A4 pages long. That comes down to +/- 600 words on a page.

(That is even more than I thought, because on the internet I often found 400 words per A4 page as an average.)

This would come down to having to write about 3 A4 pages, or 6 pages in a paperback, each day, for 30 days. Writing the short story took me 4 days, about 2000 words a day on average, and that was a lot of effort to be honest. I actually kept a changelog of the story length:

Day 1: 1667 words (written 1667)
Day 2: 3356 words (written 1689)
Day 3: 4189 words (written 833)
Day 4: 7864 words (written 3675, in 5 sessions)

This story was written over the weekend; the last day was actually a Monday, so I think I've had a day off back then, or I would never have been able to write over 3600 words in a day.