Jonathan Sherwood - Fictionist Blog

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on September 06, 2021

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Forget the Audience, Who Are You Writing For?

In a writing class of mine was one writer whose story was actually painful to read. It was so overwrought with lurid, convoluted language that often his sentences made no sense at all. All of his characters were martial-arts supermen. All of his characters were philosophers. All of his characters were the strong, silent, mysterious type. As I slogged my way through his story, I wondered how he could read his own writing and not see what was blindingly clear to everyone else. And then he started discussing his story and the answer was obvious. He was speaking just like his characters. He was laboring to use Latinate phrases and obscure words that didn’t quite mean what he was trying to make them mean. He was young, and a little nervous, and he was trying to project an image of a learned, confident, mysterious philosopher. If he’d had an opportunity to demonstrate some martial arts, he probably would hav

Signed with an agent for my first novel!

I'm very happy to be able to say I've signed with Peter Rubie of FinePrint Literary Management! I'm working through a few minor edits, but with luck, a few editors should be start seeing the novel in February. One of the revisions I've made is the title. No longer called SHADOW ON THE DEEP BLACK SEA - the new (working) title is simply VOID. There's a good chance the title will change again before publication, but I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, here's a mockup I did of the cover because I love the feeling of emptiness of VOID.

EACH SEPARATE STAR appears in Analog today

EACH SEPARATE STAR is in Analog today. I wanted to write about a significant scientific discovery at its earliest, most boring, down-to-earth stage. Scientific discoveries aren't found like they are in the movies, with an explosion of insight—they're through mundane work that keeps chipping away at a nagging question. So, I wanted to explore that. One odd thing about this story is that it was written by flipping open an issue of New Scientist and randomly pointing at an article and writing about it. My finger landed on a piece about orbital mechanics, so I read it and then just started writing blindly. Very happy with the result.

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