Leaving Uranus

By Iolanthe Portmanteaux

I’ve been posting once a week for the last seven months or so, and soon I’ll post the last chapter to my Uranus story. Then I’m going to take a week off. You’d be surprised, but the Uranus story has taken a lot out of me.

I never expected it to absorb me the way it did.

Usually the way I work is this:

• I get an idea; I jot it down in a file
• Over time, the idea develops
• I start sketching the outline
• Once the outline is clear, all the way to the end, I start writing
• After the first draft of a chapter is done, I do hours and hours of rewrites

 
I’m not kidding about the “hours and hours” -- I don’t know whether it shows, but I keep reworking the story until I can read it through without hitting any bumps.

The jotting down of ideas, the development of those ideas, and sketching the outlines -- those activities go on whenever I feel like it. They don’t have a beginning or end. It’s a lot like pottering around in the garden. After I’ve been working on whatever my current story is, and feel my energy flagging, I look through the other files and fiddle with them. It’s pure fun. Up to now, the way it’s worked out, is that as I get closer and closer to the end of my current story, I get impatient to finish. I can see the end, and want to be there. At the same time, one of the outlines develops to a point that it’s ready to graduate to being my next story. I’ve got two in that state right now.

The problem is, my current story, the Uranus story, isn’t shifting off to make room.

The Uranus story is different for some reason. It was harder. I’m not saying it’s better or cleverer. I think it’s actually a bit lost and uneven.

It started off as just the title, only because it made me laugh. I really did laugh about it for three months -- until I started writing. Then, it wasn’t a comedy. I kept thinking there should be a category “A little bit funny, but not all the time.” When I wrote the first outline, the ending was completely different. I had to revise the outline after writing each chapter. I’d think it was going one way, but as I wrote, it would go another way. I don’t understand how that happens: you tell a story to yourself, but then when you go to write it down, you see that it isn’t believable.

Several times I had to make diagrams to figure out what was happening.

All the time I worked on it, I did keep dipping into the other files: the simple ideas, the developed ideas, the fledgling outlines and the complete or near-complete ones.

I expected that as the Uranus story began to occupy less and less of my mind, that another story would start to move in. But it didn’t happen. Right now, I’m just a few paragraphs shy of ending the chapter, but it still fills my mind. There are a few angles that aren’t quite clear. They’ll get worked out and polished up in the rewrites over the next few days, and then I’ll be done with Uranus.

After that: a week to get Uranus out of my head. That ought to be enough.