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"Fitness Class" was a solo. Or at least, I could have sworn it was.
But here I am, posting a follow up about a third the original's size. The "universe" does not have a name (other than "Fitness Class"), but there it is.
Most of my stories seem to me to be complete when I write them, the length varies, but usually getting them to proper Novelette length (17500 words or more) would be a struggle. They begin at the beginning, move through the scenes I've invented, and then they end, and that's how long they are.
Possibly I write the length that I do from too many years of exposure to TV and movies. (It is an acknowledged fact the should your favorite novel be adapted to a movie, only a novellette worth of plot will survive the transition.)
Confidence Trick exists because of a moment when I was walking across my living room in 3 inch heels, and I suddenly felt confident and powerful.
I carried the observation in my mind for years, when I realized I could hand the emotion to Tim, who after all, had taken a movement class in heels, and get a Fitness Class sequel out of it.
Actually, Fitness Class had relatively few comments calling for a sequel, but it is the first one I've written. One or two others are in process.
That Karen can give the presentation via audio is important, and yet this is NOT a pandemic story. Working from your home is an ideal that many of my friends in the tech field pursue, often fruitlessly. Sometimes to the extent that they'll uproot themselves and move to an entirely different part of the country, in the hopes that once established at the firm, they'll be allowed to work from home. Those hopes are frequently not realized, as managers are suspicious of those they can't keep an eye on, but what is our fiction if not aspirational?
As for the pandemic, there are two or three OTHER stories I want to use that in.
I sometimes wonder if I'm describing things enough, although I have no desire to go as far as Brian Aldiss who once wrote a novel that a friend of mine described to me as nothing but description of a room...
There isn't much detail on the Japan scenes as I've never been and am unlikely to get there. I do follow some details of Japanese culture, though. I am particularly interested in the Otokonoko phenomenon.
Comments
The Old Saw
Of course there is the old saw about "Writing what you know." I'm not sure how that works in the various sub-genera of fantasy. And while there is a vernier of every day life to lots of TG fiction, there is also a lot of made up stuff that has to seem plausible or at least consistent.
I don't know if I have ever written here about my idea of a metric for suspended disbelief. All fiction requires some level of suspended disbelief. And in some ways it's the maintenance of a consistent level of suspended disbelief that makes a story, um, believable. of course writing style has a lot to do with it. Some authors are easier to read than others. Their sentence structure and dialog have flow. I think yours has that.
It is in Breakfast of Champions where Kurt Vonnegut writes about using irrelevant descriptions of characters as if they are important and then he goes on to describe the size and shape of the character's penis as if that had something to do with character development. I guess it works for him. So it goes.
The best fiction does two things: It is readable, and it holds your attention. I'm not sure that any authors have too much of a handle on what it takes to achieve that. We do run into the "Successful Published Author" problem where their third book is double the length of their first two and the quality is half of what the others were. I think that comes from dismissing the editor. A good editor can cut out the crap and help hold the author to a sane and sustainable story.
If you were to ask me then I'd tell you to write what moves you. What you have written moves me. But for half of the time readers are irrelevant. Your characters speak to some of the fantasies that I have. I'll never ask directly for a sequel but I would be happy to spend more time with the characters you have created.
peace.
PS. I've been on work from home for this whole last year. And it seems that I'll be on the same till at least September. WFH works well most of the time for "information workers". Though I worry that I have what David Graeber calls "Bullshit Jobs." I spend half the day figuring out how to turn red pixels on my screen green and the other half of my day making it so that fewer pixels turn red tomorrow.
We have our executive teams on record saying that they can no longer claim that people need to be in the office to be productive. One of the things it has shown though, is that we need less management than our managers used to think we need. It'll be interesting to see how the second half of 2021 plays out.
Your friend
Crash