Here’s My Crazy Idea for My Next Book
13 April 2008 by mm
Title: One Night and a Thousand Nights. Setting: The edge of the world. The Earth is flat. Some disaster in the interior (super volcano? massive drought?) has forced most of the population to migrate to the edge. Plot: We follow several people as they try to cope with life on the edge. Each chapter would be less than a hundred words. There would be 1,001 chapters. Each chapter takes place on a different night.
The concept came to me whole one afternoon while walking home from work. I don’t even know if such a book is feasible, but I’ve been thinking about it, envisioning it, and living with it for a couple of weeks now, and it still seems as juicy and cool as when I first thought of it. So that means I’ll probably attempt it eventually.
I think it’s brilliant, but I worry about the 1001 nights at 100 words each. Are you sure you don’t want to try 101 nights at 1000 words each? Which could be broken into ten sections, each focusing on a different character, if you wanted.
On the other hand, you could start with the first plan and see how it goes. ‘Cause conceptually, it’s grand.
Well, I see your point completely and it has merit. However, I feel very comfortable doing the 100 words or less episodes. That’s how I wrote Terrastina and Mazolli, and how I did my Conditional Reality blog for years.
For this new project I have a database set up where I can track episode numbers, what needs to happen in each episode, and what kind of number the episode is (i.e. prime, square, fibonnacci, etc.) Those mathemacial details will figure into the story and the more numbers I have for that purpose the better. Hence the advantage of 1,001 episodes rather than 101.
So yeah, I’ll try my way and see how it goes.
Glad you like the concept!
I love it! Are you going to have a storyteller?
One of my future projects is to read a multivolume set of Arabian Nights that I bought on eBay a while ago.
And I need to get off my duff and buy a copy of T&M! Because of work, I couldn’t keep up with your posts and I’d like to read them all the way through. I remember enjoying the ones you showed me years ago.
Yes, definitely a storyteller. Also lots of turtles.