While I haven’t been doing a whole lot of fiction writing of late, I’ve nevertheless been noodling around some ideas and plans. And something occurred to me last night: three separate stories each incorporated something of a MacGuffin that, in retrospect, can be the same thing. In other words, three separate stories (starring the “Mass Disappearance” crew) turn out to not be separate, but directly linked.
Huh.
And the MacGuffin transforms from a content-free plot device into something actually important on its own. Neato. Perhaps a way to turn short stories into a short novel…
Fortunately, the first of the three stories is actually the one I’ve actually written the most of… looks like 27 pages. I let that one lapse quite a while back when Real World Requirements started stomping on trivialities such as this, but I might get back to it soonish. Still working on “Mockingbird,” currently at 14 pages. I suspect it’ll be on the order of 30 pages when done…. and then I’ll try to attack it with a chainsaw to reduce it as much as possible. It’s a story that might be , in its complete form, of great interest to aerospace engineers… but deadly dull to normal humans. So a page and a half of someone going through static test data might be a tad excessive.