Senior Project Rambles

Alaska Pacific is an interesting school. Instead of a capstone course or a thesis, an undergraduate has to complete a senior project. This can be almost anything you can think of, as long as it pertains to your major and can bring together various aspects of your education for however many years you've been here. 

For me, the plan was originally to write an historical fantasy novel with two, interconnecting plots: one set in early Christian Ireland (around 500AD), and one in modern day (or forward a year, to 2012 and the supposed end of the world). The writing of it would include all sorts of other challenges to myself as a writer, and it was going to be wonderful. The only problem is that, when I set out to do my research for the historical plot line, I got another idea for something every other page. So I contacted my project board and asked if I could tweak the project so that I was writing a collection of short historical stories instead of the long, intricate novel. Bear in mind that I've always had horrible luck writing shorts--I tend toward fantasy naturally, so the ideas for my stories are so big and so long that trying to smash them into 10,000 words or less doesn't really work. 

Whether it was that or the fact that I've never written a historical piece in my life (school papers exempt), I found myself struggling to get past a single page on anything I started. With that in mind and the beginning of the semester looming, I decided to make another change: this time I was just going to be writing a series of short stories that all involved some sort of writing challenge to myself, e.g., a single historical piece, something in first person, a comedy piece, a contemporary fiction piece, things out of my comfort zone of male protagonists and high fantasy. 

For the last few days, I've been plugging away at what was supposed to be only part of this, but may wind up being most, if not all, of this project: a series of flash fiction/super short stories inspired by the major arcana of the tarot deck. Each story is one of the different challenges I wanted to attempt and they're all tied together in a minor way, so that each tale--no longer than three pages, at the maximum--fits into what was supposed to be a single short story. It's looking more like a novella, at this rate. Regardless, the whole piece is an experiment in itself. As far as I'm aware, the only piece that uses the tarot in a way similar to this is Neil Gaiman's "Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot," and even that isn't exactly what I'm doing. I'm just hoping it turns out decently.

I'm also tossing around the idea of gathering a few other shorts together with it, polishing it all up, and submitting it to Createspace or something of the ilk. Of course, that would mostly be for my ego, more than anything; vanity presses like that don't generally go over well with agents or publishers, from what I've heard, so I would generally just leave it off any query letters. But it would be an interesting experience and, potentially, a good aspect to add to the project. I guess we'll see how that goes. 

And, though I'm not really anticipating anyone actually answering this question, I'm going to pose it anyway: anyone interested in reading bits and pieces of the tarot stories?