I've not read any of his books, but that must have made for a fun bit of detective work tracking them all down.
I read the short stories first! Which made the novel itself simultaneously enjoyable on its own merits—it's my favorite of his novels so far, although I am again one behind because almost anything that came out in 2020 missed me—and a differently enjoyable exercise in ". . . wait a minute."
Now I'm thinking of Tolkien writing different versions of his Silmarillion tales in various lengths and styles, though I can't remember which bits came first (wasn't Eärendil as the rising evening star one of the first things?).
I believe Eärendil was the very beginning. (After that I would have to start looking things up.)
I'm also more of an 'accretion' writer—I'll have particular images or moments that I want to incorporate into a longer story before I've plotted it out fully, but they always exist in the context of the larger idea.
I rarely plot in the formal sense, except that I almost always know something of where a story is going, sometimes because the accreting image is the hinge of it. I say I write by pearl-grit.
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I read the short stories first! Which made the novel itself simultaneously enjoyable on its own merits—it's my favorite of his novels so far, although I am again one behind because almost anything that came out in 2020 missed me—and a differently enjoyable exercise in ". . . wait a minute."
Now I'm thinking of Tolkien writing different versions of his Silmarillion tales in various lengths and styles, though I can't remember which bits came first (wasn't Eärendil as the rising evening star one of the first things?).
I believe Eärendil was the very beginning. (After that I would have to start looking things up.)
I'm also more of an 'accretion' writer—I'll have particular images or moments that I want to incorporate into a longer story before I've plotted it out fully, but they always exist in the context of the larger idea.
I rarely plot in the formal sense, except that I almost always know something of where a story is going, sometimes because the accreting image is the hinge of it. I say I write by pearl-grit.