Fictional Fiction

Jen and Kent work hard to blend their writing styles into a seamless Rune Skelley voice. Rune Skelley, though, is not content with a single voice.

Each of our books has called for the inclusion of writings by authors in the story’s fictional universe, and we’ve had a marvelous time differentiating those voices. The fictional authors have writing styles that don’t sound like Rune Skelley. Neither do they sound like Jen, or Kent. Or like our other fictional authors.

As we’ve mentioned, our current novel started out as an idea born of Kent’s fevered imaginings, an idea that didn’t really speak to Jen. We found a way to work around that, and now Kent gets his reward for compromising.

In the story world, there is an author whose novels embody Kent’s original idea, and now Kent has free rein to bring that idea to life. He is encouraged to dive as deep into the hard scifi well as he wants. And since we’re only going to be including excerpts from our fictional author, he doesn’t have to worry overmuch about plot.

Lest it sound like Jen never gets to do the fun part, she already came up with the titles for all ten of our latest made-up author’s novels (and one short story). That “idea that didn’t really speak to Jen” seems to have been whispering in her ear over the past couple of days. Having the names of all the books that will provide the excerpts gives Kent inspiration for the story lines and themes they contain. It’s a neat example of the symbiosis in Rune Skelley’s writing process.