Science Fiction Short Stories versus Gaia Novel

I have been reflecting for a few days on the structure of my novel, Return To Gaia, and I have some changes in mind.

Since the market is for short stories, and since the novel has this weird episodic structure of two books with twelves ten thousand word chapters each, and I have been struggling to inject the vitality and interest into the whole, I have come up with this idea:

Write short stories that link up into a novel. As simply as that. Charles Stross wrote his nine Accelerando stories as a coherent whole. So at the moment I am working of my version of "Lobsters", the opening story of the Accelerando. The benefit of this is that it crafts a world, focuses me on the episode at hand and making it interesting, and is more fun. Plus if I write an interesting "Lobsters", as it were, I can go on to write my version of "Halo", story two of Stross' Accelerando. So it is a win-win.

On a somehwat different note, I have been reassessing and returning to my roots in search of inner stability. As a result of severe and excessive sensitivities, I have stopped drinking coffee and my body is going through some fairly unusual changes as a result. As I write this, I am having hiccups for the nth time of the night. It is all for the best, and I have returned to the spiritual group I count myself a part of in order to recover my balance.

At present the process of raising the stakes and exploring and stretching out the opening chapters of Gaia into a short story is taking some detailed thought, and it will take some world-building and research as well. Expect to see essays on this blog soon on worldbuilding and research.