Well, there haven’t been too many posts about writing this past month. Holidays plus keeping my head down in revising water has kept me from interesting notes. So in lieu of a real post, here’s my reviews of all the books I’ve read or tried reading since September. I hope to make this a quarterly thing, so look forward to more. Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow I likes me some Cory Doctorow, but I think this is the weakest of his novels. It doesn’t suffer from over-vocabulization like his others, but the plot flickers back and forth between the present, in which not much happens, and the past, where…
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I Never Learned to Read!!!
Think I might have a problem with reading. I don’t where it came from, but I’m having trouble finishing anything. Not because I don’t have the time, but because I make a conscious decision to stop reading it. Even the ones I finish are difficult. Here’s the evidence. When I finished the Rifters Trilogy (Peter Watts), I realized how much story I really didn’t get. It was too high level for me, too full of science, too full of technobabble and moving too fast for me. I completed it with basic comprehension, but when I look back, I didn’t enjoy reading it. I could have if there was less science…
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Reading Status
After I got done with the long-winded Star Dragon, I took a brief break, then looked back at my books folder. As I always do, I selected a random number and got The Janus Syndrome. I stopped reading it twelve pages through (and I struggled to even get to twelve pages before giving up), because it sucked. It kept throwing terms at you and expected you to grok everything right away. Someone got too serious with their world-building, so here I am, reading a foreign language, and no one’s translating for me. There’s a difference between thinking and guessing. I’m reading, not solving a puzzle. The next one I got…
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Research: fact or fiction?
For reference today, please see a John Scalzi’s article here about a article by Brit music critic Ben Meyers. Short version: Meyers criticized the way the Internet makes research too easy for would-be writers, so you don’t get the ‘real’ experience or facts. Scalzi says he’s using the Internet as an excuse for his own laziness. Now despite that Meyers is a hideous arse candle, and Scalzi serves him a heaping bowl of Snarkies for breakfast, this brings up a question: Say you’re inspired to write a story that takes place in ancient Rome. You know nothing of ancient Rome, but that’s where the story takes place. That’s where it…
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Writing Advice #9
Read the type of material you mean to write, for a wide range of ages, levels of seriousness, audiences, classics. This is a bit hard to decipher. I guess if I was Neil Gaiman, I’d read lots of stuff about myths, folk tales, and legends. This is not hard to do at a wide range of ages, seriousness, audiences, and classics. If I was Stephen King, it’s hard to find horror for a wide range of the above-mentioned criteria, unless you wanna read the Goosebumps books, but I don’t think he has debased himself to that. If you’re Audrey Niffenegger, what do you read? Dean Koontz and Louis L’Amour? Seems…