Sunless Rhetoric
A good friend being good to me strongly encouraged me to write this weekend, because I hadn't in some time. What I had been doing was blazing a trail through the box of games the same friend bequeathed to me (okay so maybe he isn't so good). I stumbled across a fascinating parallel between the writing in games and the writing in books in that I found myself, as the main character, wondering why I should care about certain details and regretting not having as much information as I should've had to connect with the story material. "This," I thought to myself as I wandered around aimlessly, "is what bad writing feels like to a reader." However, what I was doing could not be expressly described as researching.
But I did write, and for the first time in a long time no one will be able to see what it is I put down. On about the third page, my computer restarted, saving nothing of what I had written. I searched and searched when it finally booted back up to find no trace or sign, not a stray word or dangling punctuation. It was as if I had never sat down and committed to those passages. And yet I felt better, felt like I had done something productive, felt like I had exercised whatever muscle is required to string together ideas and fuse them as one with whit. Suddenly, it didn't much matter that anyone would ever read them and tell me whether what I wrote as good, or poor. I was back to square one.
In an opposite gear, I was featured in an interview by another author at my publisher. She was also nice enough to review my novel as well. Around the end of the month I think the rest of my promotional efforts will bear whatever fruit, and of course those items will be posted here.
This morning while questioning the drain in my bathroom, it answered to me in the form of the last novel in my urban fantasy series. A character, whom I had thought of previously, flashed onto the insides of my eyelids in much more vivid detail. I thought about who he was, and who he wasn't, what people sought from him and he from others. I do believe he has bejeweled teeth. I had other plans, though. I'm still trying to get notes about my sci-fi novel from the people who read it while warring against the notions that it wasn't very good and doesn't deserve a sequel. I'm happy to say that the strongest weapon against those negative thoughts has been to simply crack the thing open and work with it until it is good enough. Yesterday I wasn't aware I had such confidence.
So, that's about where things sit. I just finished reading one book and another has recently landed on my desk. I hope to get back to the writing soon. The last page I wrote wasn't nearly good enough to have been my best, even though no one will ever see it.
But I did write, and for the first time in a long time no one will be able to see what it is I put down. On about the third page, my computer restarted, saving nothing of what I had written. I searched and searched when it finally booted back up to find no trace or sign, not a stray word or dangling punctuation. It was as if I had never sat down and committed to those passages. And yet I felt better, felt like I had done something productive, felt like I had exercised whatever muscle is required to string together ideas and fuse them as one with whit. Suddenly, it didn't much matter that anyone would ever read them and tell me whether what I wrote as good, or poor. I was back to square one.
In an opposite gear, I was featured in an interview by another author at my publisher. She was also nice enough to review my novel as well. Around the end of the month I think the rest of my promotional efforts will bear whatever fruit, and of course those items will be posted here.
This morning while questioning the drain in my bathroom, it answered to me in the form of the last novel in my urban fantasy series. A character, whom I had thought of previously, flashed onto the insides of my eyelids in much more vivid detail. I thought about who he was, and who he wasn't, what people sought from him and he from others. I do believe he has bejeweled teeth. I had other plans, though. I'm still trying to get notes about my sci-fi novel from the people who read it while warring against the notions that it wasn't very good and doesn't deserve a sequel. I'm happy to say that the strongest weapon against those negative thoughts has been to simply crack the thing open and work with it until it is good enough. Yesterday I wasn't aware I had such confidence.
So, that's about where things sit. I just finished reading one book and another has recently landed on my desk. I hope to get back to the writing soon. The last page I wrote wasn't nearly good enough to have been my best, even though no one will ever see it.
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