Fallen off the internet

I think it’s a result of having finished Under the Hill and sent it off on its first stage in the submissions process, but last week I found myself wanting to do anything but write.  Or at least, I wanted to write fanfiction just to please myself rather than writing anything that could be vaguely saleable.  I spent most of the days trying to tear myself away from reading, reading, reading anything I could get my hands on – which was unfortunate, as I had editing and cover art to do, and I was supposed to be re-writing an old story to expand it into a novella.

I get the impression that now there’s a vacuum where UtH had been, I’m trying to suck something in to fill it, but I don’t know what that thing is, so I’m reading everything indiscriminately in order to find it.  None of which would be a problem if I didn’t have other things I ought to be doing.  I really hate multitasking!

On the ‘things I have been reading’ front, and after seeing my friends list filling up with squee about A Game of Thrones, I tried reading that.  But I seem to be fed up of pseudo medieval fantasy worlds featuring oppressed womenfolk, soap-opera style relationships, a pervasive feeling of doom, and politics.  I get the impression that no good can come of anything that happens from page one onwards, am I wrong?

I may try the book of the film of On Stranger Tides, now that I’ve decided I’m not going to see the film after all. 

I think – writing wise – that I don’t really want to be writing this novella.  I want to be brainstorming something new.  But on the other hand there’s only 5000 words between me and getting this thing finished, and I feel strongly that I ought to be getting it out of the way first.  The trouble is the more excited I get about the idea of doing something new, the more I don’t want to be doing this old thing.  If actually started to sit down and develop a new idea it would probably just make that ten times worse.

And speaking of old things, having re-read my first ever novel, I’ve got to say that while it’s not as bad as it might have been, it’s not as good as it could be either.  You can tell that I’m trying to make it sound like a Norse saga – it’s all very laconic and full of alliteration – but I strongly suspect I wouldn’t be happy to have it seen until I’d done some re-writing, reformatting and expansion on it first.  I’ll post an extract of it next post so that you can see for yourself what I mean.