Oh no! I suffer from all of these! Fortunately (or not) I know I’m not alone. In fact, I just finished reading a book which was such a martyr to this one that I’m going to quote it whole:
From “Do you suffer from one of these Writing maladies?” by Nathan Bransford
Spent today taking my youngest to the dentist. This is pretty much the story of the holidays – non stop ferrying one or the other of them about. Though I can’t be hard on her for needing to go to the dentist, poor child!
In writerly news, I have just passed the 100,000 word mark on Under the Hill and I know now that it is going to get finished and polished and become a proper manuscript. There were moments there where I thought this would be the first thing I had abandoned unfinished since starting to write professionally, but now I’ve reached the point where I know that isn’t the case. It’s going to take some whopping revision, but I know I can do it, and make it as good as it can be, given my skill level. Still approximately another 50K to go before that can happen, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I’m positive it isn’t an oncoming dragon.
Having said that, though, what with girls solidly at home, visiting relatives (and the cleaning up before, thereof) and doing laundry in preparation for going to France next week, I haven’t managed a word today. I may have to go and do some now. That or get depressed.
Am also determined to do a couple of novellas before Christmas, just so that I can have written and finished at least one new thing this year. I’m thinking that a Space Opera one would be quite fun.
Was captivated by Inception, and I’ve now been to see it three times, but despite an initial burst of “I want to read fanfic,” finding <lj user=”inceptionfic”> and doing just that for three days, I find that I don’t really want to get into the fandom after all. I’m not quite sure why not. It’s a funny feeling, liking something so much that I want to see it again, but not wanting to write it – or even particularly read about it. I suppose it could be because I have an ever increasing list of other writing I ought to be doing, including:
Finish UtH (another 50K words)
Whirlwind Lads (m/m historical, 100K words)
Possible murder mystery (~70K)
m/m Pirate novella (30K)
m/m Space Opera (30K)
Possible m/m contemporary novella (30K)
I guess that’s enough to be getting on with, without adding Inception fic!
and I may have a new fandom 🙂 What an excellent film! I do like a film where I come away from it with a head that feels as if it’s been stuffed full of new and interesting things to think about.
I’m not a fan of Leonardo DiCaprio, and this hasn’t really changed that. He’s a good actor, but I’ve yet to like one of his characters, and the only drawback to Inception was that I didn’t like him – and he’s the hero. A lot of the emotional punch of the thing must come from his attempts to get over his wife’s death and make his way home to his children. So the fact that I loved the film even without caring about the hero’s quest must mean that if you did care about him, it would be even better.
His not-quite-dead-enough wife was a fantastic character, though, and wonderfully scary. Also the inception, which had – as a side effect – the healing of a man’s relationship with his unloving father, was touching and involving enough to make up for the fact that I didn’t care about Leo and his guilt issues. Cillian Murphy played a blinder as the young businessman whose father’s last word to him is “disappointed.” Is it kind of sad that I cared about the mark more than I cared about the hero? I don’t know – it may just show that the film works on lots of different levels.
But what’s making me feel really fannish about the film is the performances of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy as the team’s point man (Arthur) and identity forger (Eames). Not only do they hit my competence kink fair and square, being extremely clever and good at what they do, but Arthur is a slender zero-gravity action hero in a smart suit, and Eames is an amused, slightly cynical but soft at heart, gender-bending con man. And he’s English, without being evil! Marvel of marvels! I was waiting, all the way through, for him to betray everyone, and then he didn’t, and I was amazed (and grateful.)
They clearly have this lovely, longsuffering relationship with each other that I badly want to see slashed. And surely the fact that at one point Eames turns himself into a woman (it’s a dream-world, and turning himself into other people is his speciality) and attempts to pick up the mark must mean there’s an infinite variety of interesting possibilities to play with there.
There’s a lovely little Eames & Arthur moment at the end of this trailer which provided me with one of the biggest laughs of the film.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z75o-F6ja2IHere is a much better review than mine, if you are wondering what on earth I’m waffling on about.
Cassie at Joyfully Reviewed has done a lovely review of Shining in the Sun. She says
I wasn’t sure how I would feel about Shining in the Sun, given that Alex Beecroft is primarily a historical writer. After reading it, I can only say I hope Ms. Beecroft decides to write another contemporary soon, because Shining in the Sun was excellent!
Which makes me very happy indeed 🙂 As does her description of the characters and the plot. I’m curious to find that people seem to like Alec more than Darren, in general, though, because I like Darren more than Alec. It’s interesting to know that author partiality doesn’t come through 🙂
(though rather expensive liquid history at that.) Naval lovers with more money than sense can now buy a bottle of authentic Navy rum, from the Royal Navy’s last remaining stocks, held in stone flagons in HM bonded warehouses since “Black Tot Day” in 1970, when the tradition of the daily rum ration for Royal Navy sailors finally came to an end. You too can drink the rum that Nelson drank! Only £600 a bottle 😉
Still, this site almost makes it seem worth the money: Black Tot Rum If I had £600 to waste, I’d definitely be tempted.
I’m happy to say that this week I’m busily doing edits on my dark Fantasy novel, The Witch’s Boy. I should have the edits finished by the end of the week, which is one step closer to the book being released in a new edition by Lethe Press, hopefully before the end of this year 🙂
I should probably take the chance to say that it’s not a Fantasy in the sense of being a m/m Romance in a fantasy setting – it’s a Fantasy in the sense of being a story set in a fantasy world without much in the way of romance at all. Having re-read it, though, I find I’m tempted to follow up Sulien’s healing in this book by maybe writing a novella where he’s well enough (psychologically) to venture on a relationship. It would be a little like fanficcing myself though!
On other good news, I finally watched the BBC’s new Sherlock Holmes fanfiction series, Sherlock, and thought it was great. I loved Holmes describing himself as “a high functioning sociopath,” because it’s very like him to know. I’ve never slashed Holmes and Watson, because my preference is for a Holmes who is asexual and completely absorbed in his work, so “I’m sorry, John, but I’m married to my job,” was a squee-worthy moment for me. (Particularly when combined with the social ineptness with which he read that situation entirely wrong.) Watson is a little dull, but then he’s the sort of character whose qualities take a while to become apparent, so that’s only to be expected at the moment. I’ll definitely be following that series in future, and it’s nice to have something to look forward to on the TV again.
Charlie Cochrane pointed this out to me, as she just got one of those “if you bought this, you might like that” emails from Amazon today. Amazon apparently thinks that she might like to pre-order Captain’s Surrender (2nd edition) at a special bargain price:
Dear Amazon.com Customer,
We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Eye of the Storm (Royal Navy, Book 3) by Lee Rowan have also purchased Captain’s Surrender by Alex Beecroft. For this reason, you might like to know that Captain’s Surrender will be released on August 3, 2010. You can pre-order yours at a savings of $4.55 by following the link below.
| Captain’s Surrender |
I’m not sure what it means by “a savings of $4.55” – whether it means the book costs $4.55, or that they’ve taken $4.55 off the price. But either way it sounds like a good deal, if you happened to want a copy of the new edition in print.
and I’m still rolling along!
Or at least, I’m celebrating having passed the 90,000 word mark on UtH. Admittedly it’s only 60% done, but things have started rolling a little and developing some momentum, and I’m feeling positive about it again. I’m also getting things clearer in my mind for what needs to be changed in the next edit.
On other positive news, I started a diet and gym routine a fortnight ago and have so far lost half a stone. I clearly had it to spare, because none of my clothes feel any looser yet, and I don’t seem to look any different. The aim there is to eventually get back down to a UK dress size 14. Even when I was 30, super fit and solid muscle I never got below a 12, and that was on 1,300 calories a day for two years. So I don’t think I’m cut out to ever be skinny. I’d like to be fitter again, though, and it can’t be too late for that yet.
What I’ve realized, now that the shoulder pain has mostly gone away, is how much it affected my mood and my mental state. I wonder now why I thought I should be able to carry on as normal, when it was hard to move during the day or to sleep at night. Maybe a lot of my depression and writer’s block over the past year was due to constant sleeplessness and pain? In which case, I should make the most of the current painlessness while it lasts, because as Oxymandias’ advisers said, “This too shall pass.”
Guess whose author copies of the print second edition of Captain’s Surrender have arrived? Hee! And in a spectacular coincidence they arrived just three days after I’d ordered ten copies to take to the Ely meet-up. (Leading me to think that Samhain had been super efficient. Probably more efficient than is humanly possible.) However, silly me! These are my author’s copies according to my contract. Which is even better, because it means I don’ t have to pay for them 🙂
And the books are lovely! Oh, it’s so, so nice to see them with the new cover – to know I can let people take them off the shelf and not feel that I ought to explain that the cover gives a false impression of what people will find inside. Don’t get me wrong – I was over the moon when Linden Bay published it first, and I’m always going to be grateful to them, but the cover was a tiny bit of grit in my oyster, and now the second edition has turned the grit into a pearl.
As is the way with book covers, it looks even better in real life than it does on the screen. But unfortunately I can’t prove that with a photo that you’ll only have to view on the screen anyway. It won’t stop me trying, though 🙂
it may be a sign that you’re not.
I was discussing this with Mirien the other day, both of us observing that we’d known some really poor writers who were convinced they were geniuses, and some really wonderful writers who needed to be encouraged every step of the way, and were always on the verge of giving up, because they thought they were rubbish.
Nathan Bransford is discussing this phenomenon on his blog today: You tell me – why is it so hard to tell if our writing is good? And one of the commenters there suggested something I’d never heard of before
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes.[1] The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the perverse situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding.
(Copied from Wikipedia)
I would have said that the unskilled don’t know what mistakes they’re making, and therefore think that they aren’t making any. As a writer (or other craftsperson) becomes more knowledgeable, they begin to understand all the places where they could be getting it wrong, and to sense all the places where they could be getting it more right if only they were better writers than they currently are. Therefore, it’s the people who know something about what they’re doing, who will be convinced that they’re doing it badly.
The only cure for this affliction, I guess, is to carry on doing it regardless, becoming more and more aware of how badly you’re failing to reach perfection, until eventually you give up (whatever artistic endeavor it is) altogether, kill yourself, or become resigned to creating (what you see as) substandard work. I don’t know whether there’s a happy ending to this one!
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