Books

I need to read more.

This isn't a problem I ever thought I'd have.  Especially not now - I mean, I've crammed my bedroom with as many books as it will hold and I work in a library.  If there's one thing I'm surrounded by all day, it's books.

But so far this year I've read less than half-a-dozen new books.  Very poor show, I'm sure you'll agree.  I'm currently 500ish pages into Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin but have found myself a little... stuck.  Perhaps I expected too much from it but I'm not particularly enjoying it.  I'm even finding it, dare I say it, a bit boring?

Of course the problem could lie in the fact that I've watched the tv series, though having experienced a story in another medium has never been an issue for me before.  It is no doubt a highly unpopular opinion but I'd anticipated more (and therein lies a problem I've ranted talked about before - I don't much care for high expectations).

Part of me wants to persist, though, if only so I can get to the point in the story which I haven't yet seen.

Another part of me, however, thinks that all that sounds like rather too much effort, thank you.  I don't want to have to fight with myself to read - with so many books and so little time, maybe I should be sticking to those books which grab me tight and don't let go until the very last page.

That sounds like the sort of book I want to read.  And, you know, write.

Major Catch-Up, reporting for duty

Wow, it has been a long time since I last wrote a blog post.  My excuses, which must inevitably arise at this point, start off pretty valid but then sort of peter out towards the end.

In March I was hit by a rather horrid bout of flu, which left me too pathetic and useless to do anything much beyond stare blearily at terrible daytime telly and feel annoyed at my under-performing immune system.  It lasted about three weeks and by the time I was better again the Easter holidays had arrived.

Here start my excuses which aren't quite as convincing but are nonetheless legitimate.  I went to Plymouth to visit my older brother and his fiancée over the Easter weekend and on my return spent the rest of that week participating in the Great Redecorating Feat which is my bedroom.  I therefore, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, had little time for blogging.

(I did reorganise all my books on my lovely new bookshelves though!)

But as the second week of my Easter break came around (ah, how I love working for a college sometimes!), my excuses become somewhat less convincing.  Why didn't I blog during that time?  Well... you see... I just... um... didn't.  Yeah, that's pretty much the sum of it.  Fully recovered from bouts of both flu and decorating fever, I was tragically struck down by a lack of motivation.  I knew I should write a blog but not doing it just seemed infinitely easier.

But I suppose the blog-writing isn't really the most important casualty of all this.  It's the novel writing which, while not having suffered a complete halt, has slowed down far more than I'm happy with.

I did manage to keep my chain unbroken during the last month and a half, writing every day when I was ill, if only a couple of sentences.  Some of it even managed to make sense, I discovered later when I typed it all up.

But the fact still remains that I'd hoped to have finished the first draft of book two by now and I haven't.  The final five chapters have all got bits and pieces - the earlier ones more so than the latter - but have yet to become whole.

So now comes the task of filling in the blanks - and doing it without going horrendously over the word count.  Oh well, miracles do happen.

And I have a major catch-up to do on everyone else's blog posts which I haven't read in so very long.  All in all, I've been a very bad blogger.

Character Depth

Chapter 47 is under way, though now because of work I'm back to the bits-and-pieces method which means that I need to type the past couple of days' work up at some point and fill in the gaps.  I seem to be writing it in an even greater number of places at the moment which means that a big part of my next page-to-screen transfer will be actually finding all the bloody stuff.

I'm still reading The High Lord by Trudi Canavan - it's so good I want to eat it.  Or cry.  Or cry while eating it.  I read 350 pages on Sunday but have had to slow down considerably since then due to the inconvenience that is Real Life.  I've a little over 100 pages to go and I don't want it to end (this is more where the crying part comes in).  I'm also terrified that one of my favourite characters is going to die.  It's a dangerous thing to grow emotionally attached to a fictional person over whom I have no control.  I find I don't care for it.

But back to characters over whom I do (theoretically speaking) have control over.  I read an interesting quote online yesterday - 'You don’t really understand an antagonist until you understand why he’s a protagonist in his own version of the world.'  It's by a writer named John Rogers and, alas, I'd not heard of him before.  But I do like his quote very much.

It made me think about my own antagonists and whether they had enough depth.  When I was writing my MA dissertation - for which I used part of Hide and See (aka Book 1) - I was told to try and think more about the backstory of my characters.  I wrote one piece relating to my main character's principal adversary.  It's less than 1500 words, just a small but defining scene from the woman's childhood, but it helped to explain her motivations - motivations which I hadn't really considered before I sat down to write them.  And although that piece won't make it into any of the books, it did - and continues to - make her more human.

Somehow, though, I need to recreate this deeper knowledge of her onto the page without stating it explicitly.  How I do this is something of a mystery - is this a thing I need to do consciously or will my deeper knowledge of the character bleed through subconsciously when I write her into the story?  I have no idea.

What I do know, however, is that I'm finding this character to be far more interesting than I ever imagined she would be.

A reader reaction to aspire to

The latter part of my half-term break did end up being rather productive.  Yes, I know, I'm surprised too.

I wrote Chapter 43 on Wednesday, 44 on Thursday and Friday, and 45 on Saturday and Sunday.  And just as I finally, gloriously, got into the swing of writing for the bulk of the day again, work reappears, rudely waking me from my creative bliss to remind me that, alas, real life does still exist.

Not that I'll stop writing now that the holiday is over obviously.  I'm still committed to my Don't-Break-the-Chain method and will continue to write every day, providing no great calamity occurs or that I just don't bother waking up and getting out of bed one day.  Believe me, it's a very tempting thought sometimes, especially when winter just WON'T BUGGER THE FECK OFF!!

Yeah, I'm needing me some sunshine.

During the break I also finished The Novice by Trudi Canavan.  I've said it before and I'll say it again - my goodness it is an amazing book.  The standard of the writing, the characterisation, the intricacy of the world, the imagination behind it all... I just can't help but gush.

When I finished it, I literally hugged it.  Yeah, we're all perfectly aware that I'm a nerd etc etc, but if someone, somewhere, ever loves something I've written enough to hug it, I will be a very happy author indeed.

Half-term

I don't think I've even visited my Blogger homepage since before the weekend, meaning that I am behind on reading other blog posts as well as updating my own.  Shame on me etc etc.

Half term is finally here!  Yipee!!  We are, however, already halfway through which isn't rather dampens the enthusiasm a little, especially considering I haven't got quite as much done as I'd hoped.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised - I'd needed a bit of a rest but now really do need to kick my arse into gear.

Chapter 42 is done and 43 in underway.  I'm aiming to get 43 done this afternoon/evening.  I think it would be good to write a larger chunk in one day because I sometimes worry that the bits I do during breaks at work sometimes lack consistency.  I'm usually writing them out of order and in a couple of different notebooks and I think the narrative often suffers for it.

But that's what rewriting is for - and I'm sure I'm going to have one hell of a job when it comes to editing this draft.

I'm also a good way through The Novice by Trudi Canavan.  Bloody hell but she's a good writer.  Of all the books I could have picked to break my embarrassing-lack-of-reading streak, I'm glad it was this one.  The copy I had, however, did have about ten pages around the middle of the book which had the first line chopped off of each page due to some rather creative binding by the printers.  A quick stop at my local library had me grabbing another copy.  Thank goodness for public libraries.

Right, back to task.  My main characters are in a race against their enemies and I need to use google earth to decide their route.  Writing is a strange business.

Ten chapters to go

Today I started on Chapter 42, which means I am ten chapters away from finishing the first draft of book 2.  Put like that, it feels like I'm on the home stretch - then I remember that that's still around twenty thousand words.

In terms of story rather than word- or chapter-count, it certainly has the air of approaching the final climax of the narrative.  I'm about to write the last chase, leading to the last fight.  It's all very exciting - or at least I hope that's how it's going to read.

It's half-term next week and I aim to get three chapters done within that time.  By the time I go back for the second half of the term (ugh, why am I thinking about that already) I should really be on my way towards the end.

What I haven't done a lot of lately is new reading.  While I'm always reading (and re-reading) bits and pieces here and there, I've not read an entire new book this year and that's just ridiculous.  It's February for heaven's sake!  So another one of my half-term tasks is to pick up one of the many books waiting patiently on my shelves.

I'm thinking Trudi Canavan's The Novice, the second book in her Black Magician Trilogy.  Her writing's always just fantastic in such an effortless, easy way.  I bought the book months ago and really should have read it by now.  Shame on me.

That's the problem with travelling to work by car - it's not really all that appropriate to read at the same time.

Fortunately, I'm going up to Bristol this coming weekend (woohoo!!) so I'll have time to do some reading on the way.  It really seems as if being on a train is the only way I can guarantee some quality book time.

A Fantastic Weekend

My trip to London this past weekend was amazing.  As someone who is not a fan of London to the point of actively avoiding going there, I am pleased to have had such a lovely time.  A big chunk of that is down to the company of my younger brother, but also to the 'show' (for want of a better word) which I talked about in last week's blog post.

I have tried to describe to people just what I was going to see/had seen but 'show' isn't specific enough.  However, I don't know a word for an event in which there are book readings, songs on topics like science, Harry Potter and fish, questions answered on a timer in which the loser gets slapped in the face, and, among many other things, a heck of a lot of cheering.

It all sounds bizarre when summarised like that - and yet it was incredible.  In fact, it was better than I'd hoped even though I broke my rule and went in with high expectations.  It was like two hours crammed full of in-jokes, but ones you share with several hundred people rather than just a couple of friends.

The show was so diverse, crossing from hilarious one minute to deeply thought-provoking the next.  There was a good chunk of literary discussion to delight my bookish soul, with John Green talking about his novel in a wonderfully mature and confident manner to a crowd who were mostly in their teens, proving that he truly believes what he preaches in refusing to talk down to young people as if they lacked intelligence.

But now it's back to my own novel.  The trip meant a good deal less writing this weekend, though I did manage to do some both days (don't-break-the-chain is still intact!) - now I just need to type it up.  It all got a little confusing last week.  I thought I was writing Chapter 40 during my lunch breaks when, in actual fact, that scene goes in Chapter 41.  So both are - at this point - about equally incomplete.

Two weeks until half-term.  It'll be great to have several days in a row to really knuckle down and do little else but write!