#4 What I did on my Holidays... and books. Lots about books.

Well, not a holiday as such, but I've just had a very nice week off work. I didn't do anything much, but it was good to be out of there for a bit. I'm now doing a small amount of writing most days. We'll see how long it lasts this time round.

Last Tuesday I went to the Bloomsbury Theatre to hear the lovely Susanna Clarke (I want her to be my adoptive grandmother or something. She's just a darling.) talk about her books. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, although we did all have to stand outside for 40 minutes or so because of a fire alarm. The fire crew checked it out, we all piled back in and Susanna picked up where she had left off. I appreciated the warmth a whole lot more though. The talk can be found as a podcast here.

On Friday, I cooked dinner for Tanya, Sam and Alastair and it seemed to turn out ok (against all my expectations!). And then on Sunday I was walking home from my eye test and saw an albino squirrel. I tried to take a photo but as I couldn't work out how to use the zoom, it's a tiny white dot in the distance. Oh well. I have a bit of a fascination for albino creatures. One day I'm going to get some albino snails.

I also read Shadowmancer, by G. P. Taylor. It's one of many books that I've been mildly interested in for a while. I should have liked it. It had smuggling (a sad result of my childhood reading is that I'm a sucker for books about smuggling) and it was set around Whitby (never been there, but a combination of Robin Jarvis and Dracula make me like it as a setting). I even like the title. Despite being a religious allegory, the bad guy is a vicar. I love that, because it's unusual and it's an interesting choice, given his message. I think BadGuyVicar is a message all on its own, one of being careful where to place trust, no matter what their position.

So... it was well written. I felt it was well researched, but what do I know? It had smugglers and some characters I liked. I loved the Azimuth and the description of her. I'm also kind of miffed Jacob Crane hasn't freed her. I did find it hard to stop reading once I got into it. But oh, the preaching.

So this is a Christian allegory. In fact, it's not really an allegory, because an allegory is an extended metaphor, where things and characters have a symbolic significance that can be extrapolated beyond that in the story. There is no metaphor here. There is no symbolic significance of anything. It's very blatant to the point where I felt uncomfortable reading it. I like some Christian allegories. I like Narnia and I love George Macdonald. They were subtle and clever. Yes, even Narnia was subtle compared to this.

Moving away from the religious message that is practically hammered into every line, I don't like its treatment of local tradition. There were lovely things like Thomas keeping his caul around his neck as a good luck charm. Being told "Come on, you don't need those silly little things, you should come and believe in the One True God (TM)" was missing the point. Maybe the caul won't save him from drowning but it was given to him by his mother and don't you think that would mean something to AlmostOrphanTom? Sometimes you do things for lots of reasons, or for the people around you. I don't think telling people they'll burn in hell for occasional games with Tarot cards is helpful or instructive.

The scene with Thomas' mother could have been really interesting and excellent. It could have turned me around on whether or not I liked the book. Thomas asks some excellent questions that have been asked by people since time out of mind. It would have been nice to have them answered. Basically, his mother is dying and he wants to know why God can't or won't save her. Other people have been healed in the course of thier adventure, so why not his mother? Presumably GPT has a point of view on this. It would have been nice to hear it. It would have been nice to see Raphah challenged. But instead, oh it's not his mother after all! No need for inconvenient questions. There were other ways to make it a trap. That one sucked.

In terms of plot, prayer was used way too many times as a get-out-of-jail-free card. "We're stuck in a room! Let's pray for the answer! God's shown me a secret passage!" ...Please. This takes Deus Ex Machina to a whole new literal meaning. I accept this is fantasy, but it's closely modelled on reality. This isn't Middle Earth. People don't get answers when they pray. That's what faith means. If you know, it isn't faith anymore. And I find genuine faith sort of interesting.

Lastly, the ending was very abrupt. Presumably the next book will fill in some gaps. There was a very big build up to the end and then everything happened in about two (short) paragraphs. I wanted more of a pay-off. And an angel just sort of snapping his fingers and making everything all right again also sucked. And what happened to everyone?

Enough on that. I shall probably read Wormwood, as I have it (for the princely sum of £1.50). And Wormwood itself, in the biblical sense, is an idea I'm fond of (but then, so were smugglers...). Right now, I've moved on to Garth Nix's Sabriel. There's some pretty neat ideas in there, so far.

#3 The myriad things I find to do instead of writing

Things I have discovered this week:

1. I can't write lyrics. I just can't. The whole 'Gemma's going to write some music' idea that I had on monday was just a complete failure because I had forgotten that yes, music I could do. Lyrics no. No. Just no. That one's on the back burner now. I suspect the only way that song will see the light of day is a brief mention in a story sometime. Haha. Probably for the best.
2. Having listened to some varied music (not written by me, thank god) this week I have reached the conclusion that the descant recorder just never sounds good. Never. Ok, well maybe if you're playing some fast moving renaissance piece. But sustained notes always sound bad. Tenor recorders are nice. People should look into them a bit more.
3. I am obviously way too critical when listening to things. I was trained that way! Sadly I have not yet worked out a way of transferring this critical nature to the written word.

I found an extremely old notebook last night that an old friend gave me. I wrote all kinds of story stuff down in it ten years ago now. A lot of it made me want to bang my head against the wall. A lot of it made my brains melt from the sheer stupidity. A very small amount of it made me think 'Hmmm. That was a cool idea. At what point did I lose that? Can I put it back in again?'.

I hate looking at it. It's not as bad as the Big Green Book of Awfulness (which I actually can't look at these days. For very many reasons.) but it's still kind of icky. But I'll keep it because then when I'm having a bad day and everything I touch seems to just fall apart I can look at it and remember that I'm better than I was. I'm learning and I'm better than I was a year ago, or ten years ago.

#2 Me and My Red Pen

This weekend I realised it's been nearly a year since I finished A Measure of Life and still haven't finished reading it through and editing. In my defense, I couldn't bear to look at it until about April, so really I've only been editing for six months.

That doesn't sound much better.

It's not that I don't like editing. It can be quite pleasing once I get motivated to do it. It's just... I'm never quite sure what I'm doing. I'm kind of unfamiliar with the whole process so I'm muddling along and it seems to be working out ok so far. But I worry that I'm somehow Doing It Wrong. Even worse, I worry that someone will find out that I'm Doing It Wrong and get cross about it.

I've never edited before. Not arrogance, for I would love a beta reader and periodically try to enlist one (then fail/get fingers burnt/we turn out to be into different writing styles/etc), but I've never edited like this before. I don't usually finish something, then go through it to edit because I edit in a crazy obsessive way as I go along. I will actually obsess over a scene (or even in exceptional circumstances, a paragraph or a word) in my head for days or weeks and when I think I have every word planned out, I'll write it down. Sadly, this explains why it takes me so damned long to get anything done (except at NaNo time).

So now I have this finished Thing and am just flailing around with a red pen trying to make it better. Mostly notes to myself to add more description (my eternal flaw). And big lines through stuff.

Things I am Looking For

• Bad spelling/grammar/Gemma used a stupid word that doesn't mean what she thinks it means/Gemma spells main character's name wrong for 70 pages (Yes, I have done this).
• Too much repetition. Sometimes I get fond of a word. A lot. In one paragraph.
• Passive voice. Now I actually know what passive voice is, I'm on the lookout for it. It's basically how I write my lab book.
• Really monumentally stupid plot holes. Haven't seen any yet, but you never know.
• Lots of other things that don't fit into bullet points, but I like playing with the bullet points.

Aaaaanyway, good things have come of this so far. I'm going to seperate the story out into three parts (Rule of threes, again. It pleases me stylistically). I may experiment with chapters. I don't write in chapters. Having procrastination type thoughts on why that is. Maybe it's because I don't notice chapters at all when I read. Hmm.

Editing musings over, I shall go back to writing the thingummy I'm writing for Deedee.

#1 Because three is a magic number.

Yes, I really did need a third blog (Rule of Threes, you know how it goes). My blogs now wear different hats. Or rather, I wear different hats depending on which one I type in.

I already have a writing one (not for writing about my writing in, but to let me do some writing while I'm at work. Yes, this is very bad and I shouldn't do it, but you can only play KOL for so many hours of the day.).

I also have a blog in which to moan/enthuse about things that, frankly, most people just don't want to hear me moan/enthuse about. My geeky blog, if you will.

So this is going to be my serious-ish, game-face, look-at-me-networking blog. It will also be about my writing, because everything is sooner or later.