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Reading, writing
Dec. 10th, 2006 01:41 amI finished "The Lords of the North" by Bernard Cornwell earlier. It's possibly the best in the series so far, in terms of emotional content, but I must admit to wanting to shake the author by the neck a few times. Did nobody ever teach you back in primary school that stringing 6 clauses together joined by "and" is awful? Too often I found myself jerked out of the immersion of the story, finding myself instead trying to reword his sentences with more appropriate conjunctions.
George R. R. Martin and Robert Jordan have no such problems with their prose. I'm still waiting on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
grrm's "A Dance of Dragons", the 5th book in the 7-part "A Song Of Ice And Fire", while Robert Jordan's final book in the Wheel of Time series is being held up by his unfortunate fight with amyloidosis. I started reading the Wheel of Time back in '95, when the 6th book in the series had just come out. Now we're waiting for book 12, and I refuse to read (and in a couple of cases, buy) books 8 to 11 until I know that the saga is actually finished, as the action dwindled away to nothing as the series went on. The premise is good, the writing is good, but it feels like he deliberately stretched it out.
The other day I found my notes on a book I've been planning to write. I was pleasantly surprised at how interesting it was, as I'm quite used to abandoning my projects due to their lack of quality, and there's a lot more emphasis on characterisation than I would have put in the stuff I wrote when I was younger. Still, it's just an outline for now, and there's a bit of a dull patch in the middle that would need spicing up. Also, there may be too many central characters, which will need some work somehow. Finally, I also need to flesh out the setting a bit more, as Generic Fantasy World just won't cut it. It would have been good to have had a go at this during NaNoWriMo, but arbitrary and artificial deadlines were never much use to me, and I really have had so many other things to do.
I got some writing software, too. I know most people might prefer to just plunge in with little or no planning and just do it linearly, but I work best when I do things methodically, and having some sort of timeline and outline helps. The things I wrote when I was younger tended to be all improvised - I wonder if I was more creative back then, or if it's just that I'm more used to planning everything now.
George R. R. Martin and Robert Jordan have no such problems with their prose. I'm still waiting on
grrm's "A Dance of Dragons", the 5th book in the 7-part "A Song Of Ice And Fire", while Robert Jordan's final book in the Wheel of Time series is being held up by his unfortunate fight with amyloidosis. I started reading the Wheel of Time back in '95, when the 6th book in the series had just come out. Now we're waiting for book 12, and I refuse to read (and in a couple of cases, buy) books 8 to 11 until I know that the saga is actually finished, as the action dwindled away to nothing as the series went on. The premise is good, the writing is good, but it feels like he deliberately stretched it out.The other day I found my notes on a book I've been planning to write. I was pleasantly surprised at how interesting it was, as I'm quite used to abandoning my projects due to their lack of quality, and there's a lot more emphasis on characterisation than I would have put in the stuff I wrote when I was younger. Still, it's just an outline for now, and there's a bit of a dull patch in the middle that would need spicing up. Also, there may be too many central characters, which will need some work somehow. Finally, I also need to flesh out the setting a bit more, as Generic Fantasy World just won't cut it. It would have been good to have had a go at this during NaNoWriMo, but arbitrary and artificial deadlines were never much use to me, and I really have had so many other things to do.
I got some writing software, too. I know most people might prefer to just plunge in with little or no planning and just do it linearly, but I work best when I do things methodically, and having some sort of timeline and outline helps. The things I wrote when I was younger tended to be all improvised - I wonder if I was more creative back then, or if it's just that I'm more used to planning everything now.
