she waited.

[aamcnamara]

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This is the Horrible Middles. Today I wrote one page. I think it is the wrong page. I think I wrote a wrong half a page yesterday, too. I don't know what the right ones are, or what my novel is doing at current moment or what it should be in the slightest.

Possibly--quite plausibly--all I need is time for my subconscious to work it out for me. This is less like overrunning my headlights and more like encountering a canyon in the middle of my road. I can see a few things in the middle, maybe a bit of road way out there, but first I have to work out how to get the damned car down the canyon wall. And maybe that will mean abandoning it there and hitchhiking the rest of the way.

In the meantime, I have... okay, I am abandoning this modes-of-transport metaphor. In my brain's desperation to think about things that Are Not This Novel, I plotted a short story today which I had the idea for last semester. It's far-future SF, and it has Erinyes and a family with a lot of problems and some troubling choices. If I write it this summer, I'll probably regret it once I start learning Greek next semester, but that is okay.

I also read two books.

Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia: Okay, now I see why so many of my friends love these books. I sort of saw it in Queen as well, but having read all three? Yeah. I put the fourth one on reserve at the library before I started either one of them, and now I am glad that I did. I missed rather a lot of what was going on in them when I read them before--I think I just ran through them without blinking, or getting anything that was happening.

Holly Black, The Poison Eaters: I'd read several stories in the collection before, but I read pretty much all of them again anyway. Reading them again in the context of the other stories gave them a different weight, and I have a greater appreciation now for her short-story writing in general. That's one of the best things one can say for a short story collection, I think. Some of them drew references into their bodies in similar ways--Rappaccini's Daughter (which I didn't like when I read it, but Black's story made it easier to think about), fairy tale bargains, etc. Probably I missed some references, but that is okay.

After all this, my reaction is "I hardly did anything today!". So I am declaring myself Done For The Night. (Eventually, my brain will stop being fooled by this ploy to get its guard down. That will be a sad, sad day.)

Comments

[vylar-kaftan.livejournal.com]

Take your Stuck in the Horrible Middles badge. :)

[vcmw]

ooh, I'm glad you felt the way I did about The King of Attolia - for me, it's the magic one, and it makes books 1 and 2 more intriguing going backward.

4, I think, is structurally stuck with being a 1 or 2 for future books, though it had a good deal of charm.

I will have to email you my thoughts on White Cat, but I sort of want to wait till after you've read it, actually.
I do admire Holly Black's short story writing a lot, too. I think she's very good with them, which not all novelists are.

And since I'm reading LJ backwards, congratulations on getting more feel of movement in your Horrible Middles at last.

[aamcnamara.livejournal.com]

See, I loved The Thief purely on its own merits for, oh, years, without getting what people liked about the other two. And I loved it partially because I never, ever saw the ending coming. In Queen I did, sort of, and in King I knew exactly what was going on the entire time. So in some ways King was the least satisfying, but at the same time the most. Hm. If that makes sense at all.

I'll be interested to see what I think of Conspiracy.

We shall see how long it takes for White Cat to show up. I wasn't in love with Black's Modern Faerie series when I first read it lo these years ago, but after reading her short story collection I'm looking forward to seeing what it's like.