Nodding in
Dec. 20th, 2007 01:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pameladeanHello. I've gotten to the point where I cannot stand my prose style for a moment. Quite apart from the gigantic size of the as-yet-unfinished manuscript, I keep having to look things up in my other books, and the amateurish mistakes in The Whim of the Dragon, in particular, are causing me to want to find a nice cave and never come out. The Dubious Hills is a little, well, enigmatic, but I don't hate it. Whim is layered, rather like Homer; parts of it are excellent, parts workmanlike enough, and parts are stubborn survivals from my teenage habits of phraseology. Ordinarily I view these fossils with great fondness and amusement, but like many aspects of adolescence, they have become wearing through the necessity of being in such close quarters with them for so long.
I'm beginning Chapter 29 of Going North. Ten chapters ago, I decided that there would probably be about thirty to this book. It's tolerably clear by now that there will be a few more than that. I think the last one, which is more in the nature of an epilogue, will be short, at least by my standards.
I thought I'd offer a few ways of dealing with writerly neurosis before I plunge back into the maelstrom. I find that if I start to write while still in my pajamas, I can fool my brain into thinking that I'm not really working, I'm just dinking around, which resolves the perpetual anxiety of starting up a cold engine. After a while, the conviction that I'm only dinking around leads to reading novels or posting to LJ, and then I go and take a shower and get dressed, after which the Work Day Has Begun and dinking around is permitted only to prevent total insanity or serious aches and pains. Then in the evening I tell myself that I'm just going to do a little revising. This is really the only way that I can make myself write morning, afternoon, and evening.
This book is monstrous. Just monstrous. But it's a benign monster. It only breaks things by accident. So far.
May you all be well.
Pamela
I'm beginning Chapter 29 of Going North. Ten chapters ago, I decided that there would probably be about thirty to this book. It's tolerably clear by now that there will be a few more than that. I think the last one, which is more in the nature of an epilogue, will be short, at least by my standards.
I thought I'd offer a few ways of dealing with writerly neurosis before I plunge back into the maelstrom. I find that if I start to write while still in my pajamas, I can fool my brain into thinking that I'm not really working, I'm just dinking around, which resolves the perpetual anxiety of starting up a cold engine. After a while, the conviction that I'm only dinking around leads to reading novels or posting to LJ, and then I go and take a shower and get dressed, after which the Work Day Has Begun and dinking around is permitted only to prevent total insanity or serious aches and pains. Then in the evening I tell myself that I'm just going to do a little revising. This is really the only way that I can make myself write morning, afternoon, and evening.
This book is monstrous. Just monstrous. But it's a benign monster. It only breaks things by accident. So far.
May you all be well.
Pamela
