(no subject)
I know it's been awhile since I posted. It's been a while since I've written, too. Work has been incredibly difficult for me, and not in the "it's hard and challenging and takes all your energy" kind of way. I've been having a rough time of it and don't know how much longer I'll be with my company. Unfortunately, I'm nowhere near being able to sustain myself through writing and gipsywriter couldn't handle supporting both of us with her job. So I'm left to grinding it out during the day while trying to keep an adequate frame of mind to write during the evening. Clearly I have failed at the latter for the past ten days.
I've been doing a lot of reading, in the interim. I finished all of the Miles series with the exception of the stories in Miles, Mutants, and Microbes. I have the mass paperback on preorder for October. I'm now reading Outlander by Diana Gaboldon. While I had listened to the audio books for book 1, 2, and 4, I had never read any of the books and decided now was a good time to rectify that. The pacing is certainly different. It's a serious gear shift going from Bujold to Gaboldon (like going from 5th to 2nd). Regardless, the two make you care about their characters with equal fervor but through different methods.
Bujold has the good fortune to write about a coming-of-age character. Have you ever noticed that adult protagonists are usually going through a second "coming-of-age?" They're learning something new about themselves that they weren't aware of before. Why is that? Because writing about characters who are emotionally mature and secure becomes boring. But I'm bored with coming-of-age characters. I want my main characters to be competent and capable.
Gaboldon has the good fortune of focusing on the same two characters for the entire book, something else I am unable to do given my ensemble story.
Can readers still care for characters not falling into those categories? Absolutely. But it's hard! It's a perpetual fear of mine (currently) that given the pacing of the story and the number of characters presented, that people will finish the book and say "meh." I want to evoke that same compulsion I feel where you can't go to sleep until you know the person is safe. You have to read one more chapter just to be sure.
I wonder if I'm capable of creating that...
I've been doing a lot of reading, in the interim. I finished all of the Miles series with the exception of the stories in Miles, Mutants, and Microbes. I have the mass paperback on preorder for October. I'm now reading Outlander by Diana Gaboldon. While I had listened to the audio books for book 1, 2, and 4, I had never read any of the books and decided now was a good time to rectify that. The pacing is certainly different. It's a serious gear shift going from Bujold to Gaboldon (like going from 5th to 2nd). Regardless, the two make you care about their characters with equal fervor but through different methods.
Bujold has the good fortune to write about a coming-of-age character. Have you ever noticed that adult protagonists are usually going through a second "coming-of-age?" They're learning something new about themselves that they weren't aware of before. Why is that? Because writing about characters who are emotionally mature and secure becomes boring. But I'm bored with coming-of-age characters. I want my main characters to be competent and capable.
Gaboldon has the good fortune of focusing on the same two characters for the entire book, something else I am unable to do given my ensemble story.
Can readers still care for characters not falling into those categories? Absolutely. But it's hard! It's a perpetual fear of mine (currently) that given the pacing of the story and the number of characters presented, that people will finish the book and say "meh." I want to evoke that same compulsion I feel where you can't go to sleep until you know the person is safe. You have to read one more chapter just to be sure.
I wonder if I'm capable of creating that...