Too much steak in my literary diet?
I carved Mr. Wolf up over the weekend, and I’m typing up the corrections from hard copy in between real life stuff. Should be done by Wednesday. I like this story, but I’m not happy with it at all. I can see a few problems, but they will get fixed up in the next draft later in the month. And then I’ll rack it up for a good mauling through critters. I started hand writing a story this evening too. I’ll see how that goes. I still can't figure a way to rewrite Nat. Diabolical. I'll put it back in the cupboard until April I think.
I started reading Count Zero by William Gibson over the weekend. A good book. Probably a great book. But, well, I kind of broke my brain a little by reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy right before. And I’d read A Canticle for Leibowitz right before that. I’m not trying to say that these books have some kind of heavyweight literary superiority over Gibson (Count Zero reads like silk) but… I don’t know. You read about the ages, the grand scheme of history, the resonance of a father and sons journey through a stark wasteland, facing despair and death on every page, and its kind of unfulfilling to to then be reading about a group of punky techno kids running around after a shiny macguffin. There is a real sense of window dressing over very little for me in this book at the moment. Yet I know that if I was reading it on Holiday by the beach, I know that I’d enjoy it. I enjoyed Neuromancer, and I loved the Short Stories in Burning Chrome. I’ll persevere seeing as I’m a third in, but I’m finding myself dipping into Stephen Jones’ Best New Horror 19 in between chapters.
Thinking about it, I did read Dick’s Flow My Tears last week, and that was good, not first class Dick, but it kept me on my toes with his psychotic plot twists. And I had the time to tear through it in a day or two.
BNH 19 got me thinking about my own writing. I need to get a deeper sense of place in my stories. Nicholas Royle really captures this area well in his story Lancashire. I want a bit of him to rub off on me. I’ll be reading his stories with a fine tooth comb from here on in. I’m trying to get a sense of Derbyshire deeper into the handwritten story. We shall see how it goes.
Ta at For now.
I started reading Count Zero by William Gibson over the weekend. A good book. Probably a great book. But, well, I kind of broke my brain a little by reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy right before. And I’d read A Canticle for Leibowitz right before that. I’m not trying to say that these books have some kind of heavyweight literary superiority over Gibson (Count Zero reads like silk) but… I don’t know. You read about the ages, the grand scheme of history, the resonance of a father and sons journey through a stark wasteland, facing despair and death on every page, and its kind of unfulfilling to to then be reading about a group of punky techno kids running around after a shiny macguffin. There is a real sense of window dressing over very little for me in this book at the moment. Yet I know that if I was reading it on Holiday by the beach, I know that I’d enjoy it. I enjoyed Neuromancer, and I loved the Short Stories in Burning Chrome. I’ll persevere seeing as I’m a third in, but I’m finding myself dipping into Stephen Jones’ Best New Horror 19 in between chapters.
Thinking about it, I did read Dick’s Flow My Tears last week, and that was good, not first class Dick, but it kept me on my toes with his psychotic plot twists. And I had the time to tear through it in a day or two.
BNH 19 got me thinking about my own writing. I need to get a deeper sense of place in my stories. Nicholas Royle really captures this area well in his story Lancashire. I want a bit of him to rub off on me. I’ll be reading his stories with a fine tooth comb from here on in. I’m trying to get a sense of Derbyshire deeper into the handwritten story. We shall see how it goes.
Ta at For now.