"Books I Want to Write"
So, while avoiding the shouting match between Dad and Sharon over the Gyp issue (see last entry), I took a nosey through some old notebooks. Originally they had been used for revision notes for my GCSEs (standard exams taken at age 15/16), but once the exams were over, I had scrapped the notes and used the remaining blank pages to write blurbs for story ideas that had been boiling in my head since I was about ten or eleven.
Reading over the "Books I Want to Write" now is hilarious. Certain themes pop up again and again; my younger self had an slight obsession with slavery, prostitutes(!), and unsustainable future dystopias (one of them involves a society which has "outlawed all forms of pleasure" *rolls eyes*). There are plagues and repressive cults and psychic "chosen ones", a smattering of dragons and vampires, several nuclear wars and unlikely environmental disasters. Most of the stories are firmly in sci-fi/fantasy/thriller territory, but there are a few "real-life"/general fiction tales, including a Jackie Collins rip-off called The Stud Farm. *cringe*
I will never write these books now: the concepts are poorly thought-through, the characters overwrought, the plotlines left annoyingly vague. I don't have enough time left anyway - there are sixty-seven blurbs, and some of those are general sum-ups of a series, length unspecified. Kalynder Girls is supposed to be twelve books, and I'm still slogging through the first one - which is the only one that I have a clear plot for.
But then I look at just how much stuff my imagination was churning out back then and I'm kinda envious. The bulk of it is paralysing. I found it easier - and more fun - to play about with all of them as story-dreams, than to sit and focus on one long enough to write it all out. For the creative writing modules on my undergrad degree, we were supposed to submit a sample of our writing before being accepted on the course. Most submitted one complete short story; I submitted maybe three or four fragments of stories begun and never finished, and admitted that one of the things I hoped to get from the course was the ability to actually finish things...
I've signed up for a local writers' group which is supposed to start on Tuesday. I don't know if it will help. I'm not sure how genre-friendly it will be and I'm reluctant to take anything until I can check on that. The only thing I have to take, anyway, is Kalynder Girls, which I'm still trying to write the NaNo way: straight ahead without looking back until it's done. So taking it in for review would kinda defeat the purpose.
I don't know how much I'll find in common with the people there. I've become increasingly lonely and isolated in real life since starting the PhD. It's not healthy.
Work is putting on extra strain: the clash of personalities, tensions between workers and management, the constant influx of work that means you can never be truly caught up on everything, all the fiddly little bits and pieces that you have to keep in your head, the sheer depressing nature of administering the breakdown of family relationships through the legal system. But I'm too tired to seek anything else - and I'm not convinced that any other job would be any better...
Ugh, I started writing this hoping to give you all a laugh at the ridiculous hyperbole of my younger self. Didn't mean to degenerate into this cynical and self-defeating crap. Sticking it behind a cut; if you only want the laugh, stick with what you see :)
Reading over the "Books I Want to Write" now is hilarious. Certain themes pop up again and again; my younger self had an slight obsession with slavery, prostitutes(!), and unsustainable future dystopias (one of them involves a society which has "outlawed all forms of pleasure" *rolls eyes*). There are plagues and repressive cults and psychic "chosen ones", a smattering of dragons and vampires, several nuclear wars and unlikely environmental disasters. Most of the stories are firmly in sci-fi/fantasy/thriller territory, but there are a few "real-life"/general fiction tales, including a Jackie Collins rip-off called The Stud Farm. *cringe*
I will never write these books now: the concepts are poorly thought-through, the characters overwrought, the plotlines left annoyingly vague. I don't have enough time left anyway - there are sixty-seven blurbs, and some of those are general sum-ups of a series, length unspecified. Kalynder Girls is supposed to be twelve books, and I'm still slogging through the first one - which is the only one that I have a clear plot for.
But then I look at just how much stuff my imagination was churning out back then and I'm kinda envious. The bulk of it is paralysing. I found it easier - and more fun - to play about with all of them as story-dreams, than to sit and focus on one long enough to write it all out. For the creative writing modules on my undergrad degree, we were supposed to submit a sample of our writing before being accepted on the course. Most submitted one complete short story; I submitted maybe three or four fragments of stories begun and never finished, and admitted that one of the things I hoped to get from the course was the ability to actually finish things...
I've signed up for a local writers' group which is supposed to start on Tuesday. I don't know if it will help. I'm not sure how genre-friendly it will be and I'm reluctant to take anything until I can check on that. The only thing I have to take, anyway, is Kalynder Girls, which I'm still trying to write the NaNo way: straight ahead without looking back until it's done. So taking it in for review would kinda defeat the purpose.
I don't know how much I'll find in common with the people there. I've become increasingly lonely and isolated in real life since starting the PhD. It's not healthy.
Work is putting on extra strain: the clash of personalities, tensions between workers and management, the constant influx of work that means you can never be truly caught up on everything, all the fiddly little bits and pieces that you have to keep in your head, the sheer depressing nature of administering the breakdown of family relationships through the legal system. But I'm too tired to seek anything else - and I'm not convinced that any other job would be any better...
Ugh, I started writing this hoping to give you all a laugh at the ridiculous hyperbole of my younger self. Didn't mean to degenerate into this cynical and self-defeating crap. Sticking it behind a cut; if you only want the laugh, stick with what you see :)