the dangerous ailment of bibliophilia!

[tempestsarekind]

I don't appear to be receiving comment notifications, and perhaps you aren't either, so while I think I've responded to all the comments I ought to have responded to, this might not be true, and if it is, I suppose you might not know that I've responded

Comments

[lareinenoire]

the reading isn't for now, but for years from now--but if it takes that much time to learn a subject well, then I should be reading a little bit about everything now! About anything I think or know I might want to write about someday! And on and on. Focus gets divided, I accomplish nothing.

I have a similar problem, actually. There are so many different subjects that I want to know about but there is just no way for me to get into all of them because they are completely disparate (i.e. the First World War, the Second Crusade, fifteenth-century Milan). I just do my best and take an excruciatingly long time to write anything. ;)

[tempestsarekind]

I'm glad to know that I'm not alone. :) Because the topics I'm interested in tend to be all over the place, too, so there's no real cumulative effect. Oh well. I guess I'll just have to buy more books...

[gileonnen]

I have a similar approach, although it usually doesn't take me very long to start barreling through history with all keys tapping. This is why I'm so paranoid about writing historical fiction--because while I do obsess over the tiniest detail (what sort of fabric was used to make pallas in ancient Rome?), as soon as I have it, I immediately want to use it.

[tempestsarekind]

I think that a part of my problem is that it takes me such a long time to read history, and I don't retain nearly as much as I'd like--all the more reason to have started yesterday, last week, last year.

On the few occasions I've attempted to write something with an historical setting, I make it a few pages in, at most, before I run smack into something I don't know, and that shuts down the process. It's highly annoying.