Category: On Reading

Reading at night

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I was doing pretty good there for a while. I was going through a number of books on my TBR pile (or alternately catching up on my shopping list by reading library copies on Hoopla), but that seems to have fallen by the wayside again. I’m back to rereading my WIP again, and I think that’s doing more harm than good right now. I did this before with Queen Ophelia’s War…I was revision-reading so often that I kind of burnt myself out with the story for a little bit and had to distance myself for a while before picking it up again.

Mind you, I find revision-reading one of the best tools I have when it comes to writing novels and prepping them for self-publication, but I sometimes need to learn that overdoing it leads to hyperfocusing on the problems and rarely getting any further. There has to be a balance.

Not that I’m burnt out on Theadia yet, thankfully. Just that I need to put it aside for a time at night. I need to read things that aren’t my own work. How else would I happen to discover new things that might inspire newer ideas? And not even that, sometimes it’s fun just to sit down and do a bit of enjoyable reading at the end of a long day! It’s a perfect wind-down activity!

So maybe what I need to do is dust off those books in the TBR pile and start cracking them open!

Catching up on reading

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My bedside reading pile looks a little less ominous these days as I’ve thinned it out a little bit, finally finishing up some titles and getting rid of others that didn’t quite work for me. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been rereading a few books by favorite authors in preparation to read a newer title in the same universe that I haven’t gotten to yet.

Recently I’ve finished Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds and The Galaxy Game in preparation to start reading the third in the Cygnus Beta series, The Blue, Beautiful World. I’d read them way back in the summer of 2015, and though I clearly remember loving the books, it seems I’d forgotten why, until reading them again. The style is very much in my wheelhouse, and must have inspired or influenced me in some way, as the books’ style is very similar to mine. I read these right about the same time I’d been working on self-publishing the Bridgetown Trilogy, so I must have been looking for something to inspire my future projects.

There’s also the fact that with age and maturity (even within the last decade), I hadn’t noticed just how brilliant the setting is: it’s a story regarding a dying planet that could have been grimdark and dystopian…but wasn’t. It’s about what happens to the survivors, learning to live and adjust to new planets and new cultures, and focuses on a group of people dedicated to ensuring this emigration is successful. It’s actually kind of hopeful without quite being hopepunk.

This, by the way, is similar to the setting of my current WIP Theadia: a story regarding a possible incoming war between galactic sectors…but isn’t merely about the war itself. It’s about what happens to those about to be affected by it, and focuses on a group of people dedicated to ensuring the damage is minimal. Purely coincidental, by the way, considering I hadn’t reread the two books in nearly a decade, but on the other hand, I’m kind of secretly thrilled that I feel like I’m pulling it off. Rereading this series basically said to me, yeah, you can write this kind of thing and get away with it.

My next reread will be Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station which I remember really liking as well, followed up by his recent book Neom, which takes place in the same universe. I was especially drawn to the first book with its origins as separate shorter stories that ended up telling one larger story, and that in itself inspired me to want to someday write a novel with a similar setup. My sometimes-trunked, sometimes-not project Can’t Find My Way Home briefly had a new life back in 2017, partly inspired by that.

So in short, what I’m thinking is this: perhaps it’s time for me to do some more serious catching up on reading, because obviously I’m finally being reminded where my inspirations and influences come from, and maybe find something new in the process!

Ready to go again

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I’ve been away from my WIPs for quite a long time, to be honest. Longer than I’d planned, but I’m okay with that. I had my reasons. But now I’m ready to get back behind the keyboard and set off on another adventure.

It just so happens that I finished up another one of my Great Reread sessions of my own work (for sequel-idea or WIP-finishing purposes) as of last Saturday evening. I finished the session with the Bridgetown Trilogy primarily to psych myself up for writing MU4, and in hindsight that was a good idea. The current version of MU4 that I’m working with resonates with the previous three novels yet stands on its own quite well, and that’s exactly what I was hoping for.

And what about the other projects? Right now I have Theadia and Queen Ophelia’s War on the front burners, and Sheila Take a Bow and Walk in Silence (the book) on the back burners. And I’m fine with that. I’m not worried about not having anything brand spanking new to work on — I think I’ve finally grown out of that particular hang up. I have the stories I want to tell, and I’m ready to start writing them. And if anything new does eventually come along, well, that’s what the 750Words site is for, right?

This also means I’m ready to start reading books again! Yay! I’ve finally gotten past the reading burnout and the indifference of my TBR pile, and I’m looking forward to catching up with what I have. And I’m also looking forward to looking for new titles again, something I haven’t done in quite a while. I don’t get that burnout all that often, but I’m glad in the knowledge that when it does happen, it doesn’t last for all that long.

I’m ready to go again, and I can’t wait!

Reading…or lack thereof

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I’m allowing myself a good reason for not reading anything new for quite some time: I’ve been mostly rereading my active WIPs and reacquainting myself with them for future work. But to be perfectly honest, I haven’t done any major reading in quite some time.

It could be that working through the 1,700-page, two-hardcover version of Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In might have fried my brain earlier in the year, but I just don’t find myself wanting to actively read these last couple of months other than the occasional manga or my own stuff. I’m not even overly excited about all that many recent genre books lately, which is a bit of a surprise. No fault of the authors or their novels, mind you — I’m just assuming this is just a temporary literary burnout. I’m still buying some titles of my favorite authors or books that intrigue me and saving them for later. Supporting the authors and my local indie bookstore and all that.

When am I going to return back to reading for the enjoyment of it? Good question. I’m not going to let it worry me too much because I’ve gone through this before in the past. It’s just a phase. I’m just going to continue focusing on my own writing for a bit, and once that’s finished I’ll see where I go from there. My bedside TBR pile will be dusted off and ready to go when I’m ready myself.

More on Rereading…and Transcribing

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All this rereading of my finished novels, WIPs and backburner projects has also kicked off more rereading, this time of my early longhand writing. Right now I’m going through some of my old chapbook poetry and lyrics, transcribing some of them and making personal notes. Why? Well, why not?

One of the reasons for doing this now is that I’m conducting a writing experiment. I’m assigning myself to work on something every day, without fail. I’m assigning myself simple things like doing some fun Walk in Silence (the book) work on 750Words and this poetry transcription. Easy writing that would take less than an hour out of my day. That was the impetus: I wanted to see if I could do a full month in a row. I started on June 1, kept on going, and I haven’t missed a day yet, so that’s nearly two months right there. Not bad at all, really. I see no reason why I should stop now.

I’ve mentioned before that I’d assigned myself a transcription project back in the summer of 1995 and into spring of 1996. I’d done it then as I’d finally had access to a computer and wanted a digital copy of my juvenilia for safe-keeping as well as for easier access. [There was also the fact that I’d done it as a distraction to avoid falling into a self-loathing spiral due to my failure at staying in Boston, but that’s another story.] That was the last time I’d done it to any considerable extent. This has become a bit of a problem in the present time, because a lot of that work was written using the MS Write program which no longer exists, and WRI files don’t translate well at all to Word or Notepad. I have the printouts…but I’d really like to have the digital versions once more.

Why am I doing this instead of writing novels, you ask? Well, I’m getting there. The rereads of the current work are preparing me for the novel projects. Refreshing my memory of the novel projects I’d like to work on next. And I still have a ways to go before I’m fully ready. It’s prep work.

It’s also interesting to read words I’ve written that I haven’t reread to any serious extent for nearly three decades. While there’s a lot in there at my most inexperienced, there are also smaller gems: unique ideas and impressive passages that merely needed the work of a much better writer. I had to start somewhere, and I wasn’t afraid to start at the bottom just like everyone else. I’m also finding elements of myself then that explain who I am now.

That’s what’s making it worthwhile: looking back in order to move forward.

Rereading My Work

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Sure, I’ll reread my own work, whether it’s completed and self-published, incomplete and on the backburner, or trunked and best forgotten. I do it rather often, actually, and for various reasons. Since releasing Diwa & Kaffi out into the world, I gave that one yet another once-over, just to see how it looks in epub format. [Quite nice, actually.] After that I reread In My Blue World with the idea of toying with the possibility of writing its sequel. And now I’m rereading what I have of Queen Ophelia (which, now that I think about it, should really be titled Queen Ophelia’s War if I’m going to keep the title at all). I plan to reread Theadia after that.

I’m rereading these three to decide which project I should work on next while also working on MU4. I’m still undecided as to which one to tackle so I’m refamiliarizing myself with the stories to see which one resonates with me the most. Sure, I could come up with a completely new idea if I wanted, but I’m holding back on that because I feel these still have merit, even if they do need a hell of a lot of work.

And that’s the other reason for the rereads: how much work do they need, and is it worth spending the time? I don’t think any of them need a major overhaul, thankfully, and the newer ideas just need their outlines fleshed out and the stories written. I don’t count MU4 here, because that’s in an altogether different beast; when I have the time I’ll reread the original trilogy and what I have of 4 because that particular project needs a different kind of immersion.

It’s a lot of work and it surely eats into my GoodReads numbers, but I’ve found that this is part of a larger process that works really well for my projects — it’s just enough immersion into the created world so that I can easily slide back into it and move forward.

That Time Again: Reading What I Have So Far

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Yup, it’s time once again for me to read what I have so far of my projects. The other night I finished reading Project A, and I’m now on the second chapter of Project B. So what do I have to say for myself?

Well, Project A has a lot of…gaps. It’s not horrible work, but I think I can add a few more scenes in between what I do have to make the story that much richer. These will essentially do two things: one, it’ll show the two main characters interacting with the different worlds they find themselves in, and two, it will expand on a few of the secondary characters that will become important later on. This one has been coming along really well and I’m quite proud of what I have so far — it’s sort of a distant cousin of In My Blue World in that it’s a Parallel World fantasy, and I find that I’m really enjoying writing that kind of thing. Who knows, maybe I’ll come up with more of them soon enough!

As for Project B? Well…you can definitely tell I had a bad case of the First Chapter Flails here. Or first chapters, really. By the time I got to maybe Chapter Four I had a better idea of where it’s all going. I can salvage a lot of it by way of snipping out some of the extraneous dead ends and insert a few things that I came up with much later in the story as a mirror plot point. The other day I was in bed reading this one and made myself get up to add four words — just a half-sentence that now makes a vague hint at an extremely important plot point much later in the book. That’s mainly what I need to do with this one: go back and realign the beginning stuff so it works with the ending stuff. I think I might be done with this one by sometime mid-November if I keep up, so I’m already looking forward to working on this one!

As for Project C…? Well, I’ve been bad with that one the last week or so, but that’s because I’ve been working on the outline instead. I should probably be back on that one by next week. I haven’t reread that one in a while, but I think I’ll do that after I finish reading Project B. We shall see…

In the meantime, I’ve also been sneaking in quick doodles for Inktober all this month and I’m proud to say that this is probably the first year I’ve been able to do it this consistently all the way to the end. (You can see my drawings on my Twitter and my Instagram.) I guess this experiment of mine of being super-involved with daily scheduling is working out better than I thought! Woo!

Getting back to reading

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I was doing so well, too. I’ve already hit my GoodReads goal of 80 books for the year (which, yes, includes manga and a few rereads) and I’ve still got three more months’ worth of reading to go. And my Mount Read Me pile is well under control. So what’s happening?

Well, what’s happening is that I felt like reading what I have so far of my current three WIPs. And when that happens, I sometimes fall into a habit of digging through my Dropbox files to find other files to read. I get into a habit of rereading some of my own writing that ends up lasting for a good couple of weeks. There’s also the fact that I bought a new tiny tablet (a Lenovo Tab 7, 3rd Gen) and I just want to play with it for a while. SO! What to do…? I’ve already caught up with Story So Far reading (status: they’re definitely rough drafts but they all have promise), so there’s really no reason for me to keep this up.

Time to get back to reading other peoples’ work. I mean, this is exactly how I find inspiration and influence, right? I have a few ‘I will read anything by them’ authors in this TBR pile, along with some titles that were suggested from others or from Publishers Weekly, and I even have a smallish pile of older music bios that I haven’t gotten through yet. I’ve proven to myself that most of these books I can fly through in a few days, so I can clear that pile by the end of the year if I so choose.

Meanwhile, the WIPs will always be there on my cloud if I need to read them again. I probably won’t for another couple of months or until one or more of them are finally finished, whichever comes first. And if I desperately need to goof off on my tablet again, I did download the Nook app on it, and I have at least a dozen or so books there as well!

Magazines

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I used to subscribe to a number of writing magazines all the time, but a few years back I ended up letting them all lapse. I used to get Asimov’s and some of the other fiction digests, as well as the writer-centric ones like Writer, Writer’s Digest and Publishers Weekly. [I also used to get a few music magazines, but it felt like all the ones I liked were either going digital-only or closing down. My music info is mostly via radio, social media and music blogs these days.]

Why did I let them lapse, anyway? Partly because I was overloading myself with too many things at the time. Between balancing the Day Job and writing and self-publishing novels and buying new music and other personal goings-on, I guess I just ran out of brainspace for them. That was about the time I decided it was time to do some high-level life-cleaning and emotional purging, so those were the first to go.

However, recently I’ve been feeling the urge to re-subscribe to some of these titles I enjoyed back in the day. I’ve been feeling very disconnected from the field over the last few months. Not in terms of pandemic hibernation, more like I feel like I’ve fallen out of touch with what’s going on in my chosen long term career field. A personal hibernation, I guess…after I published In My Blue World and did the usual push when and where possible, I disconnected from a lot of things.

I think it’s high time to reconnect. See what’s going on. See where I fit in with the rest of the writing world. Adjust where necessary, learn new things, find out new information. See what jobs are open, freelance and otherwise. Get inspired again. The other week I re-subscribed to Publishers Weekly because I got a lot out of it on a business level. Plus, their book reviews are great, and they have a monthly segment centered around self-publishing called Booklife that’s also given me a lot to work with and think about. I’m also contemplating getting WD and Writer again, and who knows, maybe I’ll go nuts and sample some of the fiction digests again!

Back to Reading Genre Fiction

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I spent the last few months of 2020 speeding through the backlog of music biographies I had in Spare Oom, and before that I’d been catching up on a few comics (which I also did at the end of the year and start of this one, reading the entire Giant Days run by John Allison), so it’s been an absurdly long time since I last read genre fiction.

I’m trying to put a bit more thought into what I read this year. I’ve said earlier that I want to read more self-published and indie work — you know, to give my fellow writers a boost and all that. I also want to keep up with the pace I’ve been reading at as well. I’ve been finishing most smaller books in a few days, and the bigger ones usually take about a week. [Noted: I’m currently reading Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn and it’s a long one, but it’s quite a fun and excellent read so I’m zipping through at a reasonably good clip.] My current GoodReads challenge is at 80 books this year.

Thankfully I don’t have any current writing projects that need Yet Another Revision Read any time soon, so I can get ahead on clearing my To Be Read pile and not have new titles kicking around for months on end. I mean, I might reread the Bridgetown Trilogy at some point, just so I can get some inspiration and ideas for MU4, but other than that, I’ve got all the books to read and, finally, the time to read them!