Over at Hightouch, she is contemplating the lack of inspiration for the blog. I agree that it is difficult to find reasons to blog, and yes, probably, FB is to blame for some of that.
But I am not ready to lose some of my favorite bloggers. So I'm going to try to blog in an effort to convey to them: look, we're blogging! It's a conversation! Let's talk!!
I spent most of yesterday reading In the Woods by Tana French (loaned to me by Hightouch). You can read my review over at Goodreads. But what I'll say here is, I like a good literary mystery but the key is balancing the literary with the mystery. If it's a mystery, it needs to have a good, solid plot that moves and doesn't get stalled in beautiful descriptions of the crime scene or the woods. Mostly these are notes for myself for the mystery I am not writing but need to finish. In The Woods actually has a lot in common with the book I'm trying to write and so it was a good reminder of what I want to do and how to do it. And what I don't want to do and BLEEP, I think I'm going to have to present resolution for both the main and sub-plots. Which doesn't mean back to the drawing board, it means writing more.
I think, maybe, I'll have finished the book in another 10 years. Damn!
2 comments:
Doesn't it drive you crazy to read books that are like the book you are trying to write? I swear I read LESS because of whatever I'm writing. I'm highly impressionable too so whenever I'm reading something fabulous, I start to write like that preferred book. It's a good reason to read only blogs! They can influence, but they're short so the impact is somewhat lessened.
I just read your review of In the Woods, and you basically nailed it, although I (easy grader) would have given it 4, maybe 4.5 stars, and also wouldn't have been able to as ably articulate what was wrong with the book, what dissatisfied me. It did haunt me, though. And I still think about the voice of that character, and his failures, which were devastating. So despite its flaws, I think I did actually like it more than 3 stars. Maybe I'm not just an easy grader!
And: I have always loved having a frequent hit of your voice on this blog--which facebook doesn't do quite as well, at least not for me--it's the intermediate status of the blog: not as brief as a status update, not as long as . . . well, something longer. Anyway, I hope we all get to keep reading each other's blogs, which means that, by hook or by crook, we all need to keep blogging. Sometimes!
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