5.5 Years

My good friend Charlie, of Various Altitudes, made me count how long I’d been working on Nikara. It came out to five and a half years. Mid-November it will become six years, which is slightly terrifying.

At the start of the project I had one page of scattered ideas and an image of a girl in my head. Now I have two and a bit books, and half of one of them is in bits again as I rewrite. I thought it might be interesting to run down what’s gone on during the years I’ve been working on it.

October 2005

A young girl popped into my head while in the shower (as so many good ideas do). She had no name, but I knew she was at a magic school and she was different. She was the only person in the school with magic and it made her fearful and excited at the same time. I quickly decided that was cliché and made her the only girl at school without magic instead. Having had plotting troubles with my previous books (most of which were unfinished) I decided to let her wander around in my head while I gathered ideas and mapped out a proper story for her.

November 2005

I decided to write a teen vampire novel (not a romance, ew) for NaNoWriMo. It soon ran out of steam and after a two week break I decided I’d gathered enough ideas for the young girl (and a name) to make a start. By the end of the month I had 40,000 words and wasn’t yet halfway through the first third of the story. Suddenly my idea was a trilogy. The prospect excited me. I was an idiot.

February 2006

After a little wrangling with some boring chapters I finished the first book. It had taken a scant three months and I was absolutely thrilled with it. I’d written until late at night most nights, and still woke up in time for uni, or even at 8am on the weekends (?!) to write yet more. I wrote on the bus, on the tram, during lulls between customers while on the tills at work (on receipt paper), at lunch, at home. You couldn’t stop me. They were the happiest months of my life, despite them being lived in the head of a fairly emo teenager with no friends.

April 2006

Being a good novelist, I put it aside for a month to let it grow old in my head. I cannot remember what I did that month.

May 2006

Being an idiot novelist, I thought that editing just meant reading it through a second time, fixing spelling errors and things that didn’t quite make sense. The story remained intact, and at the end of the month I sent the first four chapters to Critters.org, along with a request for dedicated readers who’d critique the whole novel.

June 2006

The critiques started rolling in, and they made me cry. I’d never received true criticism on my work before, and though I knew deep down that most of them had great points, it was hard. This was my first true step into improving as a writer. I got seven or so critiques on the first chapters. Half loved them, and my fairy-tale like storytelling. The other half hated them and thought I needed to embrace ‘showing not telling’. I listened to the latter, though I was proud that my prose alone was good enough for several people to enjoy it. Someone told me the first chapters read like a very detailed outline, and that I needed to expand the scenes hinted at. That person was awesome and I followed their advice.

Throughout the month I was working with the four dedicated readers I’d obtained as well. One gave up halfway through, one just gave me grammatical corrections (lay, not lie!), another gave me good, though brief advice. The fourth did a line-by-line on every chapter and now has a country in Amandil named after her. Katie was fantastic. She gasped in all the right spots (on paper) and gave me great advice, and stuck through right until the end. She was funny too, and I very much enjoyed our back-and-forth as she worked her way through the novel.

July 2006

I rewrote the first few chapters of Nikara and was really pleased with the result. There was minimal telling, though I hadn’t managed to erase an irritating time jump of seven years. But it was ok. I resubmitted to Critters and had a much better response.

August-September 2006

With Nikara “fully edited” (it was not) I started submitting to literary agents and gathering a few rejections. I also started writing the second book in the trilogy, The Third Essence. As soon as the first four chapters were done I sent them into Critters again and set about writing the next few chapters.

October 2006

My Critters critiques started arriving for the second book, and they weren’t bad. I, however, was. The second book involved two POV characters, something I hadn’t really attempted before. The timeline was difficult to sort out and it made my head hurt. Added to that, I felt like I had no plot. I’d used up so many of the plot points in book one, but I still had to get to the two other major points that resided in the second book. I had no idea how to do this in a way that made sense and had value and was more than filler. I was also increasingly hating uni, and my life in general. I decided to take a break, informed my Critters readers that I’d get in touch with them again soon, and then stopped writing.

November 2006-some time in 2009

Dark days. I couldn’t write properly. I was depressed. The plot, or lack of, was too complex. I kept trying to write and ultimately making myself more depressed. I’d take week-long breaks between trying, and then months-long, for fear that forcing it was making it worse. I forced it sometimes anyway, because I was so desperate to write, so desperate to finish the project. I made some progress, but it couldn’t have been more than a few chapters. I worked out a scant few plot points but didn’t really know what to do with them. When I tried writing them it didn’t hold any of the attraction it used to, it was difficult and painful and it made me upset.

There were a few times when I felt it was coming back to me. Early in 2008 I wrote a shortish story about the members of TW … if they were on a pirate ship in a fantasy world. I kept hoping, and trying.

I can’t remember exactly when it happened, but some time during 2009 I started to pull it together again. I got excited with my fellow novelists and I started working on chapters. And finishing them. And loving it. Nikara and Chynor were alive in my mind again, and on the page, and I felt alive myself.

November 2009

NaNoWriMo rolled around again. I’d started Nikara that month, four years previously. The second book had only a few chapters left to write, and I knew how they were going to go. I even knew how I was starting the third book. So I went for it, determined to win (not that I wasn’t determined every year).

I finished The Third Essence in the third week of November 2009. It had taken over three years, but I did it. My joy was … joyful. I ran into my mother’s room screaming about it and whooping and jumping for joy. She congratulated me and told me I was crazy. I ignored her obviously stupidity and went to bounce around the living room instead, jumping on sofa and yelling at the top of my lungs. I’m pretty sure there were tears as well. Then I got back online and whooped to my friends, the ones who understood what a joy it was, especially for me given how long it had taken. Finishing that novel meant more to me than either of the previous novel finishes. It meant my brain was back, my writing was back, I was back, my life was back. I’d overcome depression, the urge to commit suicide, the tangles of my own plot, and I’d DONE IT.

I flew into book three and on the 29th November I claimed my second win in NaNoWriMo, despite being in enough pain to be hospitalised. I ordered a NaNoWriMo hoodie, even though it was kind of expensive, and now every time I wear it I feel like I’m being hugged by my ability to be sane, awesome, and a great writer. It’s a good feeling.

December 2009

I stopped writing book three. At some point in the last year I’d decided that 1/3 of my plot was kind of lame (and by kind of lame, I mean I was embarrassed to admit I’d ever thought of it) and realised it needed removing. This would require a rewrite of the previous two books so I could continue with the third. At this point people began to get the idea that I was one of those crazy people who endlessly revises and is never satisfied, but as you can by the above timeline, I’m really not. Prior to this Nikara had been written once, then had the beginning changed quite a bit. I think I may have changed the beginning again at some point (I’m still not happy with it, actually) and I fixed a couple of things in the last chapter, but it had never had a full second draft. I’d been working on it for four years, learnt a lot about writing during that time, and it was really past time I updated the story to reflect that.

I knew rewriting book one would be a challenge, but book two wouldn’t need much altering. Because of the long gaps while writing it, I’d forgotten an awful lot of stuff. Conveniently one of those things was the 1/3 of the plot I wanted to remove, so there are scant few references to it in the second book (and all the more reason to remove it). So, I started rewriting book one.

January 2010-present

All the people who thought I was lazy and too perfectionist back in 2007/8/9 should have shut up then because they were wrong. They should actually be going on at me now, because I currently have no excuse for not writing. I’m just lazy. I’m entirely out of the habit of writing every day, and finding it difficult to get back into it. I think the fact that I’m a grown up now (ish) doesn’t help. I don’t take the bus to uni, I drive to work, so I have no time to sit and mentally blob out. I get home and I have to cook and clean and write emails for work, or TW, or pay bills, or nap because I’m exhausted. I have less time to write. But, I don’t have no time. Back in 2005 and 2006 I’d find 30 seconds all over the place to write, and at the end of the day I might have 200 disjointed words. I could still do that, but I don’t. Nikara isn’t in my head every day anymore, and while it isn’t the painful absence of the difficult years, it still makes me sad. I try and get her back sometimes, thinking about her while I’m cooking, or in the bath, or going to sleep, but it’s much harder to picture her and she competes with everything else going on in my head.

I don’t want to be like this. I want to write again, often and joyfully. I wonder if it comes down to being out of practise. I think I need to do something about it this summer. I need to make time to read (I’m currently gobbling down ASOIAF before DWD is released, so hopefully I’ll keep using that time to read other things), and I need to stop letting other areas of my life spill over into my evening. Too many nights I spend agonising for an hour over an email. Too often I end up reinstalling Windows on a laptop for work (my boss tells me not to take work home, but when else am I supposed to do it, with a full diary? It can be weeks before I have a spare two hours for things like that). Too often I end up on Reddit and lose an hour or two without realising it. So, I may have to set up a system. I’ll probably whine about it at first because I don’t like being scheduled, but perhaps I can use it to lead into something less scheduled that gives me time to pursue all the things I enjoy. We’ll see.

Chronic Bitchface

I have this problem.

I don’t know why.

There are some people you look at whose mouths are just constantly turned down, or their brows are furrowed. They look angry and miserable, and slightly evil. There was a boy at school like that, his mouth was all pouty and like an upside down U … so like a lowercase n … *cough* I can’t say for certain whether he was always miserable, as he was a yob and I don’t associate with those types, but I never saw him smiling. Even when he and his friends had amused themselves by being particularly disruptive, his mouth didn’t turn up.

I am not one of those people, however. My mouth isn’t upturned and smiley, but it isn’t downturned and miserable. I just look serious all the time. It’s my default expression, and I find it rather rude that complete strangers (it’s ALWAYS complete strangers) find it necessary to comment on it.

People look sad/annoyed for a variety of reasons. They just look like it. They’re having a really bad day. They just discovered they’re going to be fired. They ran over a cat on the way to work. Someone stole their lunch that they’d been particularly looking forward to. Drawing attention to any of these things will not make the sad looking person feel better, and will in fact make them feel worse, because their comment makes it seem like your face is offending them and you should do something about it.

My normal response to these people is to nervously laugh, and say I’m quite happy, really. But I think next time I might tell them I’m having my foot amputated the next day. Then limp out of sight.

Post #Something

What’s the single most important thing you accomplished in 2010? And how do you plan to top it in 2011?

I moved out on my own last year and gained total independence from other humans. It’s amazing, apart from the slight drawback that I’m entirely dependent on myself now. I seem to be handling the challenge pretty well, though, and think 2011 will be spent just being myself and figuring things out more.

It’s odd, leaving behind things that previously influenced you so much. I keep realising I look at things exactly the same as my mother, and then I realise that that particular way of looking at things doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, so I change it to something that makes sense to me. And there’s no one to censure me for it.

I just went on a massive rant about censure, but then I changed my mind and deleted it. Suffice to say that pretty much all my interests were labelled “weird” and dismissed, and I don’t have that anymore. This allows me to sit writing at 3am while listening to the Doctor Who soundtrack, occasionally breaking off to sew a boning channel in a corset … without someone interrupting and telling me my music is boring and I’ll never wear a corset, so I shouldn’t make it.

My thing I’m planning on doing this year to ‘top’ moving out, is entirely unrelated. I want to finish the second draft of Nikara. I know if I can push through and get to the end of this book, it will be a massive achievement. And the book will be in good shape. It’ll still need a wording edit, but making the words flow is sooooooo much easier than figuring out pacing and plotting and stuff.

Unrelated rant: pacing and plotting and things that don’t really come to mind when you’re thinking about writing, don’t get enough respect from certain members of the writing community. I suspect those members have never attempted prose longer than a vignette, in which it’s virtually impossible to screw up pacing, and the plotting is so basic (or non-existant) that it doesn’t seem like a problem.

Arranging a multi-book story into something that’s continuously compelling is a huge feat. Even arranging a single book is a challenge, because while the plot might not be as complex as a multi-book thing, it’s still going to have a high level of complexity (hopefully), and you have limited space in which to convey it.

I’ve been talking to a friend about this a bit lately. She has a story that’s big, but she doesn’t want to split it into two books. Partially this is because sequels annoy her (Personally I have no problem with stories that are simply too large to physically fit in a binding being split), but it’s also because the first half of the book doesn’t have a satisfactory story arc. If split in two, the first book wouldn’t stand alone very well.

I feel she has two solutions to this. She can either massively chop down the story, really cut back until she has the bare essentials and a book small enough to fit into one binding comfortably. Or, she can tweak the events in book one to provide a pay-off that would make the split ok. I don’t think she’ll do either, and I think we have a lot of interesting conversations ahead of us once I’ve finished reading her novel. I look forward it, because these are the kind of interesting challenges that make writing so fun.

Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but I find the actual words part of writing sort of dull. When I’m not getting stuck over something big and dramatic, I’m getting stuck over how to phrase a particular thing, and it bores me and I procrastinate. I much prefer it when I’m in the middle of a bout of writing fabulousness and the words slip off my fingers with barely a conscious thought. That’s when I feel most alive, because the imaginings in my head are coming alive with very little effort. It’s fun and thrilling and I live for those times.

Mostly, the reward I get from writing is just solving things. How should I approach this scene? How can I insert an intimation of this future event in here? How the heck do these two resolve this argument? Solving these kinds of problems crop up all the time, and even when I’m stuck on one of them (I’ve been stuck on ‘how should I approach this scene’ for a few weeks now) it’s not so bad. I know that when I sort it out, I’ll have an amazing ‘ooh yes! Brilliant, that’ll totally work’ moment and feel all smart and pleased with myself.

I had one of those the other day, while in the bath (a fine place for revelations, although the shower is better). It was actually about book three, which is odd because I haven’t thought about that since November … 2009. I managed to finish Nano about 1,000 words before I ran out of defined plot for that novel (I know their ultimate goal, but have no idea how they get there … partially because I have no idea how they’re going to do it without dying). I haven’t really mulled over where to send them after the point I wrote up to, and yet it suddenly popped into my head while in the bath. The idea makes total sense, should provide some emotional whatjamacallit, and probably something will blow up at some point. If there are explosions involved, you know it’s a good idea.

Creativity

I love creativity. When I’m creating things I feel happier than any other time, whether it’s sewing, or writing, or new systems of computer organisation. I spent a chunk of last night writing, and it was another bout of I must write, the kind I got every day for two years straight, the kind that made those the happiest years of my life. Sitting down and bashing out a scene, however rough, in that mad dash of clicking keys and words springing up just at the right moment … it’s the best thing in the world.

I spent much of my Christmas holiday creating a corset. I actually drafted a blog post about it, but it was far too boring, so I’ll just say that it’s partly made of old jeans, and has cost me about £5. I’m not entirely sure it’ll fit–it was intended as a mock up that got really pretty really fast–but creating it is fun in itself. Seeing bits of thread and fabric come together to make something recognisable, something I’ve formed from scratch by analysing pictures, is incredibly satisfying.

It makes me happy to see other people being creative, too, to a fairly ridiculous degree. Anyone following their art and enjoying it makes me smile. There’s a video on Youtube of a couple playing the guitar together and they’re so obviously having massive amounts of fun that it actually brings tears to my eyes. When my friends start gushing about their writing, it makes me beam as if I’m the one with something to be proud of.

I feel dreadfully sorry for people who don’t have an art. Even if you’re not good at it, it’s something valuable, and personal, and something to do with life that’s more meaningful than watching tv.

Purple

Purple is currently my favourite colour. Past contenders have been pink (I was a girly child) and yellow. I still like yellow, but purple has become somewhat of an obsession with me over the last few months. Purple is to me like shiny things are to magpies. If I spot something purple in a clothes shop, I home in on it. If there’s a selection of colours to choose from with anything, I automatically go for the purple one. I picture everything in purple (unless I’m writing Nikara, for some reason).

Currently, when I do a load of dark laundry and hang it out to dry, I have an entire airer full of purple clothes. Jumpers, pyjamas, underwear, tshirts, socks, gloves. It stands next to my bed, which has a purple duvet cover and a purple blanket. My towels are purple (bad choice, they drop purple fluff everywhere and make the bathroom look filthy). My bath mat is purple, as is the shower curtain I use as a window curtain. I also have a rather nifty purple straw laundry basket. My suitcase is purple (with a lime green safety strap. It’s easy to spot on the baggage carousel, that’s for certain!).

I recently made my desktop purple.

The taskbars etc have been purple for a while, but I decided I needed more. I tried to find a purple theme for Firefox too (I spend more time in that than I do on the desktop, after all), but it turned out to be rather too dark, so I went for “Purity”, a nice clean, white theme. I’m now attempting to find a purple skin for Trillian, my IM application of choice.

If I’m not entirely sick of purple by Easter, I’m going to dye my hair purple.

I know, it’s rather extreme. I don’t really care, though. I’m only going to use temporary dye, and I’ll do it right at the start of the Easter holidays, so I’ll have two weeks to repeatedly wash it out if it looks awful. I suspect it will look awful, but I don’t really care about that either. It might, after all, look awesome. I won’t know unless I do it. At any rate, I doubt I’ll regret having had purple hair.

Also, it’ll be hilarious to see the look on my sister’s face. Heh heh heh.

Post #2

Share a story about a memorable job interview.

Back in 2007, I’d just quit uni because it was causing me to lose the will to live. I was quite happy about this, but I was very aware that I needed to choose something to do with my life, even if it was a temporary job.

Of course, I had no qualifications to speak of, no references, no experience, and no interview technique. Nevertheless, I applied at the library, the one place I could actually see myself working. I’d applied there before for a job that was only four hours a week, and hadn’t got it, but that didn’t deter me.

That was actually a pretty memorable interview in itself, actually. I arrived and was told to wait in the closed cafeteria area, which I did, for 15 minutes, feeling spooked and out of place. When someone finally arrived (late), they took me through the back of the library–which contained more people than I’d ever seen out front–and into a room that was basically empty apart from a row of desks with the interviewers behind it, and a chair facing them … stuck right in the middle of this large, empty room. It was ridiculously intimidating. I didn’t feel too bad, though, as I thought back to my first “job interview” at the age of 8. I’d applied to work at the school bookshop. It was being run by my mother, there is pretty much no way I wouldn’t have got the job, but the headteacher insisted on doing interviews with no less than six teachers, and herself. She was a really, really intimidating woman (great headteacher, though) and it was a horrific experience that has enabled me to cope with most other interviews since then.

Anyway. Back to the actual memorable interview. I really, really, really wanted this job. I didn’t know where else I could work, and I knew I needed to work. There was lots of pressure from my mother, and myself, to get the job. Pressure is, of course, exactly what you need right after a nervous breakdown./sarcasm

My mother walked me from the car to the library. I don’t think she trusted me to actually go to it if I was left to my own devices. I crumbled under the pressure about two seconds after stepping through the door, and collapsed into a full-blown panic attack.

If you’ve never had a panic attack, you might not understand how utterly debilitating they are. You get physical symptoms, like hyperventilation, feeling faint, feeling sick, feeling hot, shaking, crying, and weak legs, but it’s the mental ones that really do for you. It isn’t panic like ‘OH MY GOODNESS I’M GOING TO FAIL THIS TEST WHY DIDN’T I REVISE MORE????!!!!’, it’s more like you know that everything is going to go wrong, that you’re a failure, possibly that the world is out to get you and you need to go crawl into a dark corner and hide because really nothing else will allow you to continue existing.

While having a panic attack, the very last thing you need is someone telling you to pull yourself together and go and do a scary thing like a job interview because you need to or your life will end. That makes the panic attack somewhat worse. That is, of course, what I got. I don’t know how long I stood in the porch area sobbing and feeling like I was going to die, but eventually my mother dragged me into the library proper, sat me on a chair, and then called over someone who worked there to get me a glass of water.

You know what else doesn’t help a panic attack? Having a load of strangers know about it.

So now I was sitting in a public area freaking out, with my mother explaining to someone the situation I was in and how she was worried I’d be late for the interview. So the receptionist person went to fetch the interviewer.

Now if I were an interviewer, you know who I wouldn’t hire? The person who’s applied before and been rejected, then shows up, has a nervous breakdown, and is reintroduced to me while bright red and sobbing into a glass of water, with her mother explaining how nervous she is. I wouldn’t put them through the stress of the interview, let alone hire them. This guy did not think like me.

I don’t know how I managed to calm down at all. Just the memory of this situation makes me go D: and squirm with awkwardness, horror, and quite a bit of anger. I did calm down, though. I wiped my tears and my nose, drank some water, and then followed the interviewer upstairs on legs that would barely carry me because my whole body was shaking. I then did an entire interview with puffy red eyes and a bunged nose, clutching a soggy piece of tissue because there was nothing else to do with it.

Maybe I was totally out of it, but I thought I actually did pretty well answering their questions (except the one about teamwork … I have no idea how to say ‘I love working in teams and this is the role I play!’ without lying, because actually, I hate working in a team, and generally my function ends up being to nag other people to do their jobs). I felt better as the interview progressed. My brain was probably trying to protect me from the horror of what had happened, but also talking about books and stuff always makes me feel alive and perky.

I didn’t get the job, obviously. The interviewers were lovely, but ultimately I can’t have been in the running at all. I’m glad now, as a month or so after I started working where I work now, and I love my job to bits.

That was one of the worst days of my life, and yet it’s actually one of the most positive moments too. I had an actual nervous breakdown, and yet was still strong enough to pull myself together, put it aside, and do ok on an interview. That’s pretty damn strong. If I can do that, I can actually do anything I like. And you know what? I’m going to.

Post A Day

WordPress is doing a post-a-day thing, and I’d quite like to participate. There’s no way, however, that I’m going to post every day. Often I’m too tired, or busy. I would like to post at least once a week, though, so I’m going to use their post a day blog and pick one topic each week to write about. Maybe more.

Why am I doing this? Well, I like blogging. I like rambling into the ether, and generally when I’m blogging I’m in a happier state of mind. So, in an attempt to retain a happy state of mind, I’m going to do things that I do automatically when I’m happy. Maybe it’ll fail, but it’s worth a try.

Today I’m just going to share something that makes me smile.

Casting Change

A while ago (four months?!?!! How has it been that long?) I wrote a post about who I could see my characters being played by on screen. I couldn’t really decide on anyone for Nikara and it’s been bugging me. I watched the recent Alice in Wonderland, however, and my problem was solved.

Mia Wasikowska

She’d have to lighten up her hair a bit (and grow it back …), but otherwise she’s pretty good looks-wise. She’s about a foot too short, but I can let that slide.

Her performance in Alice was quite reminiscent of Nikara, a young girl who’s moderately confused but occasionally has flashes of awesomeness. She wouldn’t have to work hard to look delicate, breakable, and generally in need of help from this guy.

Maybe he’d even make her smile.

2010

It’s been a pitiful reading year. Pitiful. I’ve read some good stuff, but so little of it that I’m saddened. Here’s the list:

1: The Painted Man
2: What Was Lost
3: The Riven Kingdom
4: Lord Sunday
5: Hammer Of God
6: Watchmen
7: Victory of Eagles
8: Slaughterhouse 5
9: 1001 Nights of Snowfall
10: Legends In Exile
11: Assassin’s Apprentice
12: Wild Cards
13: Wild Cards 2
14: Fevre Dream
15: The Doomsday Machine
16: The Great Gatsby
17: Tuf Voyaging
18: The Hedge Knight Graphic Novel
19: As I Lay Dying
20: A Thousand Splendid Suns
21: Pride and Prejudice
22: The Time Traveller’s Wife
23: I Am David
24: On The Origin Of PCs
25: Start Of Darkness
26: Night

That’s four fewer books than I read last year. I have actually read 28, because I read Nikara and The Third Essence. I’ve also read most of A Game of Thrones again, and quite a few of the stories in Songs of the Dying Earth, both of which have been in my ‘currently reading’ widget for aggggges.

Breaking it down, I’ve read:

Fantasy: 9

SF: 3

Classic: 4

Graphic Novels: 6

Other: 4

Though many of the graphic novels were fantasy, that’s still less fantasy proportionally than I read in 2008  and 2009. I’m definitely feeling like I’ve run out of stuff to read in the fantasy genre, and not because it’s rubbish, but because there is a lot of rubbish and now I’ve read the super awesome stuff, the rest is harder to put up with. Of course nothing, whatever genre, can compete with GRRM, so I’m having that problem with everything.

My favourite book was probably Wild Cards, followed by The Time Traveller’s Wife. I didn’t want to put either of those down. What Was Lost was quite the riveting read too, and was the first book in a while where I just read it from cover to cover in one sitting and burned my eyes out. It’s also the only book I’ve ever managed to work into a conversation in real life and had some interesting chitchat lead from it (until my Twihard friend started talking about Twilight ><).

Worst read was A Thousand Splendid Suns, which just wasn’t that well-written. I skimmed an awful lot of it.

The most amusing books were On the Origin of PCs, and, Start of Darkness, which were a lovely surprise from a brilliant friend (thank you again, btw).

Most of the books on the list this year were recommended by TWers, my gateway to quality literature, and the filter for awful stuff. If you include anything by GRRM, which is technically all recommended by Carr, then 16 were read because of nudges from other people.

Next year I need to read more, but who knows how that will turn out? I shall see.

Writing. Last year I deluded myself into thinking I’d have finished book three by this time. That did not happen. I have a great excuse in that I’m removing an entire plotline, though, so I’m happy. I’m really happy with what I’ve achieved this year, actually. I kind of hope that next year will be more solid work and less thinking of ideas that will change everything and cause more work …

Non-writing. I didn’t get any more work, which is sad, but possibly that will happen next year. Instead, I moved out and became a grown up. As much of a pain as that is, it’s been a fantastic change in my life and I’m glad. I hope next year sees me get somewhat organised from the mess of this year because I don’t feel tidy. I’d also quite like to not be crippled at periods throughout the year, so I’ll cross my fingers for that (if they’re not hurting too much because of stupid arthritis).

Merry new year, everyone.

Sudden Memories

I was reading some interviews with fantasy writers over at sffworld.com, and I came across this:

Which book do you remember best from your childhood?
THE HOBBIT. I was around seven and the headmaster of my junior school, in a bid to encourage reading, came into the class every Thursday to read to us. I found myself looking forward to that hour more than any other. He had a great reading voice and I used to close my eyes and live the story.

And then I remembered reading The Hobbit myself and suddenly I have to blog about it.

I was somewhere between the ages of twelve and sixteen when I read it, and I was ill. Possibly my back was hurting, because I wasn’t in bed or on the settee while I read it, as I normally would be when I was ill. I was lying in our “playroom” which was full of toys, and then two desks got added to it so it became a study, yet somehow the toys and the playroom never went away.

So I was lying on the playroom floor, on this bizarre grey carpet we had. It was one of those carpet with a loose pile that after ten years of playing on it looks something like small grey worms crushed on the floor. It was less horrible than it sounds, but it did mean that being in one position too long left you with wormy imprints on your skin.

The carpet isn’t important here, but somehow I feel like I want to get all the details of this memory down, possibly because I thought I’d forgotten it, and almost-forgotten memories are more precious than the other kind.

It was warm, late spring or early summer, and there was sunshine coming in through the leaded windows at some point. I can’t remember what time of day the sun came into the room, which is odd. I spent hours in there with my sister, for a decade or more, and yet I can’t remember when the light was best.

I don’t remember why I ended up picking The Hobbit. Probably I didn’t have anything from the library, I had nothing new to read, and didn’t feel like rereading any of my usual stuff. There were books that we had that used to lurk around waiting for me to be desperate enough to read them, and The Hobbit was one of those, I think. Mostly those books were obtained from a library sale, or bought cheaply, or unseen by me at the time of purchase.

The Hobbit wasn’t one of those books. The Hobbit was a Reader’s Digest faux-leather bound book in red, and it had gilded edgings and runes on the bottom margins, and coloured maps as the endpapers. It was gorgeous, but it was the kind of book I admired, not read, especially because I didn’t have any idea what was in it. I used to hate not being able to read a synopsis, so if a book didn’t have one, I didn’t read it. I suspect because of this, my mother must have just remembered that it was a childish sort of book, and a classic, and told me to read it, and because I was desperate to read, and ill and too tired to look harder, I did.

I always used to read when I was ill. I read when I was anything. I read anywhere, and all the time, and anything I could find. I used to sit in the bathroom reading the backs of shampoo bottles long before I knew how to pronounce de-methyloxysilicate (or whatever). Rinse and repeat. I’d read tv guides back-to-back if I was waiting around. The recipe on the back of the flour wasn’t safe, or the dedication in Learn To Play The Piano (the piano was in the dining room, and I got bored at breakfast). When I was learning to read, I even used to read my mother’s books over her shoulder. I still remember being ridiculously pleased at identifying ‘the’ for the first time on a page of her book. The first phrase I read alone outside school was ‘The Art Shop’–a sign over an art shop, unsurprisingly enough.

So yes, I would read anything. And that day I was reading The Hobbit. I think it may have spilled over into two days of lying on the floor with a cushion and the book and the sunshine, and eyes going dry and scratchy and that peculiar sort of tight that you get when you’ve been reading too much. I used to get that a lot.

I haven’t read The Hobbit since that day, but I remember it. There were ridiculous amounts of little poems (I think they rhymed) and the prose had a sort of lyrical sing-songiness to it. And there was Bilbo and Gandalf and a host of dwarves, and then trolls, and probably elves, and then Mirkwood and Misty Mountains and orcs and dragons and Golllum and riddles and treasure. When I finished it I poured over the maps on the endpapers, tracing Bilbo’s journey. I think I tried to translate the runes. I probably gave up.

I had that feeling that you get at the end of very few books. The feeling where you just have to sit back and go ‘wow’ for a while. With some books that might be a few minutes, others half an hour. Now I’m liable to muse on them for days, though that’s mostly because I try to decipher how the story was told so well. I may be rose-colouring the memory here, but I feel like it was a life-changing moment, only without me actually knowing it. I felt different, as you should after all good books, but I didn’t know why. I think I do now.

I don’t remember reading anything classically ‘fantasy’ before The Hobbit. Possibly The Chronicles Of Narnia, I can’t remember what order I read them in, but I know that Narnia left me with that achey childhood feeling of wishing Narnia was real, and terrible sorrow every time the children, and myself, had to leave it. The Hobbit left me with an entirely different feeling. I hadn’t, after all, been exposed to fantasy in quite that way before. It hadn’t been so epic, so all-encompassing.

I know I didn’t become obsessed with fantasy until much later. I had trouble finding books to read because nothing seemed to be suitable. The fun stories from childhood, like Narnia, and The Hobbit, didn’t seem to exist in YA literature at that time. I went through a phase of reading classics, and mysteries, but they never enthralled me. Outside those genres I didn’t know what to pick. There were kid’s books, and adult books, and I didn’t want to read the kid’s stuff, and didn’t dare read the adult’s. So I floated for a while, and then things appeared, things like His Dark Materials and Harry Potter, and finally things were thrilling me again.

I was starting to understand the concept of fantastic fiction, and being able to say ‘I read fantasy’ was a huge relief. As a child, I remember feeling very confused whenever people asked me what books I liked. I always went with ‘adventure books’, relying on my adoration for The Famous Five, but ‘adventure books’ never really captured what I actually wanted. Fantasy did, because it contained adventure, but it contained an awful lot more, too, and I think that’s why I love the genre.

Fantasy isn’t just one thing. It isn’t dragons and flying horses and magic and evil wizards. It isn’t the quest storyline, or the coming-of-age. It’s everything, all in one. You have coming-of-age quests that are grand adventures, with mystery and politics and romance, and dragons and magic and evil wizards. It’s satisfying on all the levels I enjoy, and it can go anywhere. The possibilities, are, cliché though it might be, almost endless, and I doubt writers will ever find the end of them. Just when you think you’re tired of all the epic stuff and much-used themes, along come people like Rothfuss to breathe new life into them.

Fantasy deserves new life, all the time. It’s a much-maligned and abused genre, largely because it’s so popular. The sheer scope of it, the fact that it’s all-encompassing, means it can appeal to almost anyone in some form or other, and that means there are more people interested in creating it. That’s wonderful, but with more people, you inevitably get a larger number of less talented, less creative people, and they are the ones who will create perfectly serviceable, but lack-luster and derivative, things. In the enormous pool of mediocre creations, it must be difficult for someone who doesn’t swim in the pool to spot the shiny gems on the bottom. And I feel sorry for them.

Oh hello digression! I haven’t seen you for a while.