Friday, October 17, 2008

Funky

I've been in a bit of a funk, for various reasons, and have been valiantly trying to pull my head out, with varying degrees of success. 

It's a mean vicious circle: funk = less writing = more funk. I feel much better if I just have one good writing session. So why don't I just do MORE of that? Writing should by all logic be like crack to me.

I finished the draft of "Dragon Hunter", and was happy with that, and even happy to get back to working on "The Wonder Kid"...but "The Wonder Kid" is 60 pages long and something of a mess of contradictory ideas; I've been having trouble staying motivated to edit it. I'm not sure what to write for it next.

I perked up a bit at the idea of expanding it into a novel, which came from my wife. I would like to do a novel set in the world of "The Wonder Kid". The setting is that of a world of elves and goblins who are in conflict, and at some point the fight generates a bunch of refugees. 

Anyway: whether I'm in a funk or not, the internet generates endless interest, so here are a couple of things:

  • Adam Cadre's dissection of Stranger in a Strange Land is pretty interesting. He even explains how one can cringe at Heinlein's writing and still enjoy the book.
  • I didn't know there was a shorter contest inspired by the Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest, called the Lyttle Lytton. "This story is a murder mystery -- the mystery of a murder."

2 comments:

  1. As you know, I suffer from the same funk cycle.

    I'm not sure at times what the real goal of writing is for me. Psychic pressure valve to release pent-up imagination? Escape from the real world? Desire to create something original and only one decent set of tools to accomplish the task with? Actual goal of becoming a paid fiction writer?

    If I was a character, my motivation would be unclear, even though my compulsions would be obvious.

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  2. Oh, and I read Stranger in a Strange Land so long ago that I mostly remembered the weird philosophy and the sex (very exciting to a teenage boy at the time). The sexism and the blatant Mary Sue qualities of Jubal Harshaw and Michael were only dimly recalled. Now I remember how bad that book was, and how I never bothered to read any more of Heinlein's "adult" fiction. His juvenile novels were so much more entertaining. The less insight into Heinlein's psyche, the better.

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