Thursday, May 05, 2005
Addendum: We spent most of the day on Frog Toes and Tentacles, me reading the vignettes aloud to Spooky, her following along on my iBook. We made it all the way through, nine vignettes and the afterword. And, to my considerable surprise, I have to say this is probably my favorite work since Low Red Moon. It's a bizarre turn of events. I did this book as a lark. I thought it'd be fun. It wasn't. I thought I'd be fairly indifferent about the finished volume, and here I like it, a lot. Weird. But there's a purity in these little visions that I haven't seen in my writing, really, since the stories in Tales of Pain and Wonder. I think it was freeing myself from the tyranny of plot. I opened something that hasn't been open on a regular basis. I allowed myself to do whatever I wanted, because I had no real expectations and knew that my career as a writer did not rest upon the performance of this book. So, as I said, weird. I like one of the pieces, "'Ode' to Katan Amano" so much that when I finally do a collection of my sf, this story will almost certainly be reprinted therein, even though it is, nominally, a work of erotica.
Tomorrow, I'm probably going back to plotting the second half of Daughter of Hounds. Kathryn (Spooky) is helping me talk through this. The whole outlining process is so alien to the way that I write that it helps a lot to have a sounding board. We're stuck, at the moment, on Woonsocket and a particular plot point that has to be resolved before moving along to the second half of the book (much of which I already have a fair idea how it's gonna go). I've had to reduce Sadie and Deacon's roles in this book, especially Sadie's, but it has left open the remote possibility that I may write a book about Sadie later on, using a bunch of the stuff I'm taking out of DoH. I'm also beginning to let myself think about the film project I mentioned a little while back, which I can hopefully get to once the novel is soundly back on track.
As of sunset, it still hadn't rained, though the skies were dark all day and there was a chilly wind.
A whole night of Orson Welles last night on TCM, and I think we get more next Wednesday. Other than that, part of last night was wasted on a fairly lame XBox game called Stolen, which seems an appropriate title as it stole surely at least an hour from me last night and gave me nothing but frustration and boredom in return. Basically, I'm having post-Jade Empire letdown, wishing that I could discover another adventure game that fully realized, that free of tedium, a game with a story and a female protagonist, a game with controls that are fluid and intuitive. These sorts of games seem, to me, to only show up once or twice a frelling year, at best. *sigh*
Just three more weeks, a mere 21 days, naught but 506 hours (and so forth), until I will slip from -0 to -1. Maybe I should count it as -0.0, instead. Anyway, there's an Amazon wish list, if you're...you know...
10:12 PM
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