Book Reading

11/21/13

after a wonderful money making fourteen and a half hour day - i here sit; ready to....write? sleep. dang. the good news is, i only work four hours tomorrow so i can devote some time to making a dent in the middle.

so... i'm reading michael crichtons book: timeline and was wondering why i like him so much. i dunno.

i think that his style is often, as i am reading, disjointed and random... but he does things on purpose. why? i think because he wants to establish certain facts about his characters. like: say for instance, that he wants to show that they have compassion. he will have someone killed and zoom in on the characters tears falling off of their cheek instead of coming out and telling us that they are a compassionate soul. brilliant! show me don't tell me!

so, yeah. it works... i've just never known why before.

i also enjoy neal town stephenson and his insanity. he will not only tell me how the character is, on the inside, he will build up elaborate stories-within-stories to show just how far the character feels this way or that way... and will teach me science at the same time.

this is probably the same reason that i enjoy arthur conan doyle.

hmmm. it seems i did a bit of writing after all?

nah. this doesn't count.

off to bed!

11/18/13

making some quotes for a fake book by a pen name of myslef to put at the chapter headings for the book..

pretty interesting. i needed to say some things that my protagonist couldn't say, and, as i am writing this first person, from his perspective: this is what i went with.

here is one of maybe thirty:

"It is the morrow to weep, to mourn: for the unknown that crashes down upon us. Today is for the sacrifices that come, one to each man. It is the reflection of yesterday that brings us hope and charity in our everyday steps forward from there."

-Ratuna Fonsaire, “The value of sacrifice”

(but not really)

11/11/13

i have had a chore of building the middle part of the rising climax of the book, so as it does not get boring and think i have finally pulled the proverbial sword from the stone so that i might slay the dragon of writers block.

indeed, i hand-wrote a two page outline that spells out most big things until the climax...

thinking that it might still be too slow, i called my wife and started asking her questions about speech to action ratios in some of the better books she read.

and it's like a 75% to 25% ratio in the better ones that are in my genre, so i am adding more complications and things to keep things fluid and not lose interest...

when a writer DOES lose their audience, it often occurs in the middle... but the trick is to ramp up the struggle between the protagonist and his quest, build on what is already going on, and push the fight onward.

so this is what i did today.

it looks pretty good.

i even had to change some things on my reference maps and charts that i have been working with.

it's just that good.

i look forward to finishing even more than you look forward to reading!