13 March 2006

I spent the weekend being sociable and feeling cruddy -- not, sadly enough, taking turns between the two, but always feeling cruddy and sometimes managing to be sociable despite it. Could have been worse, but could have been much, much better, too.

I have just started reading an ARC of His Majesty's Dragon, which is just lovely. (It's not my ARC, so you can't borrow it, but I'll be getting my own copy if it continues at this rate.) Napoleonic Wars and dragons. And the dragon talks and is bonded to a human and is not all Anne McCaffrey about it. And the bond is not all psychic and stuff.

I'm still working happily on The Mark of the Sea Serpent. It's a book I can just sit down and work on, more or less any time so far. I had almost forgotten what that was like after Sampo, and it's a pretty welcome change. For me, there doesn't seem to be much correlation between how hard a book is to write and how good it is. I know some people do better with prose that just flows, and some people do better when they're sweating bullets over it, but you honestly can't tell when reading my fiction which were the bits that felt difficult when they were coming out in first draft form. The good thing about this is that it means I don't have to feel that the ease of the first draft has a price here. The bad thing, of course, is that it's not a negative correlation, it's a lack of correlation -- so any given segment could still stink up the place. I'm not the point where I know that yet. It's okay, though, because I don't have to be at that point for awhile now.

Maybe it's that people get to harass the gods face-to-face. Maybe that makes it easier to write. I don't know; that might be totally irrelevant. Still, I'll take it, whatever it is.