In Which Our Heroine Anticipates Ice

7 February 2004

I didn't only dig through the to do list yesterday. I also finished the Laestadius (which, okay, counts as work) and most of Fallen Host (definitely the middle book of a trilogy) and watched "Monk." Which demonstrated the perils of a continuing plot in a series like that: the viewer knows that Monk is not going to achieve either of his two main goals at this point in the series (getting reinstated on the police force and finding out who killed his wife). One is binary: he's on the force or off it. The other can be more gradual: he can get clues to Trudy's death without figuring it all out. So when they go with the Trudy's-death overarching plot, okay; it works incrementally. When they go with the force-reinstatement one, it's just...another failure, guaranteed. The viewer is smart enough to know that. It weakens the episode when the focus is strongly on that aspect.

Stuff to keep in mind for writing the episodic novel later.

The plans for today: Ice Palace Ice Palace Ice Palace! Also probably pizza. Also, big shock here, books, both writing and reading. But I am going to the Ice Palace today if I have to walk across the frozen rivers all by myself. Which would make me very cranky, but then I'd be at the Ice Palace, which would cheer me right up.

So. I'm reading Francis Spufford's The Child That Books Built, and this is my kind of a memoir. Lots of books. Lots of good books. And some I haven't read. Poor library list: remove the one thing, the Spufford, only to replace it with a half-dozen others. Or more. Sigh.

Well, I got a question I didn't really expect in e-mail last night. Two, actually. The first was what is spec fiction, and honestly I figured that most people with no interest in spec fic would have little interest in the journal of some random person writing one. Apparently I'm interesting in ways I don't understand; or else people are bored in ways I don't understand. Let's just go with the first. It sounds better. And the second was, why have I chosen to write in this genre/these genres?

The answer to that second one is going to be long. Long enough, in fact, that I might put it in tomorrow's entry. But for the moment, I'm just starting the (very, very long) list of whys and wherefores. (And, apparently, singing Gilbert and Sullivan. Thank you so much, subconscious; my day was not complete without a full mental chorus of Pinafore.)

My mom explained to me that a "cat o' nine tails" was a whip, and what kind it was, when we went to see Pinafore when I was small, but I also thought it might refer to a straying female, because of the parallel construction of "sing hey the merry maiden and the tar"/"sing hey the cat o' nine tails and the tar." A merry maiden, I thought, could also be a cat o' nine tails. And you know, as an adult I kind of like the association, and it keeps triggering some "isn't there a Japanese goddess...?" section of my brain.

Surprisingly overdeveloped, such brain sections.

Right then. Why I do this, Ice Palace, etc. But not now.

Back to Novel Gazing.

And the main page.

Or the last entry.

Or the next one.

Or even send me email.