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Still cat waxing-- I finished Skin Folk
I now have no idea what I'm doing with the story I'm currently writing. Yes, I will go back to writing it as soon as I finish this blog entry. After all, I wrote 700+ words yesterday that I will probably throw out today. That's ok though. I wrote them mindfully. As Elizabeth Bear says, if I break my best ideas, then the words I write count towards my million words of crap. The last story I finished took about 8 days with few wasted words. So, this will probably be one of those where I write 60000 words to find the right 4000. It's happened before. I'm not thrilled, but I'll get to the end of the story.
While I'm warming up, I figure I should blog about Nalo Hopkinson's Skin Folk, the latest in my "books by this year's Clarion [West] instructors" series. This book, perhaps more than any other I've read so far, makes me wish I'd gotten into Clarion West. (I'm exempting Elizabeth Bear because I already have her books sitting in large stacks in my home office.) Not every short story in Skin Folk is the epitome of brilliance. Maybe one or two of them I couldn't get through. I suspect I was just really tired, rather than the stories having any problems. The rest though... wow. Imaginative scenarios. Rich, deeply developed characters. Powerfully embroidered writing. I want to write like this. (Well, except that she's already doing it and I really need to be the best me rather than a knock off of Nalo Hopkinson. You know what I mean...)
I'm extremely curious how readers familiar with the cultures she writes about read her work. I'm not familiar with, for example, Trinidad at all, but she never loses me. Whatever it is I need to know to understand the story is always there, exactly when I need it. Do more knowledgeable people find that intrusive? I suspect that she's done it so well that they don't even notice. Anyway, I'm revising a couple of stories right now that won't make sense to most people unless I work in some knowledge of Chinese culture. It was a neat coincidence to be reading a collection where she solves the same sort of problem wonderfully over and over again. (Maybe some of what she does will sink in. We can only hope.)
I just started Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand. After that, I will have read something by all of the Clarion [West] 2009 instructors at some point in my life. (Ok, not David Hartwell unless reading something he edited counts.)
While I'm warming up, I figure I should blog about Nalo Hopkinson's Skin Folk, the latest in my "books by this year's Clarion [West] instructors" series. This book, perhaps more than any other I've read so far, makes me wish I'd gotten into Clarion West. (I'm exempting Elizabeth Bear because I already have her books sitting in large stacks in my home office.) Not every short story in Skin Folk is the epitome of brilliance. Maybe one or two of them I couldn't get through. I suspect I was just really tired, rather than the stories having any problems. The rest though... wow. Imaginative scenarios. Rich, deeply developed characters. Powerfully embroidered writing. I want to write like this. (Well, except that she's already doing it and I really need to be the best me rather than a knock off of Nalo Hopkinson. You know what I mean...)
I'm extremely curious how readers familiar with the cultures she writes about read her work. I'm not familiar with, for example, Trinidad at all, but she never loses me. Whatever it is I need to know to understand the story is always there, exactly when I need it. Do more knowledgeable people find that intrusive? I suspect that she's done it so well that they don't even notice. Anyway, I'm revising a couple of stories right now that won't make sense to most people unless I work in some knowledge of Chinese culture. It was a neat coincidence to be reading a collection where she solves the same sort of problem wonderfully over and over again. (Maybe some of what she does will sink in. We can only hope.)
I just started Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand. After that, I will have read something by all of the Clarion [West] 2009 instructors at some point in my life. (Ok, not David Hartwell unless reading something he edited counts.)