![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Stuck in a rut
Mar. 5th, 2001 06:02 pmWordcount: Still sitting at 800, dammitall.
I spent the weekend in Dallas helping some friends move, one of those prior-commitment things, so I didn't have time to get anything done on the book. And tonight I've got homework, but it's short homework. Sigh.
Why is it that every time I drive to Dallas, the weather's awful? It snowed over New Year's and I almost wrecked the car. This time it just rained buckets and the temperature dipped into the forties.
It doesn't help that I also have revisions to do Real Soon Now on the Excalibur story, but ideas are moving on that front. The editor had suggestions, and Jacob and I sat down and brainstormed a different way I could have written the scene that needs to be changed.
Said scene involves Our Heroine, a teenaged girl on a collect-the-following-widgets fairy-tale quest, facing down a dragon in order to obtain its fire (to feed a forge, natch). I'm not real big on the way most fantasy writers of the last 20-30 years have portrayed dragons. Most of the time it's because they come off as Misunderstood Creatures of Great and Ponderous Wisdom who actually have the Best Interest of the Hero (or of Humanity) at heart; this is not something I groove on, because it's just so done. So I went the opposite direction, and basically ended up making it a very big, very dangerous animal. My guess is that this failed because cleverness beats force three times out of five, and people know this. I wanted something amoral, something completely outside the bounds of human ethics, and I got it, but it wasn't the right kind of challenge. It didn't engage the mind.
It's easy to go overboard, I guess.
I spent the weekend in Dallas helping some friends move, one of those prior-commitment things, so I didn't have time to get anything done on the book. And tonight I've got homework, but it's short homework. Sigh.
Why is it that every time I drive to Dallas, the weather's awful? It snowed over New Year's and I almost wrecked the car. This time it just rained buckets and the temperature dipped into the forties.
It doesn't help that I also have revisions to do Real Soon Now on the Excalibur story, but ideas are moving on that front. The editor had suggestions, and Jacob and I sat down and brainstormed a different way I could have written the scene that needs to be changed.
Said scene involves Our Heroine, a teenaged girl on a collect-the-following-widgets fairy-tale quest, facing down a dragon in order to obtain its fire (to feed a forge, natch). I'm not real big on the way most fantasy writers of the last 20-30 years have portrayed dragons. Most of the time it's because they come off as Misunderstood Creatures of Great and Ponderous Wisdom who actually have the Best Interest of the Hero (or of Humanity) at heart; this is not something I groove on, because it's just so done. So I went the opposite direction, and basically ended up making it a very big, very dangerous animal. My guess is that this failed because cleverness beats force three times out of five, and people know this. I wanted something amoral, something completely outside the bounds of human ethics, and I got it, but it wasn't the right kind of challenge. It didn't engage the mind.
It's easy to go overboard, I guess.