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Apr. 14th, 2007 05:49 pmYesterday's temper tantrum was explained by today being a tired time. Just another of the joys of peri-menopause, dealing with shifts from one part of the cycle to another.
I managed two meetings and a visit from Donna and James through a sleepwalking haze and my main feat of tonight will be getting the Australian Speculative Fiction Carnival entries to the next host (a certain Mr Barnes, currently residing in the Emerald City), updating my other blog, and watching The West Wing. Oh, and analysing MZB - I realised that her take on feminism says something very important about writing fiction and suddenly I want to sort it out. I've known for a long time that MZB meant different things when she castigated feminism to what I mean when I use the term, but it's taken till now to find out how important this can be for speculative fiction writing.
I don't think I'll write an article on this (unless anyone really, really wants one), but I just need to understand it and maybe apply it to some of my fiction. It's not the word 'feminist' that has changed meaning (though it has) so much as the world has shifted. Paradigm shifts are very cool.
I also solved a conundrum about presenting backstory in a novel due to some fatigued thinking about the well-told movies I've seen recently and the conversations I had with Kylie Seluka over the last little while. Kylie sorted it out last year: I can be slow sometimes.
I am now going to instruct myself very, very firmly to experiment with writing key backstory as separate vignettes, maybe even short stories. When and how they tie into the main story can then add to the tension rather than diluting it. If they look like fairy tales or someone's writing exercises then the moment when it becomes evident that they're real and that the stories are about someone the reader has got to know will be that much more interesting than if I had the narrator saying "Oh, and if he had still been in the French Foreign Legion then he would simply have dusted off his kit and..."
And that's my day.
I managed two meetings and a visit from Donna and James through a sleepwalking haze and my main feat of tonight will be getting the Australian Speculative Fiction Carnival entries to the next host (a certain Mr Barnes, currently residing in the Emerald City), updating my other blog, and watching The West Wing. Oh, and analysing MZB - I realised that her take on feminism says something very important about writing fiction and suddenly I want to sort it out. I've known for a long time that MZB meant different things when she castigated feminism to what I mean when I use the term, but it's taken till now to find out how important this can be for speculative fiction writing.
I don't think I'll write an article on this (unless anyone really, really wants one), but I just need to understand it and maybe apply it to some of my fiction. It's not the word 'feminist' that has changed meaning (though it has) so much as the world has shifted. Paradigm shifts are very cool.
I also solved a conundrum about presenting backstory in a novel due to some fatigued thinking about the well-told movies I've seen recently and the conversations I had with Kylie Seluka over the last little while. Kylie sorted it out last year: I can be slow sometimes.
I am now going to instruct myself very, very firmly to experiment with writing key backstory as separate vignettes, maybe even short stories. When and how they tie into the main story can then add to the tension rather than diluting it. If they look like fairy tales or someone's writing exercises then the moment when it becomes evident that they're real and that the stories are about someone the reader has got to know will be that much more interesting than if I had the narrator saying "Oh, and if he had still been in the French Foreign Legion then he would simply have dusted off his kit and..."
And that's my day.