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This week I'm fascinated with the different voices writers have.

Blogs are a bit tell-all in this respect. We think they tell us all, but, in fact, they only tell us a fraction of a fraction. Some writers have fiction that sounds a lot like their blogging: I think I might be one of those, most of the time, John Scalzi most definitely is one, so is Chuck McKenzie and so is Poppy Z Brite (who alas, doesn't seem to be blogging right now).

Not everyone is like this. Margo Lanagan's fiction sounds very different to her blogwriting. They're universes apart. Marianne de Pierres' blogs are more like her spoken voice - she doesn't carry the aches and the tension over into blogchat, which is a good thing, actually - I'm not sure I could emotionally deal with that level of heightened tension in a blog!

Though now I'm about to contradict myself, because Paul Haines uses a lot of the same voice and writing techniques in his blog as he does in his stories and his posts are magic because of that closeness and that tension and the way he strips his inner feelings bare and shows us where he is and what he is dealing with. It's through his blog that I've learned to love his fiction, in fact.

Jennifer Fallon has a quite different voice in her blogging to her writing. High adventure is replaced with high humour. She also tells her stories in a different way. When she writes humour, though, those voices overlap.

Maybe I need to do a table, showing the different characteristics of voice in all the writers I know who blog and comparing it with those same aspects in their fiction and in their conversation. And maybe I should just note that I have a nice little fever and this is the sort of direction Gillian's brain goes when she has a nice little fever and has trouble breathing. Not very sick, and not very well.

I was told to do less work this week by innumerable friends, and I rather think they would classify a table as 'work.' It isn't, really, but friends do things like that. Assume that fun stuff is work. I shall respect those friends and not tabulate interesting data.

It would be a cool table, though. I'd love to see just how many writers end up with dull blogs because they don't use the stuff that makes their writing interesting elsewhere. I also like making data into tables.

To all those friends who told me to take time out and get over this idiot-whatever-I-have I'm trying, truly. Very trying. And this is not work. I'm only thinking of that table, not actually creating it. I've taken *hours* of today off and spent them trying to sleep off the fever. Really. Hours and hours.

Can I do some editing now, please? Before my brain implodes?

(no subject)

littenz caused me to have a thought. This is such a rare event that I want to chronicle it here, rather than leave it in the comments to the earlier discussion. He suggested a place I could find information concerning those sugar trains. He was right - it's a good place to check. Except that I didn't need a straightforward way of finding data in this instance (though how he could know that without reading my mind is another issue entirely). It was working out why my undergraduate training in historical data retrieval was turned off that made me realise I had a theory. Probably old hat for others, but new for me.

I don't need sources of perfect and accessible information always, as a fiction writer. I need to play with the reliable past I have. Drawing pictures on copies of maps is part of assimilating the information and making it work, creating a diffferent understanding of it, one that will work in a story. Finding a place and turning it into the actual location for my characters to live their lives. Finding a past and turning it into the past my characters will live in. Playing is one of my mechanisms for worldbuilding.

This is one of the differences between me researching as an historian and me researching for a novel-to-be. The play is an important part of the history-for-writer, because it helps me know the shapes of the streets and get my brain around how to make a place function for narrative. It's not so much where something is as how it works in a story.

When I don't get my head around it in the right way, when I assume that the research I do as an historian will work for fiction, well, that way lies infodumping. I get happy with my knowledge and want to share every bit of it. That works for the historian - historical studies is about sharing knowledge and understanding - but it doesn't work terribly well for fiction.

And now I have a shiny new notion that infodumping is proof that a writer hasn't played enough with his/her research to actually understand how it will work in a narrative.

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I'm not working, truly.

Just now, in fact, I've been reading this. I ought to have read it in amazement and horror, but instead I found myself thinking "Why didn't I put a hardware shop scene in Life through Cellophane - it would have fitted so perfectly." Maybe the more of us vocal folks there are who reach invisibility, the more we can challenge it? I have found, though, some things are hard to challenge. I always take someone younger or someone male and/or younger for certain types of tasks.

What else have I done with my day off, besides catching up on a bit of email (321 messages, to be precise), attended an online conference (by downloading the papers to read another time, mostly), pretending to rest and doing bits of stuff for a possible novel? I've sorted out Sunday's teaching and the weekend's food. I shall update a webpage and send off some course proposals and do twenty more email answers today and that will be that.

See, day off. I'm so very proud of myself!