Books Read for June: 2/9
(The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 and Brooke Shields is Not Allowed to Get Old)
(Still in the middle of 3 books, and doing that thing where I’m reading a little bit of all of them as opposed to just reading one through. This is ill-advised.)
(Also I have a few other books out from the library and the urge to start one or both is unbearable but thus far we persevere.)
I have not gotten a lot done on my revision, Squiders.
I felt so good after my writing retreat! But the first person who did the critique marathon last week threw off my groove, and then I had my in-person critique on Sunday which also went…confusingly.
Like, the story is working for some people and not for others. About half and half.
And, of course, you can’t please everybody and you will always have people who aren’t jiving with what you’re doing, but it’s weird to have it be so even in the critique stage, because my experience has been that the critiquers tend to be more uniform in their feedback. Things are working, or they aren’t.
Like, with my in-person group, which is currently me and two other people, one of the guys loved the level of detail I went into in Chapter 4, but it was too deep for the other one.
Do I even it out to make it more attractive to the person who didn’t gel with the detail to the deterrent of the person who enjoyed it as is?
And questions along those lines. So far I’m running into this sort of issue with both Cpt 1 and Cpt 4, and I don’t know what to do about them because it’s hard to tell if they’re actually issues or not.
(The critique marathon has Cpt 4 this week, so maybe that will clarify at least that issue? Or not. Slim pickings on the critique marathon as well. Right now there’s only 3 of us and it’s normally between 5 and 8 people. So if those two people continue to be divided I continue to be confused.)
So part of me wants to go back and fix things, but I don’t have clear direction on what needs fixing, and part of me wants to continue ahead (I need Cpt 5 and 6 revised before next week) but it feels weird continuing forward when there’s potential changes to be made.
And so I am doing nothing.
One of the many books I’m in the middle of is a productivity book. I listened to the author on a podcast and liked what he was saying about work/life balance and thought I might give his book to my spouse, but for some reason I picked up his first book instead of the newest one, and reading it I see why his latest book is about work/life balance, because this other one is like a recipe on how to burn out. I think I’m continuing to read out of morbid curiosity.
But he mentions that it’s much easier to get things done if you know your next steps, and that’s where the process is breaking down for me. The next step isn’t clear. Do I go back and poke Cpt 1? Do I move on to Cpt 5? Do I give up on writing and turn to octopus husbandry?
Unclear.
See you Thursday, squiders, where I shall hopefully have made some progress somewhere.
