What's Up This Week
Nov. 24th, 2023 01:50 pmReading
I finished reading Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski, which I still wish I'd read years ago. It's so positive and affirming, though it was a little depressing to confront how many cultural myths about women's sexuality I've internalised and had never really challenged. You're normal and that's normal and that's okay are the book's mantras.
Now I need to find my non-fiction read for December! I have a list of non-fiction books I'm interested in, and I think I want to lean a little lighthearted and easy for the end of the year, since December will not only be dark and dreary but also busy. I'm eyeing up Greek to Me by Mary Norris, which seems to be part travelogue and partly about the author's obsession with language and alphabets. It sounds fun and interesting, and hopefully will remind me of sunny Santorini while I'm in cold, rainy Glasgow.
For fiction I'm about halfway through Ran Away, the 11th Benjamin January book. I am hooked! The 10th book was probably my least favourite of the series so far, but this one is brilliant and I want to read it rather than do nearly anything else. The first part was set in Ben's past in Paris and it was great to get to actually see that, and to meet Ayasha as a person rather than a source of Ben's angst (though I do love Ben's angst, he is a perfect iron woobie). Ayasha was delightful, brilliant and sharp-tongued and smart, and Hambly's attention to period detail just as good in 1820s Paris as it is in 1830s New Orleans. I'm now back in New Orleans, and Ben is trying to prove Huseyin Pasha's innocence, while trying to keep up with the demands of playing piano at the balls of the rich. And Hannibal is back! Hambly's attention to detail of this social mileu is second-to-none, and she clearly has a great time poking fun at them. I particularly enjoyed the musicians and servants placing bets on which petty arguments would escalate into duels, and this aside:
(The other two were perfectly routine quarrels: a Royaliste planter whose sister had been asked to dance by a Napoleoniste, and two American lawyers whose mutual accusations of graft, bastardy, Whiggery and unnatural appetites had begun in the courtroom last month and had been continued in the 'Letters to the Editor' columns of the True American ever since.)
My reading is technically 'behind' my fairly random goal of reading 55 books this year, at least according to Storygraph. We'll see if I can catch up to it. It turns out that trying to read and meet a NaNoWriMo word count while having a job and a small child who doesn't really believe in sleep is... quite difficult.
Writing
Still behind on my word count goal for the month, but no more behind than I was last week! I've written just over 32k so far, so getting to 50k will be a tall order but not entirely out of the question provided I can get some decent writing time this weekend. I think November is going to be my writing month, and then I'll try and do some editing in December. I usually edit as I write, for the most part, so it's been interesting to try and let myself just throw things at the wall, as it were, and just keep pushing through rather than getting caught up in making the previous bit "right".
To the Victor (Rogue One Hunger Games AU): I have a solid version of chapter 10 done, and I can definitely get that polished up in December. I have a big, unwieldy draft of chapter 11 that will need a lot of work but essentially hits all of the beats I want to hit. I may need to kill some darlings of character interactions just to tighten up the pacing, but I'll see how I feel later. I definitely need to rework a tense, action-y scene -- always a bugbear -- not least because it contains lots of [[FIGURE THIS OUT LATER]] notes to myself. I skipped merrily to chapter 12 and I think I need to make myself outline it in a little more detail as now I'm trying to juggle not only the mentors in the Capitol but also the tributes in the arena, and it's A Lot.
Indulgent Victorian AU: now actually resembles a story, or at least the start of one, rather than a collection of scenes that don't hang together! I know the broad outline of the plot (it's not quite the same plot as the original, but I can't resist going back to that well but making it Victorian). I am enjoying writing all the repressed pining and taking any opportunity for the characters to call one another "my dear" while telling themselves that it's completely platonic. I need to do some more research on how hot air balloons worked back then, but mostly I want to write some UST in the backstage of a Victorian theatre.
As-yet-untitled fantasy romance thing![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
golem_djinn: isn't going along as quickly as I would have liked, but Anand has been saved from the Big Bad and they are almost out of the desert at last! Unfortunately I feel like I've lost my sense of the character voices and the emotional beats that I want to be hitting, so I think the actual solution is going to be to reread the whole thing from the beginning. But if I can at least write the roughest of outlines of the ending I'll feel better about it, and then I can go back and actually rework it properly. Things have cropped up as I've written and there's things that should be built into the world or characters earlier, and probably other things that should be trimmed or cut because they didn't go anywhere. But that's why it's a WIP, I guess! At this point I think this will be a 2024 project, really.
This time next week it's December, somehow! I have actually really enjoyed trying to write a ludicrous amount in only 30 days, but I'm looking forward to slowing down. Maybe then I'll have the time and energy to watch some of the many TV shows or films I've been putting off.
I finished reading Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski, which I still wish I'd read years ago. It's so positive and affirming, though it was a little depressing to confront how many cultural myths about women's sexuality I've internalised and had never really challenged. You're normal and that's normal and that's okay are the book's mantras.
Now I need to find my non-fiction read for December! I have a list of non-fiction books I'm interested in, and I think I want to lean a little lighthearted and easy for the end of the year, since December will not only be dark and dreary but also busy. I'm eyeing up Greek to Me by Mary Norris, which seems to be part travelogue and partly about the author's obsession with language and alphabets. It sounds fun and interesting, and hopefully will remind me of sunny Santorini while I'm in cold, rainy Glasgow.
For fiction I'm about halfway through Ran Away, the 11th Benjamin January book. I am hooked! The 10th book was probably my least favourite of the series so far, but this one is brilliant and I want to read it rather than do nearly anything else. The first part was set in Ben's past in Paris and it was great to get to actually see that, and to meet Ayasha as a person rather than a source of Ben's angst (though I do love Ben's angst, he is a perfect iron woobie). Ayasha was delightful, brilliant and sharp-tongued and smart, and Hambly's attention to period detail just as good in 1820s Paris as it is in 1830s New Orleans. I'm now back in New Orleans, and Ben is trying to prove Huseyin Pasha's innocence, while trying to keep up with the demands of playing piano at the balls of the rich. And Hannibal is back! Hambly's attention to detail of this social mileu is second-to-none, and she clearly has a great time poking fun at them. I particularly enjoyed the musicians and servants placing bets on which petty arguments would escalate into duels, and this aside:
(The other two were perfectly routine quarrels: a Royaliste planter whose sister had been asked to dance by a Napoleoniste, and two American lawyers whose mutual accusations of graft, bastardy, Whiggery and unnatural appetites had begun in the courtroom last month and had been continued in the 'Letters to the Editor' columns of the True American ever since.)
My reading is technically 'behind' my fairly random goal of reading 55 books this year, at least according to Storygraph. We'll see if I can catch up to it. It turns out that trying to read and meet a NaNoWriMo word count while having a job and a small child who doesn't really believe in sleep is... quite difficult.
Writing
Still behind on my word count goal for the month, but no more behind than I was last week! I've written just over 32k so far, so getting to 50k will be a tall order but not entirely out of the question provided I can get some decent writing time this weekend. I think November is going to be my writing month, and then I'll try and do some editing in December. I usually edit as I write, for the most part, so it's been interesting to try and let myself just throw things at the wall, as it were, and just keep pushing through rather than getting caught up in making the previous bit "right".
To the Victor (Rogue One Hunger Games AU): I have a solid version of chapter 10 done, and I can definitely get that polished up in December. I have a big, unwieldy draft of chapter 11 that will need a lot of work but essentially hits all of the beats I want to hit. I may need to kill some darlings of character interactions just to tighten up the pacing, but I'll see how I feel later. I definitely need to rework a tense, action-y scene -- always a bugbear -- not least because it contains lots of [[FIGURE THIS OUT LATER]] notes to myself. I skipped merrily to chapter 12 and I think I need to make myself outline it in a little more detail as now I'm trying to juggle not only the mentors in the Capitol but also the tributes in the arena, and it's A Lot.
Indulgent Victorian AU: now actually resembles a story, or at least the start of one, rather than a collection of scenes that don't hang together! I know the broad outline of the plot (it's not quite the same plot as the original, but I can't resist going back to that well but making it Victorian). I am enjoying writing all the repressed pining and taking any opportunity for the characters to call one another "my dear" while telling themselves that it's completely platonic. I need to do some more research on how hot air balloons worked back then, but mostly I want to write some UST in the backstage of a Victorian theatre.
As-yet-untitled fantasy romance thing
golem_djinn: isn't going along as quickly as I would have liked, but Anand has been saved from the Big Bad and they are almost out of the desert at last! Unfortunately I feel like I've lost my sense of the character voices and the emotional beats that I want to be hitting, so I think the actual solution is going to be to reread the whole thing from the beginning. But if I can at least write the roughest of outlines of the ending I'll feel better about it, and then I can go back and actually rework it properly. Things have cropped up as I've written and there's things that should be built into the world or characters earlier, and probably other things that should be trimmed or cut because they didn't go anywhere. But that's why it's a WIP, I guess! At this point I think this will be a 2024 project, really.This time next week it's December, somehow! I have actually really enjoyed trying to write a ludicrous amount in only 30 days, but I'm looking forward to slowing down. Maybe then I'll have the time and energy to watch some of the many TV shows or films I've been putting off.
