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Reading for Fun
Nov. 14th, 2005 11:46 pmToday I'm afraid I finished re-reading Georgette Heyer's Frederica when I should have been writing. But it was so much fun.
Imagine a man so rich, he can have anything he wants. Wait until he's 37. Now he finds everything "a dead bore." One of my favorite lines from near the beginning is something like, "I must warn you that I am never of use to anyone!" Why? Because it's no fun and he's selfish, but at least he's up front about that. Now imagine that he's the hero of a romance novel, that he grows to care for someone, and to be of use to several, and that you grow to think he could be a good catch.
Georgette Heyer can do it.
You'd think the writing could be inspiring, but no. Just delightful. (I'm more the type to be intimidated than inspired, but that didn't happen either.)
Although, after spending so much time writing so much dialog, practicing the rule that you start a new paragraph to indicate a change in speaker, I was confused about who was being referred to in a line in Frederica until I remembered that the sentence is from the point of view of whoever is speaking in that paragraph. So this whole nanowrimo thing has finally paid off!
Nanowrimo Update
I re-read some of my old stuff hoping to get back into the story. I don't think it quite worked, but I was pleasantly surprised; I actually enjoyed reading much of it (skipping over some icky parts, of course). Which then froze me up, because I couldn't think of anything else good. But that was true all those other days for a little while, and fortunately I got over it. Although I did write two scenes I had to abort in the middle.
I also allowed myself to do some editing of the old stuff when I could immediately see improvements, especially when the improvements increased word count, although I did also make one change that reduced word count and a couple that didn't change word count. This editing added only about 150 words, though.
Today I added 2331 net words in 4 hours. I'm not quite halfway done.
Two tiny excerpts:
And this:
Imagine a man so rich, he can have anything he wants. Wait until he's 37. Now he finds everything "a dead bore." One of my favorite lines from near the beginning is something like, "I must warn you that I am never of use to anyone!" Why? Because it's no fun and he's selfish, but at least he's up front about that. Now imagine that he's the hero of a romance novel, that he grows to care for someone, and to be of use to several, and that you grow to think he could be a good catch.
Georgette Heyer can do it.
You'd think the writing could be inspiring, but no. Just delightful. (I'm more the type to be intimidated than inspired, but that didn't happen either.)
Although, after spending so much time writing so much dialog, practicing the rule that you start a new paragraph to indicate a change in speaker, I was confused about who was being referred to in a line in Frederica until I remembered that the sentence is from the point of view of whoever is speaking in that paragraph. So this whole nanowrimo thing has finally paid off!
Nanowrimo Update
I re-read some of my old stuff hoping to get back into the story. I don't think it quite worked, but I was pleasantly surprised; I actually enjoyed reading much of it (skipping over some icky parts, of course). Which then froze me up, because I couldn't think of anything else good. But that was true all those other days for a little while, and fortunately I got over it. Although I did write two scenes I had to abort in the middle.
I also allowed myself to do some editing of the old stuff when I could immediately see improvements, especially when the improvements increased word count, although I did also make one change that reduced word count and a couple that didn't change word count. This editing added only about 150 words, though.
Today I added 2331 net words in 4 hours. I'm not quite halfway done.
Two tiny excerpts:
"Then I won't further waste your time. It's been a displeasure to meet you."
And this:
In Which We Meet Mr. Otis at a Bad Time
"Mr. Otis, may I speak with you in my office?"