Justina Robson's Blog, page 2

Just a note to let any interested parties know I am ...

Just a note to let any interested parties know I am still with the Write-a-thon although very glad I didn't set a better target than 'will write every day'.  Hope you others are all doing well.  Meanwhile I am dithering over a decision about what to write next as this looks as if it will be the last QG book for the time being.

New Writer (to me) found and enjoyed...

Thanks to Stephanie Burgis for lending me 'The Truth About Forever', a teen book by Sarah Dessen.  It was such fun to read and she is a great writer on relationships and that whole identity thing.  I can only envy some of her skills at getting such clarity from what was, in my personal experience, a time of great muddiness and struggle.  So, after never hearing of this person, I now find she's a bestseller.  Well, I'm not surprised really.

Meanwhile my own writing has crawled through another few

The last couple of days have been dominated by children's...

The last couple of days have been dominated by children's party organisation, so word counts have been barely into the twenties.  Instead I spent my free minutes surfing around looking for writing I felt a connection with to try and bump my own into a slightly different kind of level. 

After a while I realised that no amount of 'research' into other writers' was going to be much of a help because they're all good in their own way and that isn't my way. Then I went back to my opening chapter, too

Mini mini mini milestone

I completed a version of the QG4 story so far recap yesterday, which is about 8k words although it took me a week to write and edit it.  Now I'm moving back to QG5 today.  I wrote the first chapter but it has a lot of options circling it, like vultures of the possible:  shall I do a fancy structure and tell the story backwards?  Shall I run with the undead storylines or are they too complicating?  Shall I include the vigilante thing that's waving vaguely from the back of the cast and crew or sho

Write A Thon

Today is the third day of the Clarion West Write-A-Thon, and of the current Clarion workshop.  I'm taking part to show some support to the hardworking guys who run the show year after year and to say thanks for the great experience I had there myself in 1996.  See http://www.clarionwest.org/ for more information, especially if you're reading this and would like to be a pro writer yourself.

I couldn't work out what the best sponsorship program would be for me this year: should I try for word count

Mundanity

Argh the website...two years out of date.  How could this happen to a technophile?  Bucketloads of emotional resistance is how actually, but I apologise to anyone who has been there scratching their head and wondering how I ever managed to write a sentence involving the word 'computer'.  Can't promise a rush job but matters are In Hand.  I said that before too, but this time, no really...  I've been struggling with a mundane SF short story, caught between wanting to go with the credo for social

Sidetracked

Thanks to everyone for your heartening and useful comments.  Yes, once again, I have demonstrated how easily I get sidetracked by 'intellectual' problems when they never really matter much in the construction of a book.  They do function rather nicely as avoidance items though.  Of course you don't need to know what you're doing when you sit down, in fact I think it is positively bad if you do, as this will stand in the way of interesting progress.  For myself though I definitely need an emotion

What is Fantasy about?

I just had an interesting note from Lou Anders who was also wondering what this fantasy novel would be about (that I am about to start...but haven't started yet because I wonder the same thing).  I mentioned to him that I was worried because I feel like I don't do big scale politics, in the manner of say Juliet McKenna...but Lou said he thought that Fantasy really WAS politics. 

This put my cat in the pigeon basket, because my cold feet and lack of a first sentence is really down to one thing: 

QG4

Book four is now finished and I've had my 'holiday' of 2 months off. (Book will appear in the US in July I think, next spring for UK schedules).  I plan to make a slow return to this journal.  Hi to everyone I saw at Eastercon, nice to see you!  A few faces missing however...hope you're all doing well. 

I'm now about to start writing a fantasy book before I get stuck into QG5 which may be the last in the series (not sure yet).  After that I have an SF novel to do.  But even before that I have to

Howdy

Hi everyone,
 
I'm just writing to check in and apologise to anyone I haven't written to due to my cyber-exile at the moment.  If you need to contact me with hopes of a timely reply please do so via email as I'll be lurking here only rarely for the rest of the year.  I hope I'll become a more effective LJer next year but it will have to be after I finish book 4 of the series.  In the meantime I wish you all a lovely time.