(no subject)

My NaNoWriMo count was 12,518. It was actually a bit more than that, i wrote a few paragraphs over the last few days i worked on my project, but i didn't even bother to count them because at that point it was clear to me that i was dead in the water. It wasn't just that i lost my momentum, though that was part of it. I finished the first part of the story, which i had previously visualized fairly vividly, and came up to the second part of the story, which had a sizable bit i hadn't visualized at all. And then suddenly i felt like a cartoon character who had run out of road and was now continue to run in mid-air.

It's the same thing that happens to almost every writing project i undertake. I get a good ways into it, and then i find myself in a gauntlet of self-sniping. Why am i writing this? Who's going to read it? What do i really want to say with it? If i plotted the thing out in advance, it's, Whoa, this all feels contrived, and if i didn't plot it in advance, it's, This is going nowhere.

I have projects that are almost 20 years old that are half-written. It's getting ridiculous.

(no subject)

I just finished reading Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper. Actually i just read a trifecta of her books: The Awakeners, The Visitor, and Beauty.

Beauty has not become my favorite of her books, but it is the most "solid," in the sense that the writing, plotting, and characterization is really tight. It's... well, it's literally a fairy tale: a radical feminist fairy tale with a touch of dystopian science fiction and a clear anti-porn & anti-religion strand running through it. Tepper asks us to consider that we need beauty in our lives and environment not just to thrive but to survive, describing a dead-end future where all of the joy and beauty in the world has been paved over, and contrasting this with scenes from the medieval period (where the fey, and magic, still exist), and the present day (where the magic is almost all gone).

When i consider what i've written about meaning in the last year or so, i think i'm forced to agree with Tepper: as we gain more ability to shape the spaces in which we live, we cannot consider beauty to be optional.