CATHERINE THE GREAT: PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN, Robert K. Massie
“Born into a minor noble family, Catherine transformed herself into Empress of Russia by sheer determination.”
I’ve actually read about a third of this and it’s very good, but nonfiction is something I can only absorb in small doses. Not that this keeps me from adding more to my wish list!

LADY ALMINA AND THE REAL DOWNTON ABBEY: THE LOST LEGACY OF HIGHCLERE CASLTE, The Countess of Carnarvon
“Drawing on a rich store of materials from the archives of Highclere Castle, including diaries, letters, and photographs, the current Lady Carnarvon has written a transporting story of this fabled home on the brink of war.”
Look, I’m a sucker for anything DA related. I also have THE WORLD OF DOWNTON ABBEY, and I haven’t read it either.

THE WINDS OF KHALAKOVO, Bradley P. Beaulieu
“Serviced by windships bearing goods and dignitaries, Khalakovo’s eyrie stands at the crossroads of world trade. But all is not well in Khalakovo.”
There’s really no excuse for why I haven’t read this yet, because I have a copy on my kindle too (I think it was free).

HEART OF IRON, Ekaterina Sedia
“In a Russia where the Decembrists’ rebellion was successful … Sasha Trubetskaya wants nothing more than to have a decent debut ball in St. Petersburg. But her aunt’s feud with the emperor lands Sasha at university….”
The only reason why this hasn’t been read yet is that I expect it to be so awesome that I’m terrified of finding out its not my taste. Silly, really.

THE CALLIGRAPHER’S DAUGHTER, Eugenia Kim
“In early-twentieth-century Korea, Najin Han, the privileged daughter of a calligrapher, longs to choose her own destiny, though her country—newly occupied by Japan—is crumbling, and her family … is facing difficulties that seem insurmountable.”
I admit that this was a complete impulse buy, purchased based on the cover copy, and it keeps getting bumped down the list by other titles.

THE RIVER KING, Alice Hoffman
“The students at the prestigious prep school don’t mix with locals…. But when a body is found in the river behind the school, a local policeman will walk into this enclosed world and upset it entirely.”
Found at a used bookstore shortly after I finished reading PRACTICAL MAGIC. Thought I’d see if I liked anything else of hers.

What books do you have sitting on your shelves, waiting to be read?

(book descriptions quoted from Amazon)

“‘I’m writing a novel,’ you say. And they ask you, ‘Oh, is this the same one you were writing last year? And the year before that? And the year before that?’ And you say, ‘No, those were different ones. I decided that–’ And at this point you make up some excuse about publishing trends or writer’s block or The Muse, but it all adds up to the same thing: you’re not very good at finishing what you start. Your life is littered with the dessicated corpses of countless incomplete manuscripts, characters whose lives are woefully cut short by your +7 Axe of Apathy. You’re so good at not finishing, embrace this skill and quit.”

I know I’m a broken record on this blog, always saying “I never finish anything! Wah!” I totally wouldn’t blame anyone who wondered why I don’t just give up already. I’ve wondered that myself and, actually, I did stop writing for a year and half, from Jan 2009 – Oct 2010. Yet, here I am. My doubt-monster keeps trying to convince me that I’ll never succeed, but there’s some part of me that doesn’t buy it. To borrow from the quote from Mary Anne Radmacher, I have an inner voice that quietly says, “I will try again tomorrow.” This isn’t quite the same as the “f*** you, I’mma do it anyway attitude” that Wendig mentions in his post, but it’s a close relative.

As long as I listen to that quiet voice, I think I’ll be ok.

The hard drive on our main computer had been troubled for some time when it finally gave up the ghost at the beginning of this year. It was a pain in the neck, but we had an automated backup system in place. Or so we thought. When we went to restore the files, the most recent copies we had were all from the autumn of 2010. The computer had given us the message that the backups had failed, but we simply forgot to to anything about it until it was too late. Among the countless family photos lost on that hard drive were two of my WiPs, both of which were started and abandoned in 2011.

I’m the first to admit that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I wasn’t emotionally attached to either WiP — they’d both been put aside for very good reasons — so I was more disappointed than gutted. What I lost, though, was the ability to return to these ideas, to reuse them in part or in whole for future works. You never know what details of character, plot, or setting you might need again. These WiPs (flawed though they were) were things that I spent time and effort on, and which I will never be able to replace. I simply can’t remember everything that I’d created for them.

As someone who claims to want to write professionally, it was irresponsible of me not to have a better plan to protect my work. Thankfully we have our automatic backups working again, but sometimes (as the Pixar folks discovered) that’s not enough. It’s better to have multiple backups whenever possible. Put your files on an external drive or thumb drive, email them to yourself, store them on the cloud, give a copy to a trusted friend or relative. Whatever you do, do it every time and do it for every project. You may never need it, but you’ll be so grateful if you ever do.

What do you guys use to back up your WiPs? I’m always looking for new ideas!

“It sets out to paint a portrait of a whole society, telling the stories of a wide range of characters, both real and imagined, from every social level. Their narratives are developed and gradually interwoven over the first three episodes, each of which ends in a cliffhanger as the ship begins to founder. The fourth and final episode draws all of the different stories together and reveal to the audience who survives.”

I can’t believe I didn’t realize this was on — it’s exactly my kind of thing. I haven’t seen any reviews of the miniseries (not that I’ve looked, yet), but apparently it’s out on DVD already.

So — thoughts? Has anyone seen it? Is it worth owning? I think I’ll probably try to watch it on Netflix before spending money on it, but I love Fellowes’ other shows, so I think I’ll like it.

(image copyright ITV Studios, used without permission)

Ever since I read the The Book Smugglers review of Susan Hill’s THE WOMAN IN BLACK, I’ve been interested in reading the book. So I bought a copy a while ago and today, because I love spoilers, I peeked at the ending. Just the last page, you see.

Mistake.

I’ve mentioned before that I will stop reading a book if I’m too anxious about what’s happening to the characters. Even the tiny glimpse I got of THE WOMAN IN BLACK tells me that there will be no lack of suffering in this book. Which, of course, puts me off.

The thing is, THE WOMAN IN BLACK is a horror novel. It never claims to be warm and fuzzy; there are no promises that the characters will emerge safe and sound. They so rarely do, in horror fiction. I don’t know why I expected different.

Despite my newfound hesitance, THE WOMAN IN BLACK remains on my shelf. I’ll try to read it anyway. I made it through four volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, after all — a series which is rife with all kinds of suffering. If I can stand that, I ought to be able to handle anything Susan Hill could throw at me. (Of course, now I’ve doomed myself.)

How about you? What books were too creepy/anxiety-inducing for you finish? What books did you find yourself loving, despite what you expected?

(image copyright Vintage, used without permission)

It starts with the realization that my current WiP is terrible. Every time I’m fooled into thinking this belief is an honest one, and not one fed by fear and self-doubt. So I put my WiP away and struggle to work on other things for as long as I can, until I decide that everything I’ve ever written is terrible and I will never, ever be able to write anything that is any good at all.

Now, sometimes I pull out of my spiral of increasingly negative thinking by realizing that, like the old joke says, no one ever got to Carnegie Hall without practice, practice, practice. I can better and I will, if I work at it.

This latest time, however, I took my self-doubt to a whole new level. If my writing was never going to improve, then I was wasting my time on it. If writing was a waste of time, so was social media (where I talk about writing). And, heck, while we were talking about wasting time, well, reading was the biggest waste of time (and money) of all!

Even while I was thinking these things and culling the books I knew I would never reread from my shelves and swearing that I would never again put pen to paper, I knew that I was lying to myself. I didn’t delete my WiP, or deactivate my accounts, or even take the books I planned to get rid of any further than the basement. I didn’t take any steps that couldn’t be undone, because I knew I would regret it. I knew that I was overreacting, fooled by my self-doubt and my fear into believing that I could never change.

So why did I listen at all? I don’t know. Doubt is a tricksy, seductive thing. Even though you see that you’re falling for the same lies and you beg yourself not to listen — I don’t know. It happens anyway. Which is not to say I absolve myself of any responsibility for the situation, but that I acknowledge that it’s not as easy as listen or don’t listen.

For me, I think it’s because the doubt-monster tells me what I really, secretly believe about myself. I want to keep improving, but I don’t really think that I can and this line of you’re-no-good thinking lets me escape from trying. The doubt says, “You’re setting yourself up to fail, so don’t even bother,” but it’s holding my hand and putting an arm around my shoulder at the same time. And I bury my face and have a good cry and think about all the ways in which I’ve fulfilled my very worst expectations, even though I hate every minute of feeling this way.

And the little voice of hope keeps saying, “But maybe…” until I finally dry my eyes and lock the doubt away.

I know that each time I overcome my doubt and learn a new trick to use against it, the doubt comes at me from a different angle. What I don’t know is if I’ll ever escape it entirely. As long as I keep trying, though, it will never truly win. That’s not such a bad thing to live with.

I want to climb a mountain. Not so I can get to the top, but because I wanna hang out at base camp. That seems f***ing fun as sh**. You sleep in a colorful tent, you grow a beard, you drink hot chocolate, you walk around. “Hey, you going to the top?” “…Soon.”

And here’s what I wrote about this last July:

I chat with other aspiring authors, I follow agents’ blogs and twitter accounts, I read writing craft books, I keep up with published authors that I like. I’m doing everything BUT climbing the mountain that is novel-writing. All I need to do is grow a beard and get some hot chocolate and I’m basically the guy from the joke.

There’s definitely the kind of “writer” who spends all their time talking the talk without having anything to show for it. This is not writing; it’s more like a big game of let’s pretend. And here I am, right in the middle of it, with my invisible manuscript and my author costume.

For a while after I first came to the realization that I was allowing myself to give in to “base camp syndrome” I really improved. I joined a writing group and started working every day. The group eventually fizzled out (and so did my story), but I joined another one and picked up something new. I stuck with that off and on for months, but somehow…

There aren’t really any excuses I can give. The only person responsible for my not writing is me. But I’m tired of feeling like a fake. I’m tired of thinking about the fact that my two-year blog anniversary is coming up this fall and I have NOTHING to show for all the “writing” I’ve supposedly been doing.

So I’m stepping away from base camp. I love it here. I love reading blogs, following twitter, etc. But I don’t think that I will ever leave if I don’t make myself do it.

My blog is on hiatus. My twitter account is on hiatus. My tumblr has built up a queue, but it’s going on hiatus too. I will be back, but I need to go stew in my own ideas for a while.

I intended for this blog post to sound honest, but I think it’s just come off as a bit drama llama. So I’m ending it here.

“What you do is, you take a deep breath and believe in yourself. If you’ll know when you get it right, then believe that you will know. Work at it, fiddle with the parameters, change the viewpoints, mess with the plot outlines – but trust that inner voice when it says “Not like this” to something that logic says is just the perfect thing. And trust it again when it says “Yes, this is right” to something that logic (and/or your editor, agent, friends, crit group, fans, etc.) all say is insane and unworkable.

If you find that your confidence is easily undermined by those other voices, you may have to stop listening to them for a while. That means not talking about your work-in-process with the dear, supportive friend who thinks you should be writing gritty urban fantasy instead of the sweet Romance that your inner voice is demanding. It means that you stop reading the writing forum where everyone talks endlessly and with great assurance about how books have to start with action to sell these days and how you must never use a first-person narrator, when the book that’s banging on the back door of your brain is a first-person memoir that starts with three pages of description and backstory. It may mean reading a lot of books like the one you want to write (to reassure yourself that yes, books like this do sell), or it may mean reading a lot of books that are totally unlike the one you want to write (so you don’t get the depressing feeling that it’s all been done before, much better than you’ll be able to do it).

You also want to be fairly certain that it really is your backbrain that’s insisting on doing this insane and unworkable thing, and not the lazy part that doesn’t want to be bothered doing things the hard-but-better way. … The trick is to know what your particular tells are, so that you can reliably ignore what needs ignoring and accept what needs accepting.”

It’s so easy, as an amateur writer, to get caught up in what you’re supposed to write and forget about what you want to write. For a long time I thought that writing (and reading) fantasy meant limiting myself to epic fantasy, but there’s so much more to the genre than just that.

I’m really trying to focus now on telling the kind of story that I want to tell. I see quotes all the time about “write the story only you can write”, but I never actually thought about what that meant before now.

There’s a quote from Jane Austen’s MANSFIELD PARK that ties into this nicely, so I think I’ll close with that. It, of course, has nothing to do with the topic of writing (in fact, I can’t remember what circumstances surround the quote), but it’s still a good thought.

“We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.”

My Conscience: So, how’s it going?
Me: …Fine.
Con.: Been doing a little writing, have you?
Me: Well, we had company, and –
Con.: Nope. Try again.
Me: I was up with –
Con.: *makes a buzzer sound*
Me: *defeated* No. I haven’t.
Con.: And have you been thinking about writing? Planning? Brainstorming? Anything?
Me: …
Con.: So, you’ve been…?
Me: *hangs head* Goofing off.
Con.: Ding ding ding! *folds arms* Now get to work.
Me: *scurries off*

Sir Richard: Do you always play charades on Christmas night?
The Dowager: This isn’t charades. This is “The Game”.
Sir Richard: Do you enjoy these games? In which the player must appear ridiculous?
The Dowager: Sir Richard, life is a game in which the player must appear ridiculous.
Sir Richard: Not my life.

Why I Like It:
Part of the beauty of this snippet is that it accurately portrays the character’s personalities in a very simplistic exchange. Sir Richard hates to look like a fool and looks down on anyone who does so willingly. However, he doesn’t launch into a diatribe, expressing explicitly in a long speech the same sentiment that he gets across here in a few subtext-laced sentences. He also skirts the boundary of propriety, implying his true opinion without quite being rude.

The Dowager speaks her mind more directly, of course, but her response to Sir Richard not only displays her cynicism, but also her disdain for him. Dame Maggie Smith’s delivery of the line is perfect: barely tinged with sarcasm and condescension. He is an unwelcome outsider at a family holiday, but she’s also restrained from being completely rude.

This exchange between Sir Richard and the Dowager is nothing more than this brief aside in the middle of a game of charades, but it gets across everything it needs to. Not a word is wasted — it’s excellent writing.