Stephanie Burgis
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Past the final hurdle!
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Today I typed in all those words I'd handwritten in the café yesterday, kept writing and then - WOOOT! - finally, finally broke through the final barrier of the "hard" bit of the novel's climax, into that final writing space where everything just flies frantically downhill from here until the end of the book. It's an incredible feeling. After almost two weeks of struggling just to manage 500-600 words a day, today I wrote over 1600 and felt like I could have kept going forever (although I stopped anyway because I needed to eat and thought that it might be smart to think a bit, as well). It felt like skiing downhill, when everything's perfectly angled and poised and it just feels like flying.*
I am feeling ridiculously giddy and very, very in love with my novel. It's the best feeling.
I'm really enjoying my new books, too. I finished Audrey, Wait! yesterday evening, and it was really fun - a novel for teenage girls that was as funny as anything by Meg Cabot, but with a darker, sharper-edged sensibility, more like Nick Hornby. As always, my true preference is for plots that include magic, but despite the serious lack of any fantasy plot (sigh), I really enjoyed this book.
And now I'm in the middle of Black Ships, which is just breathtakingly good, and lushly magical enough to more than make up for that earlier lack. It's a fantasy novel written around the Aeneas legend, so the setting is ancient Greece - a setting that had never honestly interested me much before (I was turned off the Greek classics by a really unfortunate translation of The Iliad that was assigned in our high school - translated into 1920s British schoolboy English, it included lines like "I say, Hera, old bird", said Zeus - but sadly without any of the humor necessary to make that kind of translation palatable!), but Jo Graham's writing is so rich and gorgeous, I'm absolutely loving it now. The book is absolutely mesmerizing - reading it feels like sinking into a deep, hot bath, one I never want to leave. I'm only about 150 pages into it right now, but at least based on those first 150 pages, it's probably my favorite fantasy novel I've read so far this year.
Today I'm going to re-heat a frozen pizza from Marks & Spencer for an easy, yummy lunch, write a letter to an old friend, cuddle Maya, and maybe go to a café. And I'm already looking forward to my next writing session. :)
Kat by Starlight
*And yes, of course when I talk about skiing downhill, I really am talking about hills, not mountains...I grew up in Michigan, so I've only ever skiied cross-country. But hey, those Michigan hills are fun to ski down, too! And you're much less likely to break any bones doing it...as we all told each other wisely, every time we heard about crazy people going off to mountainous country for their ski trips.
I am feeling ridiculously giddy and very, very in love with my novel. It's the best feeling.
I'm really enjoying my new books, too. I finished Audrey, Wait! yesterday evening, and it was really fun - a novel for teenage girls that was as funny as anything by Meg Cabot, but with a darker, sharper-edged sensibility, more like Nick Hornby. As always, my true preference is for plots that include magic, but despite the serious lack of any fantasy plot (sigh), I really enjoyed this book.
And now I'm in the middle of Black Ships, which is just breathtakingly good, and lushly magical enough to more than make up for that earlier lack. It's a fantasy novel written around the Aeneas legend, so the setting is ancient Greece - a setting that had never honestly interested me much before (I was turned off the Greek classics by a really unfortunate translation of The Iliad that was assigned in our high school - translated into 1920s British schoolboy English, it included lines like "I say, Hera, old bird", said Zeus - but sadly without any of the humor necessary to make that kind of translation palatable!), but Jo Graham's writing is so rich and gorgeous, I'm absolutely loving it now. The book is absolutely mesmerizing - reading it feels like sinking into a deep, hot bath, one I never want to leave. I'm only about 150 pages into it right now, but at least based on those first 150 pages, it's probably my favorite fantasy novel I've read so far this year.
Today I'm going to re-heat a frozen pizza from Marks & Spencer for an easy, yummy lunch, write a letter to an old friend, cuddle Maya, and maybe go to a café. And I'm already looking forward to my next writing session. :)
Kat by Starlight
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*And yes, of course when I talk about skiing downhill, I really am talking about hills, not mountains...I grew up in Michigan, so I've only ever skiied cross-country. But hey, those Michigan hills are fun to ski down, too! And you're much less likely to break any bones doing it...as we all told each other wisely, every time we heard about crazy people going off to mountainous country for their ski trips.
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