Novel’s made it to 43,593 words.

Starting to worry that pantsing it means I’m dropping plot threads. I’ve already noticed a major one that just completely fell of my radar, and two more that are smaller but also haven’t been addressed in a while.

Not sure if I should slow down and try to fill them in, work the missing threads back into the book, or keep moving forward, and worry about fixing it later.

This might even be a good thing, a sign that these plot elements don’t belong, and should be cut, not reinforced.

It’s hard to tell which is right. I think it’s too late for the major plot point, that’ll have to wait for the second draft. The minor ones, though, I think I can fill in as I go, and take care not to leave them behind. I guess if I get stuck somewhere further in to the book, and it’s because of these missing threads, I’ll know to be more careful in the future.

A friend of mine last week insisted that Aliens was a better movie than Predator. Having fond memories of both of these movies from my younger days, I didn’t believe her at first. I thought the movies were very different but equally good sci-fi films.

I re-watched both movies to test her thesis, and man, was I wrong. Aliens is far and away the better movie, and not just because Sigourney Weaver can out-act the former governor.

Both movies turn out to be very similar to each other, but the writing and structure of Aliens is much better, much better.

How They're Similar

The alien threat in both cases clearly outmatches the resources of the team.

Both squads have an Outsider Who Is In Charge along with them (Dillon in Predator, Burke in Aliens). This Outsider has a different moral code than the rest of the team, being concerned with either profit or enemy intelligence above everything else.

The original mission in both movies is supposed to be rescue, but we find out the team has been tricked, and they’re really there to advance the Outsider’s agenda.

The Outsider is karmically punished for their betrayal of the team by the alien threat.

The climax of both movies is a one-on-one fight between the protagonist and the main alien threat.

What Aliens Does Better

The Team

Aliens succeeds. Its marines seem to actually like each other, and function as team. We get to see them joking and talking as they come out of hyper-sleep and while they’re eating before the mission briefing. They continue to banter using their radios as the mission starts (before things go haywire).

We also get a clear sense of the hierarchy and role for each member of the team: we know who the sergeant is, which people are carrying the heavy guns, who’s got the radar for spotting, etc.

Predator fails to do any of this. The members of the team don’t seem to like each other at all. We don’t see them bantering, but we do see them do some macho posturing, which is not a substitute.

What’s more, none of the team members really seem to have a clear role. They all carry basically the same weapons, they don’t work in groups, and they all have the same skills.

The one exception is Billy, the tracker, but he’s so close to the “wise Native American hunter” stereotype that it doesn’t serve to flesh out his character, it just makes him more of a caricature.

The Betrayal

In Aliens this is a real betrayal. Burke locked two of them in with an alien in the hopes it would impregnate one of them, and was ready to kill the others so he could take off on his own (with the alien and its host). The Outsider turns out to be a real threat to the team, and there’s conflict generated both in overcoming his betrayal and deciding how to punish him for it.

Predator’s betrayal is much lower key. The team’s capture of the rebel camp seems effortless, with not much risk to any of the team members. Dillon’s betrayal is just an ulterior motive for getting in the camp. He never directly puts anyone’s lives in danger, and so the protagonist’s treatment of him feels overblown and melodramatic. There’s no real punch to it.

It would have been much better to make Dillon’s betrayal more serious. Imagine if Dutch’s team made it to the camp only to find that everyone was dead, with Anna the only survivor. She won’t talk, but they decide to take her back with them anyway. As they head back to the evac point, the team start getting picked off by the Predator. Eventually only Dutch, Anna, and Dillon are left.

Dillon finally confesses what’s really happening: he knew about the Predator, and contracted Dutch’s team under false pretenses because his first pick got wiped out by the alien. He wants to capture it, which is why he hasn’t been shooting to kill when he sees it. He’s ready to admit that he was wrong, though, and wants to help kill it so they can all get home.

Now Dutch has got a real moral problem: should he trust Dillon and work with him to defeat the predator? Or should he punish him for betraying his team and getting most of them killed?

Either choice is interesting, and would have a significant impact on the plot.

The Climax

I mean that in the Predator climax, the alien gets progressively dumber. He starts out as this advanced warrior, but eventually ditches all his advantages – his armor, his gun, his helmet – to take on the protagonist in one-on-one combat. Against such a willfully dumb and weakened adversary, how could the protagonist lose?

In Aliens, the alien queen gets smarter as the fight goes on. We originally see her as just an egg laying machine. But she escapes from the power station before it blows up, stowing away on the ship. Once on the ship, she waits until they’re docked with the main one before emerging, and when she does she goes after the humans for food (Well, and maybe a little revenge. She does seem pissed off). She uses every advantage she has, all her strength and cunning, which makes Ripley’s victory even more impressive.

An odd book. The author’s main thesis – that the Celts knew enough about geometry and astronomy to align their cities with the path of the sun – is convincing, once his evidence is laid out. But along the way he falls into claims that sound more like an “aliens built the pyramids” book, such as when he says all Celtic art was based on complex geometric designs.

It’s hard to fault him too much, though; the central idea is inspiring, and his excitement at getting to share it bleeds through.

Just a few of the things I learned from this book:

• The Druids -- and the Celts in general -- were not illiterate, though writing down druidic knowledge was taboo. Most of their writing was done using the Greek alphabet.
• There were several large Celtic migrations in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, that were apparently well-planned (Caesar relates one that was planned two years ahead of time). Many of these ended up in northern Italy; both Bologna and Milan were founded by migrating Gauls.
• The Roman conception of Gaul's geography was terrible. Tacitus thought Ireland was just off the coast of Spain (!). Caesar had to rely completely on local knowledge to navigate the terrain. In contrast, a Gaul from Marseille (Pytheas) circumnavigated Europe in the 320s BCE (Mediterranean to Atlantic Coast to Britain to Baltic to Black Sea back to Mediterranean), taking accurate latitude readings the whole way.

Novel’s grown to 41,169 words.

This week’s writing has been done not in spite of stress, or without it, but because of it.

A lot of things I thought were settled suddenly popped back up again: my mother-in-law has been in and out of the hospital, the buyers for our house seem to be having second thoughts, and my day job turned into slamming my head into a brick wall over and over again, for eight hours.

On top of that, the time for me to pack up the house and move is getting closer, so I’ve got that prep to deal with: going through years of accumulated memories in an empty house and sorting through which ones get to come with us and which ones get left behind.

I thought it would prove too much, and that I’d have to stop writing again. I did take off an extra day this week, spent it watching movies instead of working on the book.

But the next day I got back into it, and was surprised to find that writing the novel – at this point, at least – is the easiest way to take my mind off of all the stress. It’s hard to feel lonely when I’m writing dialog, or worry about my house selling when I’m trying to work through a character’s alibi.

I’m not sure why it’s so different now than back in July. Perhaps it’s because I’ve loosened my grip on my outline, so I don’t have to think so far ahead?

Whatever the cause, I’m grateful for it.

Fantastic, pulpy action. I mean, it’s zombies vs superheroes, how could I not read this?

The writing is sharp and moves along at a good clip, with a cinematic feel. Clines' use of flashbacks lets him bounce back and forth across the zombie apocalypse divide, deepening the characters and the world without slowing the action.

Three things about writing I learned from this one:

• Even in an ensemble book, focus on no more than half a dozen characters. I couldn't tell the non-superheroes apart in this one, and gave up trying to keep track of them all. The heroes were all well-fleshed out, but the regular humans were extras, and who watches a movie for the extras?
• Using flashbacks in short, quick bursts can let you jump in to the interesting part of the story immediately, building and keeping momentum behind the main storyline. Clines could have used the first third of the book to work through each heroes' timeline before the zombie apocalypse happened, but it would have resulted in a much slower book.
• Don't be afraid of writing what you want to write. I'm sure there are plenty of people that would look down on the zombies + superheroes concept, but I'm glad Clines ignored all of them and wrote something this fun and entertaining.

An amazing achievement. Moore’s novel deals head-on with the tragedy and emotional wreckage of losing someone you love, but doesn’t pull its comedic punches either. You end up with a book that’s perfectly willing to poke fun of the lead character one minute, then show the empathy resulting from his experience of tragedy the next.

Oh, and did I mention Moore does it while keeping the writing so smooth its frictionless, juggling multiple points of view, and occasionally just stopping the action to give background on the psychology of the main character?

Forget amazing. It’s intimidating.

Three things I gleaned from this one:

• You can get away with dropping a lot of background info on the reader if it's: a) humorous and entertaining, b) about one of the main characters, c) dropped in after the reader's already emotionally invested in that character
• Placing a tragedy at the heart of a comedy gives it an emotional weight that strengthens both
• You can setup multiple POV later in a novel by swapping out from the main character for short bursts in the beginning, then gradually lengthening the time away from the main POV character as you go. By the time you get to the longer passages later in the book, your readers won't have any problems switching and keeping track of them all.

Novel’s reached 37,510 words.

My semi-pantsing of the thing is still working. The characters are starting to do and say things on their own now, which I’m taking as a good sign. It means I can relax my grip a little more, give them leeway to go through the story in their own way.

I still get a sense of physical terror when I sit down at the keyboard, though. It’s been getting stronger every day the past week, as if each day’s success means I’m that much more likely to fail the next day. I know it’s not true, that the words will come if I just sit down and push them out.

But fear isn’t rational. Sure, I’m not as worried anymore about making the first draft as perfect as it can be. Now I’m just worried about being able to write each day’s part of the draft at all.

Only way I’ve found so far to defeat the anxiety is, of course, to write. Writing the day’s words pushes the fear back a little, proves once again that I can do this, that I can create something on the page.

Fascinating. Shines light on an invisible but vital industry. The author got to travel on a container ship from the UK to Singapore, and she uses each stage of the journey to dive into the history and current existence of merchant sailors, from their food to how they deal with pirates to the convoluted shell companies that own and run the ships.

Extremely well-written, and made my next visit to the Maritime Museum much more interesting, because I understood more of the context in which those ships were operating.

Three of the very many things I learned:

• Merchant sailors are often cheated out of pay by their bosses. In 2010 alone, the International Transport Workers Federation managed to recover $30 million in back pay that was owed to seafarers.
• The Suez Canal is only wide enough for one-way traffic, so they have to stagger the ships going through in convoys each way
• Merchant sailors captured by pirates in the Indian Ocean are held for 250 days (!) on average

Realized recently that I’ve never read many of the classic works of literature: no Dickens, no Hemingway, no Austen. So I picked up a dozen or so and I’m going to work my way through them.

Heart of Darkness is one of those books I’ve heard about for years, especially about its influence on other books and movies (notably Apocalypse Now).

It’s an odd book, short and yet seemingly told with one long breath, filled with racist slurs but treating the plight of africans under colonial rule with sympathy, overflowing with details one minute and skipping ahead days the next.

A few things about writing I learned from it:

• Dropping the use of chapters, and keeping the narrative flow constant, means there's no pauses for the reader to use as an excuse to put the book down.
• A story that reads well aloud can be forgiven a lot. There's large points where Conrad tells instead of showing, or skips over details, or repeats words and phrases, but it never bothered me enough that I stopped reading. The language drew me in; it sounded like the narrator was there whispering in my ear, and how could I be so rude as to stop listening?
• First-person narration is still very powerful, combining direct access to a character's thoughts with the characterization and reading speed you get from dialog.

Novel’s at 32,277 words.

Most days I’ve managed to write more than my 250 word goal, hitting somewhere north of 500 words before stopping for the day. Those words are flowing more easily now, the scene building itself out as I keep asking myself “what the characters would do?” without regard for the rest of the plot I’ve outlined.

I even found a way to make my inconsistencies consistent within the scope of the story, which was not only a pleasant surprise, but has helped me loosen the grip of my inner editor and just set words down on the page.

We’ll see how long it lasts, but for now I’m going to ride the wave this technique is giving me.

Revelatory.

I first read this ten years ago, when I was first trying to take my writing seriously. It was inspirational then, and inspirational now, though I’ve discovered different lessons in it this time.

From the autobiographical section, I got a strong sense of the struggle King went through to become the successful writer he is. There were multiple points where he could have stopped, where people wanted him to stop, but he didn’t. Success in writing wasn’t something he was born into, it was built out of hard work over decades that finally paid off and lifted his family out of poverty.

From the section on the writing craft itself, I’ve pulled three new techniques to try:

• Write the story first, and do the research later. The desire to get things right in the first draft is something I struggle with. King emphasizes getting the story out, and then doing the research needed to make it feel true.
• Shoot for a second draft that is 10% shorter than the first. King insists this will push you to not only eliminate pesky adverbs, but also take out anything that is not story.
• Rely on your characters and the situation they're in to tell you the story, not your outline. I've been using this last technique to push my current novel forward. Instead of thinking through each action to its consequences for the outline in my head, I'm just writing out what the characters do and say, letting it evolve on its own. It's helped me overcome the stress and blockage I had two weeks ago, and made writing much more enjoyable.

One of those books I tried several times to read, failed to get into, and finally just plowed through.

I’m glad I did. Stross has created a fantastic updating of the Lovecraftian mythos, blending it with computer science, government bureaucracy, spy thrillers, and comedy (yes, all four).

The result doesn’t have the creepiness or the horror of the source material anymore, but is much more entertaining.

(Incidentally, this is the third novel in the series. Yes, I started with the third one. No, I didn’t feel lost, but I did feel silly for not starting at the beginning.)

Three things I learned about writing:

• You can still get tension from a narrative told as a memoir. When your characters can go insane or become disembodied spirits, terrible things can happen to them but still leave them able to narrate.
• Writing what you know can give you interesting twists on old material. Stross was a programmer for a while, and that kind of thinking is what makes his take on Lovecraft's old gods feel new.
• Even in a first-person story, you can still show non-POV character scenes by cheating a little, and having the narrator imagine how they would have gone.

Novel’s at 29,068 words: I’m back to working on it, and it feels great.

The week off really helped me relax, as did spending time with my friends, getting out of the house and forgetting about the stress of moving for a while. I was only able to write a few hundred words on Saturday, but it felt like a victory.

I’ve kept up a moderate pace since then, carving out enough time to write at least 250 words each day. I’m keeping the word goal low for now, letting myself go over it but also giving myself permission to stop when I hit 250. It’s a small number, but it’s more than zero, and a target I can hit.

A rambling, overly-long book. Spends so much time digressing from his core topic – dipping into cognitive theory, the history of Standard Oil, and Greek mythology, among others – that he doesn’t find time (in 700+ pages!) to tie anything together.

The final section is the biggest offender, becoming just a parade of names and quotes with no background, no context, and no focus.

The one point he hammers on constantly is that any attempt to resolve conflicts by playing up the common interests of the parties involved is an “anti-strategy,” as he labels it. This quirky obsession puts him in some odd positions, like when he spends some time talking about the amazing Jane Addams, only to disparage her thinking on conflict by slapping the “anti-strategic” label on it. Many of the women he discusses end up dismissed in a similar fashion, making his attempts to undermine their thinking seem motivated by something other than rational thought.

Even though I felt like putting it down multiple times, I did learn a few things:

• Chimps not only compete politically, they use coalition building within the group, and engage in raids and genocidal warfare outside the group.
• Clausewitz is more famous today, but the most popular writer on military strategy in the 19th century was Jomini.
• Martin Luther King wasn't originally committed to non-violence. Only once some of Gandhi's followers joined his organization -- and after Rosa Parks' successful boycott of buses -- did he commit to nonviolence as a strategy

Kingsman: The Secret Service is an uneven movie. It’s trying to both subvert and exploit spy movie clichés, and it doesn’t always work.

The easiest way to fix it is if we just swap Roxy (the female Lancelot) and Eggsy’s roles, making Roxy the protagonist.

The opening scene becomes Galahad giving the medal to his comrade’s daughter, not his son. The daughter grows up watching men abuse her mother and feeling powerless to stop it. Galahad plucks her out of poverty and brings her in to train for the Kingsmen.

We make one more change, and make her the first woman they’ve ever had compete for a spot. Now she’s got two things to prove: that both women and lower-class people can make it into this elite service.

Eggsy can be the supporting character, one of the other competitors that’s also lower-class. He cracks self-deprecating jokes about it being positive discrimination, that none of the lower-classes ever make it, etc. Roxy can give him confidence, teach him to believe in himself, and help him reach the #2 spot. When her mentor (Galahad) gets killed, and everything goes “tits up”, he’s the one she calls, even though he failed the dog test (Roxy still passes that; there’s a great character scene to be had there).

By reversing the two characters, we move the movie away from the clichés that it tries and fails to subvert, and into “I’ve not seen this before” territory. Every emotional beat gets stronger, every fight becomes more interesting.

I haven’t written anything for the novel in a week.

More importantly, I haven’t let myself work on the novel in a week. I’ve been following Vivien Reis' advice, giving myself time to step away from writing and focus on what’s happening right now with my family.

It’s turned out to be exactly what I needed. I’ve been able to focus better at work, I’ve been more relaxed about all the house showings and paperwork and myriad other little things I’ve had to deal with as we prepare to up sticks and move.

I still feel guilty, though. Like I’m shirking my homework, which is fine for a little while, but eventually you sit down for the final exam and you haven’t a clue what’s going on.

So I’m going to try writing again this weekend. Not much, just an hour or two at most, and with no word count in mind.

Perhaps this way I can use the novel to keep me busy, to keep my mind off things, on days when I’m not at work. And assuage some of the guilt I’m feeling.

Ms Marvel (Wilson, Alphona): Well written. Not written for me.

Captain Marvel (DeConnick, Soy): Not as well written. Also not for me.

Superior Spider-Man (Slott, Stegman): Amazing concept and writing. Art confusing and slightly cliche.

She-Hulk (Soule, Pulido): Its cancellation was a tragic loss. Easily my favorite superhero comic.

Five Ghosts (Barbiere, Mooneyham): So well-done, it’s use of women as just damsels in distress sticks out like a splotch of mud on an otherwise perfect painting.

Saga (Vaughn, Staples): Perfect.

Wicked + Divine (Gillen, McKelvie): Awesome concept. Disappointing that they take it to such a mundane place. Emotional heart of the story is strong, though.

Superman: Red Son (Millar, Johnson): A very 50s take on an alternate Superman. Fascinating, especially the Epilogue.

There’s a moment in the first episode of Season 8 where The Doctor turns to Clara and says: “You can’t see me. You look at me, but you can’t see me.”

Re-watching the episode recently, along with the rest of the eighth season, I felt that line was delivered from Peter Capaldi to me, to the audience, a plea for us to give him a chance, to let go of anything we thought we knew about The Doctor and just see him, see his version of The Doctor, and judge him based solely on that.

I’m glad I gave him that chance, and watched Season 8 all the way through, because Capaldi’s Doctor is in many ways amazing, and very fun to watch.

He’s got the grumpiness I liked from the First Doctor, the alien perspective of the Fourth, and the arrogance of the Third. Those happen to be some of my favorite Doctors, and his blend of their characteristics, combined with his own no-nonsense take, is fantastic.

Capaldi’s no-frills, no apologies, no sentimental nonsense version of The Doctor is a refreshing change after Smith and Tennant. Gone are the dewy pauses and the hand-wringing. Instead, we get a Doctor that doesn’t waste time over the lives he can’t save, not when he can spend that time saving others.

The perfect expression of all this is in the Mummy on the Orient Express episode. The Doctor doesn’t hesitate to use the mummy’s victims to gather all the information he can, asking them question after question even as they’re dying, with no apology for not being able to save them and no comfort offered – save that their answers can help the others escape the same fate. He’s splendidly hard-nosed, which makes his last-minute gamble in directing the mummy away from its next victim and onto himself all the more powerful: you know this is a Doctor that would not put himself in danger lightly.

Granted, in order to enjoy Capaldi’s performance, I had to drop a lot of habits I’ve built up watching the new seasons of Doctor Who. I had to let go of any need for continuity, taking each episode as it came and forgetting anything that had gone before. I also had to drop my need for plausibility in plot and circumstance; most (ok, all) of the episodes contained elements that stretched beyond the merely fantastic and into the completely impossible or nonsensical.

In this, it helped that I’d just come off watching a lot of Classic Doctor Who episodes. The same approach let me enjoy them: don’t worry about continuity, don’t worry about the special effects, don’t worry about the setup making any sort of sense. Just watch The Doctor and his Companion having adventures, enjoy the dialogue, and let your imagination fill in the rest.

Novel stands at 26,750 words.

Haven’t posted here in a while because my life is being turned upside-down.

My wife’s currently in Arkansas, tending her mother, who was admitted to the hospital a few weeks ago with a serious heart-and-lung condition. My wife flew out just three days after she heard, and has been there ever since.

Her mom has been discharged, and is recovering, but will need near-constant care for the next year or so. My wife’s currently providing that care, and intends to keep providing it. That means we’re looking at moving, at leaving the house and city and friends we’ve come to love here in California, and going back to Arkansas.

So my past few weeks have been a blur of getting my wife to Arkansas, supporting her through the early days of her mom’s discharge, and now putting our house on the market and preparing to move.

Needless to say, I didn’t hit my target word count for NaNoWriMo.

I’m finding it hard to write in general, not just finding the time but finding the mental space to build up the novel in my head and then set it down on paper. It’s like I have room in my head for my job and my wife and my move, and nothing else.

If I manage to squeak out just 150 words in a day, I have to call it a victory, because many days I don’t manage any.

But I haven’t given up, and I won’t stop writing during this new phase of my life. I’ll grind out what I can for now, and look to pick up the pace once we settle in to our new digs.

Novel’s currently at 7,787 words.

I’ve only written the first couple of scenes, and I’m already at a point where I’m a little undecided about which way to go.

I have the words ready to go to start toward the next scene, but I’m not sure what to do once I get there.

So do I pause here and outline out what happens next? Wait to write more till I know what’s going to happen? Or just let the words flow, and find out what happens as I write it?

The latter instinct terrifies me. The former path makes me worry I’ll spend too much time plotting, and not enough time writing.

I guess I can always go forward now, and fix any mistakes later. It just feels like a wrong turn this early could force a lot of extra rewriting later.

Not much progress this week: only at 4,180 words.

I’d like to say that I didn’t get to write much this week, as if writing time were something that were doled out to me by a woman with a hairnet and an ice-cream scoop.

But that’s not the case. The truth is I didn’t take as much time to write this week as I needed to. I chose other things – morning exercise, staying a little longer at work, going out with my family – and that’s ok, but I need to remember that it’s a choice.

That means I’m on the hook for not getting as far as I should have this week. It also means it’s in my control to change that, to make different choices and get more writing done.

So my writing slowed this week, but I haven’t stopped, and I’m not blocked altogether, thank goodness. It’s just a reminder that I have to carve out the time I know I need to make the progress I want.

Started writing the new novel July 1st, as scheduled. Already 1,600 words in.

It was an incredible relief to write those first 250 words. I had such a hard time outlining the book that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to put anything down, that the magic would fail me this time.

But it hasn’t yet. I’m already adding things to the world, color and details I didn’t think of before, just by writing about it.

I forgot how much fun this can be, making things up and seeing where they lead. It’s addictive.

I don’t want it to end.

I’ve been trying to read various magazines – for example, The Economist – on some form of eReader for a few years now.

At first I couldn’t do it because they didn’t have electronic editions. Then they did, but only online. Then they offered electronic versions you could subscribe to, but only for Apple products.

Now I can find a lot of them in online bookstores – for Barnes and Noble, or Kobo – but the subscriptions only let you read them on each bookstore’s tablets.

But there’s a workaround for the Kobo eReaders that I wanted to share.

It takes advantage of Pocket, which lets you save web articles for later reading. Turns out that Pocket is integrated into all of Kobo’s eReaders, so any articles you save to your Pocket account will show up on your Kobo.

Here’s how you can read any magazine or newspaper that has an online version on your eReader:

1. Sign up for a Pocket account.
2. Download and install the Pocket plugin for your web browser.
3. Go to the homepage of the magazine you want to read (e.g., economist.com)
4. Subscribe to the magazine (if you haven't already).
5. With your subscription, navigate to the "print edition" version of the website.
6. Now you can start saving articles for reading. Either right-click on the link to the article and select "Save to Pocket" or open the article and click the "Save to Pocket" icon in your browser's toolbar.
7. Wait for the popup that tells you the article has been saved to Pocket.
8. Go to your ereader. Navigate to the "Articles from Pocket" section.
9. Sign in to Pocket if you haven't already.
10. Your saved article(s) should sync to the ereader. Tap any one of them to read it!

An excellent book, but one I wouldn’t have been able to finish without spoilers. It’s got a very slow start, and even 100 pages in I couldn’t tell most of the characters apart, or match character names to titles to dialogue.

I almost quit the book, but then I reread the essay in Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great that got me to read it in the first place. By giving away the ending, and filling in some of the gaps in a modern readers' knowledge – for example, in 1936, when the book was written, if a college-educated woman got married, she could no longer teach at the university, making the family-or-career choice a stark one – Walton’s essay opened the book up for me, and let me pick up on the multiple ways gender politics is woven throughout.

This is the first time spoilers for a mystery not only didn’t ruin the story, but positively enhanced it for me. If you plan on reading the book, I’d recommend reading Walton’s essay first, if only to equip you with the knowledge of the day that Sayers assumed all her readers had.

I noticed two interesting things about the way the book was written.

First, almost all the action is conveyed through dialogue. There’s a few scenes where Sayers describes what a character does – flicking on a light, for example – but most of the time, Sayers lets her characters talk about the action, or lets us guess that action is taking place by having them describe it. It makes the dialogue feel more real to me, somehow, when we don’t have to interrupt the character’s speech to say something as mundane as “he put on his hat and coat.” Instead, we can let the character’s personality shine through by having them talk about their hat and coat as they put it on, or mumble about how they need to get that elbow patched or complain about missing buttons. However, it doesn’t seem to work well when the reader isn’t familiar with the actions involved; there was a scene in Gaudy Night where the main characters were boating down the Thames, and I couldn’t picture anything that was going on.

Second, the way in which the theme of gender politics gets echoed throughout the book felt masterful to me. It comes up in multiple conversations, it lies at the heart of the mystery, and it’s the core of the problem Harriet Vane (the main and only perspective character) wrestles with throughout: whether to marry Peter Wimsey, or rejoin the scholarly world at Oxford?

I think it even shows up in the structure of the book itself: most of the characters are women, all of the suspects are women, and it’s a woman that leads the investigation for 3/4 of the entire book. It’s a Peter Wimsey Mystery without much Peter Wimsey at all, and the only men that show up most of the novel are adjuncts to the narrative, distractions from the main events, rather than principal players. It’s something that’s all-too-rarely done today, and it must have seemed radical in 1936. I think it was also done deliberately, to make the book not only contain discussions of gender politics and the roles of men and women, but be a shot fired on the side of equality.

I’ve joined Camp NaNoWriMo this year.

NaNoWriMo gave me the motivation I needed to start – and then finish – my first novel last year. The target word count for the month, the daily emails from professionals about their writing process, even the simple bar chart showing my daily progress, all pushed me to see it through.

I’m hoping to get the same kind of kick in the pants from Camp NaNoWriMo. It starts July first, but there’s no set word count goal, no restrictions on what you can work on, like for regular NaNoWriMo. I’ve set a personal goal of 30,000 words for the month, enough to challenge me but not enough to feel like a mad dash toward the finish line.

They’ve also got the idea of cabins, where they group you up with other writers for the month. I think the idea is that we band together to reach our writing goals, by maybe sharing snippets of what we’re working on, or just talking about our own writing experiences. In any case, I’m looking forward to finding out who my cabin-mates will be.

As for the outline, it should be ready to go July 1st. I’ve got the flow and basic challenges set, nailed down the start and finish, and am getting the characters personalities and voices set in my mind.

I’m still nervous about starting the actual writing of it, but I tell myself that’s normal, and that I have permission to suck on the first draft. But there won’t be a second draft unless I finish the first one, and I won’t finish unless I start, so there’s no getting out of it.