Not writing is starting to get under my skin.

The two weeks I was going to take off has turned into a month.

At first it was so I could catch up on all the house work I’ve been putting off: hardscaping the front yard in response to the drought, cleaning up the back yard, fixing both fences.

More recently I’ve held off writing because of a talk I’m giving at a conference for work next week. I knew starting on any novel would quickly occupy whatever spare head space I have, and I wanted to keep that free to work on the presentation.

Both good reasons. But it doesn’t stop me from missing it. When I was working on the novel, I felt like I had a purpose, a mission to fulfill. Without another novel to work on, I feel more relaxed, true, but also a little empty, a little directionless, a little smaller now that I don’t have any characters spouting dialogue into my head.

I’m trying to be patient, to keep notes on the books I’m debating working on, to stay focused on the other goals I’ve set for myself for this month. But I miss the work, and need to get back to it.

Background:

terribleminds.com/ramble/20…

whatever.scalzi.com/2015/04/0…

grrm.livejournal.com/420090.ht…

I think if these tactics had been used to ensure that only women got nominated for the Hugos this year, or that only PoC did, the Sad Puppies wouldn’t see that as right or fair.

I also think that they had – still have, I guess – a chance to act on their feelings of rejection in a positive way, by starting their own convention. No one could fault them if they started a Con that promoted the authors they prefer, nor would anyone be this mad if they’d launched their own awards at that Con.

First draft of novel’s done, writing vacation is winding down.

I’ve got an urge to start editing the novel now, to go back and fix the mistakes I know are there, and find the ones I don’t yet know about.

But I’m holding off. I’m not ready to treat it objectively yet. While printing it off for my wife to read I read a few pages, and liked it a little too much.

I need fresh eyes on it, eyes that haven’t seen anything but the words on the page, and so will notice if something’s missing or inconsistent or out of tune. Thus the printing run for my wife, so she can read it while soaking in the tub. And thus my new search for beta readers, for those willing to slog through the mess that is the first draft.

Wish me luck.

A short book that’s long on emotional arguments. The author seems to believe that merely repeating the phrase “American government is broken” often enough will substitute for producing evidence that over-specification of rules in law has harmed American business or society.

Not that I think our laws are perfect, or aren’t in need of simplification (I’m looking at you, tax code). But I don’t need to read 200 pages of someone repeating that phrase to me, and telling me that other countries do it better. I need specific examples and evidence of how a different approach has saved countries time or money or boosted their GDP or – anything, really, to back up the claim that our government is mired in too much red tape to be effective, and the author’s principles-based laws would solve the problem.

Despite the general lack of facts, I did manage to learn a few things from the book:

• President Clinton had a line-item veto -- granted by Congress via law -- for two years, until the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional.
• Presidents used to be able to hold back money for programs they felt were wasteful or inefficient, till that power was specifically outlawed by Congress.
• Iraqis who worked for the US Army after the invasion were supposed to be given special visas to immigrate to the US (because of the death threats they received), but the Immigration Service delayed their processing over rules so long that some died after waiting more than a year

Very readable history of how the rules of spelling and grammar in English have evolved over time, often despite the efforts of those who attempted to set those rules in stone. Makes a great companion book for Shady Characters.

Three things I learned:

• No one cared about English grammar or spelling until the 18th century. I'd always heard that Shakespeare was a bad speller, or a rebellious speller, but that wasn't it at all: no one in his era cared about spelling very much, so however he wrote the words down, so long as their meaning was clear, was fine.
• At least part of our spelling problems come from using a 23-sound alphabet (the Latin one) to write a 40-phoneme language. The original runic script for writing English had 33 letters, which made it much easier to distinguish the blended th in thing from the separated th of masthead.
• Many of the differences in spelling between American English and British English (e.g., color vs colour) come from Noah Webster, who, in a spate of linguistic patriotism, wanted to give the new country its own English.

Decided to take two weeks off of writing. I’m one week in, and it’s only now that those writing muscles are starting to relax.

First few days I didn’t know what to do with myself. For five months now, all my free time has been given over to the novel. For the last two months, I’ve been spending half of each Saturday and Sunday on it as well.

So when I woke up on Saturday with nothing to do, I didn’t quite believe it. It’s like when you lost a tooth as a kid, and you kept sticking your tongue in the hole, even though the tooth’s gone and you know it’s gone. My mind kept wanting to remind me to get in there and write, but there was nothing to write, so it was just egging me on for nothing. Had to tell myself each time that I was done, that I’d finished the book, and I’d earned some time off.

Took me several days of repeating that to finally believe it. And only one day after that for my brain to start churning out ideas for the next book.

I’m not going to fight it, though. I’m going to gather the ideas as they come, jot them down, while taking at least one more week off. When my vacation’s over, I should have enough to start outlining the next book, and then we’ll start everything all over again.

I can’t wait.

A frustrating book, in multiple ways.

Frustrating because it’s good, it’s really good, for about 2/3 of the book. Like her novel Bellweather, Willis really nails the feeling of trying to get something meaningful done while working inside a vast uncaring bureaucracy. By putting me through the minutiae of the main character’s days – including her thoughts on trying to decide what to eat – Willis pulled me into that character’s head, and gave me just as much emotional stake in her research as she had.

Frustrating, too, because the payoff kept getting pushed out. All that daily minutiae means it takes a few hundred pages before anything really happens in the book, and another few hundred pages before the next event, and so on. The last hundred pages of the second third of the book I couldn’t stop reading, I had to find out what was going to happen. This was partly because of how involved in the character’s life I’d become, but also because it took those hundred pages for something to occur.

I can’t decide if that technique is completely unfair to the reader – certainly felt unfair to me at the time – or a master stroke of writing something so addicting it kept me reading long past the point of where I’d have dropped something else.

I did drop it, though. The main storyline basically ends with Part 2. Part 3 is just other characters scrambling to duplicate the main character’s research from Parts 1 & 2, and by that point I’d gotten so frustrated with the pacing that I just skimmed the rest to confirm my suspicions about the plot, and moved on.

So I’m taking this book as a warning for my own writing. I think my novel has grown to the length it has partly because of how much time I’ve spent in my main characters' heads, writing out their hopes and fears and internal debates. Looking at Passage, it’s a very powerful technique, but its use has to be balanced carefully against the action and dialogue that moves the story forward. Too much of it, and my story will become one long crawl upwards, with few drops or twists and turns to provide some release.

The novel’s done! It’s done it’s done it’s done it’s done!

Wrote the last 8,000 words or so in a white heat. Actually cried and shook at some of the things I was writing, at some of the pain the characters had to go through to get to the end.

But they made it, and so did I.

Going to take some time off writing and let my brain decompress…

Final word count: 139,528

No real blog post today as I focus on the novel.

Our intrepid protagonists are sharing a last meal together before they go to face the evil that’s been haunting Skallfast, and I can’t just leave them there :)

I need to see them, and this, through.

126,154 words.

One of the characters surprised me again this week, committing an act I didn’t think they’d get to in this book, and triggering the start of the climax in the bargain.

For two full days (and 4,000 words) of writing after that point, it was smooth sailing. Words poured out of me, and I felt like I could do it, I could finish, I knew where things were going and every step of the way there.

That momentum slowed on Monday, died completely on Tuesday, and hasn’t come back yet. I continue to churn out words, and I still know exactly where things are going as it starts the final climb toward the climax, but I feel like I’m pushing the narrative uphill for each step of that climb, word by word.

I know that I’ll get there. It’s only a matter of time now, of sitting down and writing each days 1,000 words until I reach that point. That doesn’t make the work any easier, or give me any confidence that the final product will be worth reading.

But I am going to finish, dammit. If it turns out to be crap, well, that’s what the second draft is for, right?

Having watched Superman and Superman II: The Donner Cut last year, and enjoyed them, my wife and I decided to skip over Superman III and IV and go straight to Superman Returns (which itself ignores the last two movies, and is set five years after Superman II).

I remember seeing it in 2006, when it came out, and thinking it was a terrible movie. Rewatching it now, I think I missed what Bryan Singer was trying to do: this is a 1970s movie made with 21st-century special effects, an attempt to capture the mood and feel of the first two movies that mostly succeeds.

I definitely prefer its version of Superman – who, while flying by to rescue someone during the climax, casually uses his heat vision to melt shards of falling glass, keeping them from hurting people on the sidewalk – to Man of Steel’s destructive hobo.

And in adopting the deliberate pacing of the earlier movies, it gives itself plenty of time to set up the relationships between Lois, Superman, Richard, and their son Jason that might have defined and deepened the sequels that (unfortunately) didn’t get made.

When Superman discovers he has a son, he’s presented with a unique challenge: he wants to be in his son’s life, and he needs to give his son guidance in the use of his growing powers, but he cannot reveal that he’s the boy’s father without destroying the life that Lois has built for herself while he was gone. That’s a great source of dramatic tension, and I wish we’d gotten to see more of it.

Much as I like it better this time around, two huge flaws still stood out to me: Lex Luthor’s evil plan, and the movie’s treatment of Kitty Kowalski (Luthor’s female companion).

Kitty is pulled right from the earlier films, a soft-hearted ditzy blonde that has no place in reality or in a modern movie. In some ways, she’s worse in this one, since the 70s version actually showed up Luthor a time or two, and her conscience led her to betray Luthor and save Superman. This Kitty is all tears and no action, a throwback to a more misogynistic period that should have been either updated or left out.

And Luthor’s plan – to destroy the Eastern seaboard to make room for his new continent – is simply ridiculous. I understand that Singer wanted to echo Luthor’s real-estate plan from the first movie, but they concocted something that was – frankly – dumb, and unworthy of a supposedly brilliant supervillain.

Instead, they should have had Luthor build his new islands somewhere in the Pacific, in the tropics, and set them up as new luxury vacation spots. Then the movie could have started after the islands were complete, and about to open for business. We drop in news stories in the background talking about the islands' opening, about Luthor’s reform story, about how world leaders are showing up to get a personal tour of his creation, and possibly license the technology themselves to solve their own land shortages. Then, we get Lois assigned to cover the opening ceremony (against her will), with her family going along for the “vacation” part of the experience.

Once everyone’s on the island and the ceremonies start, Luthor unveils the evil part of his plan: he holds the world leaders hostage, shows them how destructive his island tech can be, then tells them he’s got seed pods scattered offshore of New York, Hong Kong, St Petersburg, Tokyo, etc. He demands a large payment, lucrative contracts, and sovereignty over all the land that he might create. He threatens to detonate the seed pods if his demands are not met.

This gives us the same basic setup for the final sequence of the movie – Superman arrives at the islands only to find he’s powerless because they’re Kryptonite, his child can discover his strength by defending his mom against kidnappers, Lois can save Superman, who in return lifts the islands out in to space before Luthor can detonate the seed pods – but now Luthor is threatening worldwide destruction in order to get what he wants, instead of causing destruction in order to get nothing.

It’s a smarter plan, and it gives us dramatic possibilities the other doesn’t, like Luthor setting off two seed pods at once, both to show the world leaders what they can do and to make Superman choose which one to save. It also helps drive home how long Superman has been gone, if Luthor’s had time to get out of prison, discover the Fortress of Solitude, create the islands, and rehabilitate himself as a purveyor of luxury.

The novel’s grown to 118,051 words.

Where last week felt like plummeting down the tracks in a mining cart, this week has felt like the slow climb upwards that follows. I keep thinking of new projects I could be working on instead of this one, shiny objects to distract me from finishing.

Just these past few days I’ve thought of two new novels to write and an iOS game to build. I’ve even caught myself starting to write dialogue in the voice of the narrator from a third novel (also as yet unwritten) while daydreaming.

I have to keep forcing my attention back to the novel I’ve got, the novel that every day gets longer and every day I feel like I have less grasp of.

Telling myself its okay for the first draft to suck is dangerous now, because my other projects come rushing in, tempting me with their promise of perfection. I know none of them will be perfect in the end, but I want it, I want to write something brilliant and moving that people will remember when I’m gone. I feel like I can see the flaws in my current work all too clearly, and I these distractions are my unconscious way of doubting that it’s worth finishing.

Weaves together a history of the architecture, interior design, politics, and sociology of the office, from its rise in the countinghouses of the 19th century to the co-working spaces of the present. Made me want to re-watch Mad Men, this time to appreciate all the historical detail in the architecture and furniture that I missed before.

Out of the many things I learned from this book, three surprised me the most:

• Human Resources as a discipline was invented by Lillian Gilbreth, the wife of the couple Cheaper by the Dozen was based on. It's original name was Personnel Management, and it was based on the efficient workplace theories of Frederick Taylor.
• The Larkin Building in Buffalo, NY, one of the first office buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (in 1904), set all the precedents for Google's offices a hundred years later: rec areas, open floor plans, libraries, and outdoor spaces for employee relaxation.
• The cubicle farm came out of a 1968 design that was intended by its inventor (Robert Propst) to be a more flexible, individualized, office. In seeking to make something more human than the offices of the past, he inadvertently created the inhuman office of the future.

www.youtube.com/watch

That’s how I feel, like I’ve turned a corner in one of those old mining carts and found the tracks plunge down into the darkness. At the bottom, the climax is there, waiting for me. I couldn’t stop it happening now even if I tried.

So I’m holding on as best I can, gripping the sides of the cart as we hurtle down together, my characters and I. I only hope I can type fast enough to capture everything before we hit the bottom, and it’s all over.

Another novel that makes staring at a computer screen, thinking, seem more exciting than physical combat. But where Egan took me deep inside the protagonists' heads to generate that excitement, Grossman goes one level deeper, using second-person narration from the perspective of video game characters to take me down past the narrator playing the game and into the game itself. It’s a genius trick, and the fact that Grossman manages the transition between first and second person without jilting me out of the story is impressive.

To me, it’s an example of second-person done right. It contrasts with novels – such as Charles Stross' Halting State – that start out in second person, creating immediate dissonance between me and the story. I’ve never been able to get past the first few pages of Stross' novel, but devoured Grossman’s in a few days.

It also made me miss working in video games. Which is strange, considering how much time it spends describing game developers as ill-fed slobs that don’t have lives outside of work. But that feeling of belonging that the narrator talks about, of discovering where he was meant to be after years spent away from gaming, really hit home for me. The narrator’s descriptions of his childhood in the 80s, even though the character is 10 years older than me, still resonated.

That sense of something important happening when he first sat down in front of a computer, of being on the threshold of the future, didn’t happen to me at the time (I was 6, and not very self-aware), but it could have: I used our Commodore-128 to teach myself how to program, and spent many hours typing in machine language instructions from the back of Compute! magazine in the hopes of being able to play a new game. It didn’t feel like something that was only mine, and not for the adults, but it did feel natural, more so than almost anything else I’ve done, and it still does.

Despite everything it does right, You’s ending is unsatisfying for me. The climax of the book happens off-screen, and in the final few pages – that I tore through the rest of the book in desperation to reach – don’t resolve anything. Perhaps that makes the ending more realistic, but the lesson for me is twofold: first, show your climax. The reader’s earned it. Second, tie up most of the plot threads you weave into the novel by the end. Leave some of them, sure, but after so much time invested, the reader’s going to want to have some of the tension you’ve built up released. Ideally, showing your climax also releases the tension and resolves multiple conflicts – internal or external – at the same time.

107,187 words in.

I’ve heard other writers talk about how issues they didn’t know they had can show up in their writing, unbidden, like notes from an intimate therapy session suddenly posted on a public bulletin board. But I didn’t think that was happening to me until this morning, when I realized that my treatment of two of the male characters in the novel I’m working on echoes a pattern of behavior from my youth, which itself stems from how my father treated me when I was little.

It shocked me, to think that something I wrote pointed so directly to emotions and expectations that I didn’t know I had. I felt – I feel – very vulnerable now, as if when I finish the novel and hand it over to its first readers, they’ll be able to decode everything about my personality, know all the parts of my self I try to keep hidden in everyday life.

I don’t think I can stop feeling vulnerable, but I tell myself that being vulnerable is part of the writing, that putting these parts of myself down on the page is what makes the characters come alive, that any book that didn’t have more of me in it than I’m comfortable with probably isn’t worth writing. I could be lying to myself, but I hope it’s true.

A remarkable book. Covers not just the development of Keynes' and Hayek’s positions, but also how they developed in opposition to each other, then moves on to how their followers (both politicians and economists) have continued the argument over the past 70 years.

I’m not sure how balanced the book is. After reading it, my opinion of Keynes is much higher than it was before, and my opinion of Hayek is lower.

Hayek’s economic ideas come across as an obscure version of classical economics, neither very original or very influential. Hayek’s politics, the idea that any government intervention in the economy inevitably leads to fascism, has the whole of recorded history against it, with the last 70 years as a comprehensive refutation.

Keynes, on the other hand, invented the Bretton Woods system, and laid the foundation for the IMF and World Bank. His criticisms of the Paris Treaty that ended World War I led to the US policy of rebuilding Germany and Japan after World War II instead of trying to hold them down. Despite politician’s rhetoric, his economic and political ideas are the dominant ones in Western society, and have been since his death.

However, this interpretation of mine could be a result of my natural tendency toward Keynesian thinking, and not a result of any bias in the book. After all, followers of classical economics have been looking at exactly the same world as the Keynesians and coming to different conclusions for decades; perhaps from a Hayekian perspective this book proves just how prophetic he was?

In any case, it did show me the massive gaps in my understanding of the history of both men:

• Keynes pioneered the now-conservative idea that decreasing taxes is the same as spending money to stimulate the economy. In the US, it was first proposed as policy by Kennedy in 1962 to overcome a mini-recession, and the economic data support Keynes.
• Keynes invented the discipline of macroeconomics, which is partly to blame for why he and Hayek disagreed so violently: they were really working in different disciplines.
• Milton Friedman, Hayek's biggest supporter, actually first adopted Keynesian economics, only rejecting them after his study of the causes of the Great Depression in the US. It was Hayek's politics, not his economics, that Friedman and the conservative establishment of the UK and US adopted.

You’d think that after 97,867 words I’d have things pretty well plotted out by now, that I’d know everything the characters are going to say and what they’re going to do.

Far from it. Instead, this far in I find myself knowing what my characters want, and what situations they’re going to have to deal with next. But I don’t know how they’re going to deal with it, or how things will play out, until after it’s written.

Early on, this terrified me. What if what I write is terrible? What if I contradict myself? What if I set them free and they totally derail my plot and everything ends up in shambles?

This past week, though, it’s actually helped me relax and just write. How will they get out of this problem? I dunno, let them solve it. How will they convince this character to help them out? No idea, let’s see if they find a way.

It sounds creepy and weird to say it, like I’ve got multiple personalities crawling around in my brain. But I swear to you, earlier this week one of the characters turned to the other and said the solution to a problem that I’d been wrestling with since November, and it was better than anything I’d come up with. Gave me chills to write it out.

I hope it keeps happening, all the way to the end. It makes the act of writing a little more like an act of discovery, something akin to an improv performance, with me both on the stage saying lines and standing on the sidelines watching.

It’s fun, and I don’t know how long this feeling will last, but I’m going to enjoy it while it does.

As I thought watching the first one, this sequel is a better movie in all respects: a better villain, with a better plot, and with better companions for Watson and Holmes.

In particular, I think this movie handles Holmes' sacrifice at the Falls perfectly. Using Holmes' calculated-combat trick here is sheer mastery: we get a physical climax which is reflective of the combatant’s mental sparring – especially when Moriarty gets into the act – and we still get the proper climax of Holmes throwing himself off the falls, legs wrapped around Moriarty, sacrificing himself for the greater good. The fact that we haven’t seen Holmes' calculated combat since the start of the movie lends this scene extra weight; we’ve been waiting for them to repeat the gimmick from the first movie, so this is a payoff on multiple levels.

Altogether I think Jared Harris makes a brilliant Moriarty, easily my favorite on film, and second only to the portrayal of Moriarty in tv’s Elementary. He’s threatening and clever and cultured, all at once, with a calm exterior that belies a rage bubbling up underneath. He’s not surrounded by stupid minions that have to be cursed every five minutes, he’s surrounded himself with other master criminals, all working to implement his well-thought-out schemes. I don’t think he raises his voice once in the movie, and yet everything he says feels like the important words of a powerful man.

As for the other rough edges from the first movie – the extended action sequences and Irene Adler – those have been polished out.

Adler’s death early on removes a weak actor while lending Holmes' character more depth and giving him – and therefore us – a personal stake in what had been, till then, a very abstract criminal plot.

The extended mass fight pieces have been entirely cut. We get one acrobatic sequence with Holmes, Madam Simza, and the Cossack, and then the flight sequence where everyone is fleeing the factory. But neither of these degenerate into the general face-punch-kick-ouch-hold-turn-kick tedium from the first movie. The flight sequence in particular is a fantastic use of slow-down effects and running the actors at a different speed from their surroundings to give us a good sense of what’s happening and convey some of the otherwordliness of being on the receiving end of an artillery barrage in that era.

Browsing iTunes this weekend, I realized there were no recent movies that I wanted to watch, only televison shows.

This was weird for me. For most of my life, movies were better than television. If you had a choice between watching a movie or watching a TV show, you chose the movie. But these days, more and more I find I’m either not interested in the movies that are being released, or that they’ve gotten such bad reviews that I’m not willing to risk the money on them. Instead, I find myself firing up Hulu or Netflix to pick from the plethora of television shows that I’ve been wanting to try.

I think this is a sign of something deeper: television has replaced movies as film’s long-form narrative. Where it used to be each TV episode was a short story, now they’re a chapter in the longer narrative arc of the season. Television is the novel of film, and movies - with less screen time, plus the need to be a complete story within one viewing - are looking more and more like short stories.

And just as the novel is now the dominant form of written fiction - it pays writers better, and it gives readers a longer sustained narrative - I think television will become the dominant form of film.

I think one sign that it’s already happening is that both Amazon and Netflix chose to make TV shows, rather than movies, when they wanted to become studios that generated their own content. Presumably they ran the numbers and decided a long-running television series would make the best return on their investment.

Another is that we’re already seeing both actors and writers talking about working for TV as preferable because of the steadiness of the paycheck and the ability it gives them to explore or inhabit characters longer.

When the people making the art come to prefer working in one medium rather than the other - for whatever reason - you’re going to see most of the new, exciting art come out in that medium.

That’s what it feels like. The novel’s at 91,183 words, and I feel like things are clicking into place. All of the main characters are on the stage, and most of the minor ones as well, pursuing their goals, chasing each other toward the climax of the book. All I have to do is write them into place.

That makes it sound a little too easy. I still have doubts. I keep writing scenes that I think I’ll need to come back and fix in the next draft. I see plot threads that I might be dropping on the way to the finish line.

But I’m at the point where the momentum I’ve built up is finally pushing me forward, where even if I don’t know the exact path things will take from here to the end, I can see the end coming, taking shape out of the gloom.

Very hard to characterize or sum up in any way. She’s stuffed it with essays, stories from her life growing up and working in comedy, commentary on social issues, real photos and fake letters.

It’s top to bottom fantastic, but let me try to pull out three of my favorite parts:

• Her chapter on getting older and the superpowers you acquire made me look forward to turning 40.
• Her detailing of the lifetime of work it took to get to where she is - that it takes for anyone to "make it" in show business - made me want to be even more supportive to the friends I have that are trying to build that body of work as sketch comedians or screenplay writers.
• Her "heart" and "brain" apology letters made me hear exactly how insincere I sound when I try to apologize to, but still win an argument with, my wife. I need to give up thoughts of winning and be vulnerable enough to be truly sorry.

Interesting little book. I finished it in just over an hour, swallowing the thing whole. Part of that was the breezy style, part of it was how similar most of Kleon’s advice is to what I’ve read elsewhere.

Three things that were new to me:

• Most great artists - and the majority of good ones - are embedded in a scene, a group of other artists that create, share, and respond to each other's ideas. Previously this meant moving to a city and getting involved in its local culture, but today it can mean joining any group of like-minded creators online.
• The way to ensure you don't overshare is to always be pointing to the work of others and celebrating it.
• Instead of taking breaks between projects, go from one straight into another, constantly moving from work to work. To keep from burning out, take sabbaticals every decade or so, long breaks where you walk away from doing finished projects to daydream and doodle. But during your working periods, don't pause for breath: finish one project, and start another immediately after.

83,438 words. Still not done.

Close to, but not quite, 5,000 words more than last week. Well shy of the 90,000 words I wanted to have done by the end of this month.

If I manage to crank out 3,000 words today, and do a marathon session of 4,000 words tomorrow, I might just make 90K. I’ll have finally caught up with the flu week, but only if I steal 4 hours or so away from chores and errands.

And even then, I probably won’t be done.

I’m into the latter third of the book, but only a few hours into the final day. There’s so much left to have happen, so many events that also need description and character insight and reactions and justifications and dialogue, that…I think I might not be done till I reach 100,000 words, or more.

On the one hand: hooray for the little story that could, the story I thought would be over so fast I’d have to write three of them to hit the 50K word mark for NaNoWriMo.

On the other: ye gods, I can’t wait for this thing to be done.

I’ve refrained from reviewing fiction on the blog for two reasons: first, I don’t want to have to issue spoiler alerts for the books I want to talk about, and second out of a (possibly misplaced) sense of professional curtesy; as a writer who wants to be published professionally, I don’t want to be seen as being overly critical of those whose ranks I wish to join.

I’m breaking my self-imposed rule now because I realized there’s a way to talk about the fiction I read without indulging in spoilers or going too negative. Instead of discussing the overall quality of the book, like a normal reviewer, I’m going to talk about what I’ve learned from it about the art of writing. Like studying Frank Lloyd Wright buildings for architects, or replicating how Van Gogh made his own colors for painters, I think each book, each short story I read can teach me about the writing craft.

Take Permutation City, a book I finished recently. It’s an older science fiction work - published in 1994 - recommended by Jo Walton in her What Makes This Book So Great? compendium of fantasy and sci-fi reviews. What did it teach me?

It supports the idea that the real strength of the novel (as opposed to film or tv) is the ability to completely describe a character’s thoughts and dreams in addition to their actions. Novels can take you deep inside someone else’s head, something that tv and film can’t really do. It’s something Egan proves a master at, using it to make what on film would be just a character staring at some shapes moving on a screen into some of the most compelling parts of the story. In contrast, the more traditional “action” parts of the story aren’t as interesting or exciting.

It offers a rebuttal to my (recent) idea that often the details of something don’t matter, that character and plot can carry you through even when you’ve got the science (or the law, or the traditions) wrong. I’ve been using this idea to explain why I still enjoy shows that have dodgy physics or loose legal systems (Arrow, Forever).

But Permutation City has a huge crack running through the middle of the narrative, a place where it gets the details so wrong that the only way the plot can proceed is if you take a leap of faith along with the author, disregarding a lot of what we know about the physical world and how computers work. It’s a leap of faith I couldn’t make, and it divides the book into a well-detailed, well-thought-through portrait of the mid-21st century and a second half that, for me, might as well have been a discussion of angels dancing on the head of a pin.

Perhaps if the novel had built that leap of faith in from the beginning, I might not have felt the fracture? In any case, I’m taking it as a warning, a sign that sometimes getting the details wrong (or perhaps poor timing of certain details?) robs well-drawn characters and intricate plots of their power.