Thursday, 13 December 2001

I haven't gotten much writing done. Jackie and I have been watching movies. We watched "Rio Bravo" last night and "Harold and Maude" tonight. Both great movies.

Watching "Harold and Maude" helped me figure out what was wrong with the hospital story I got stuck on a few days ago. My vision of the story was something like "Harold and Maude;" it was the story of a broken man who is healed. The problem is, my hero is not sufficiently broken, so it doesn't affect the reader when he is healed. My subconscious was even trying to help: When the story veered off-course the last day I was working on it, it was trying to wreck the hero's life. From a story point of view, though, it's not useful to wreck the hero's life at that point, unless the story is going to be a lot longer than I'd planned.

I'm falling behind in my reading. I'm in the middle of both Dracula and Perdido Street Station. I also got two issues of Interzone (October and November) just two days apart. And the most recent Asimov's just arrived, so I had to read the Geoff Landis story immediately and the Charles Stross story right after. And lurking underneath those are all the things I was about to read before those came. I don't really mind; it's much better to have lots to read than not enough. It's just a sign that I need to clear some time over the weekend and get some reading done.

I may not have been writing much, but I am getting ideas and filing them away. It's sometimes hard to resist running with each new idea as it comes along. As long as I can resist, though, it's good incentive to finish things.