By a strange coincidence, a virus felled me the day after I saw the movie Contagion. That was bad enough, but the topper was that for a couple days, I was too sick to even read. You can only sleep so much, and with my need for glasses, it’s not easy watching television lying down. And writing—even to just think the words—fuhgeddaboutit!
So, as much as I hate the word bored, I have to say I was. I kept thinking about that Twilight Zone episode where the man who wants only to be left alone with his books, gets his wish, but then isn’t able to read because he breaks his glasses. Hell, indeed. Today, I’m about 90% back to normal.
When I could read again, I finished The Help, which I’d started before I got sick, and read a little more of another one, Joy for Beginners, which I’d started over a month ago, but set aside.
For the record, I loved The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which I mentioned in a previous post. I was astounded to learn the degree to which one woman’s cells have been instrumental in worldwide medical and biological research for over fifty years. My only reserve is discomfort over the way the author chose to portray Henrietta’s family.
I also loved The Help. It’s been a long time since I read a book of that length so quickly. I hope to see the movie soon, though I’ve heard it’s not as good as the book. Typical. I try not to read reviews before I read a book, so afterward I was surprised to read negative remarks written as though the reader expected The Help to be more history than fiction.
Despite what the cover says, Joy for Beginners is not constructed as a traditional novel, and eventually I found it less frustrating to read it as a collection of connected short stories. The writing is pretty. The reason I’m taking so long to finish the book is that I don’t care enough about the characters.
As for Contagion, it was a disappointment. The acting was good, the story premise good, the execution of that premise, not good. It started out well, developed a bit, but then waned, and finally, fizzled out. Gee. I seem to be doing nothing but blogging reviews lately, or rather opinions—which is exactly how you should view them.
I don’t really have much to say about writing because I’m sort of stumbling around again. This is a list of the writing problems I encountered this month:
- I kept changing my mind on which book to work on first. (Solved … I think.)
- I lost sight of writing for myself and started wondering what readers would think.
- I started worrying about who I’ll get to beta read and how I can pay an editor.
In short, I’ve been fussing and fighting with writing, but not doing much of it. I have one more novel to read, and then I’m hanging up my library card for a while, so I can do what I’m supposed to do. Write. Right?
And yes, sometimes, I’m just putting it off. For weeks, I’ve been saying I need to get down to serious work on my next novel, and yet here I am saying it again. I do have legitimate Real Life distractions. And I’m still working out some plot points in the back of my mind, so maybe not all is lost. Still, in part, I’m just wasting time. I find myself making lists. Most of these are to-do lists, which I know, even as I make some of them, I may never look at again.
Her life was in chaos. She created order out of a thousand one-inch pieces because she could not, was not ready to create a new order in her life. As her hands worked, her mind let go. As much as possible, she ignored the present, even listening to WWII music, the music of her youth, the music she danced and sang to before my father entered her life.
You never know what you’ll find when you clean house. I have now made it most of the way around my “workroom.” This is where I write, do genealogy research, make jewelry, draw, and do whatever else requires a big table or a computer. Every inch of this room is occupied. Also in this room are two deep closets crammed with … well, a lot of stuff. I’ve now cleaned and organized those two closets.
On two of the disks, I found some of my old writing files, and I’m working up the nerve to open them. Others are files from the first two online critique groups I belonged to in 2000. As soon as I saw the writers’ names, I remembered the plots of the books they were working on at the time. I did some research and found out that, of the three writers I worked most closely with in those groups, two of them have been published and the third mentors other published writers.
