A few questions I have gotten from all 15 or so of you who read this blog:
“What’s the process for writing an entry?”: I read a thing, and take notes on it. I use a kindle for most of my reading, and take notes on a ‘remarkable’ tablet. This gadget nonsense is an affliction I inherited from my father; there’s zero need to use a fancy tablet for note-taking, but hey, it works. I choose these devices instead of a phone or general-use tablet as they only do the thing that they do; there are no notifications or other nonsense to distract me. My notes are a way to remember character names and a general outline of a plot— I’ll flip through the book as I write the essay that goes with it, with the notes as a guide. I make an effort to connect what I am reading about with some other thing, jumble them up, and relate them back together. Most of the long entries on this blog are the result of two and a half drafts; the “half” largely being cleanup of gramatical errors or fixing tone or removing redundancies. I don’t keep track of how much time it takes to produce an entry.
“Are you going to write a book/are you working on a book?” : 1) about what? 2) who’s going to read it? 3) who’s going to publish it? I used to write fiction in college; I was very good at coming up with characters, and not very good at figuring out things for them to do. So I was like a shitty Virginia Woolf. As for non-fiction— well, maybe something will suggest itself at some point, but at that point I’d be concerned about putting that much time and effort into a thing and would want someone to publish it. Yeah, I know self-publishing exists, but I am too lazy and too busy to promote it adequately. I’d like to think that this blog will get an audience organically, but it’s already a strange specialist blog written by someone who doesn’t want to stick to the plot. A book by the same author isn’t going to get published.
“What’s the deal with spoilers?” : I’ve never felt that learning the plot of something ruins it. I don’t understand or relate to the idea of ‘spoilers’ very well. I’ll respect someone’s boundaries in a conversation if they don’t want to know a thing, but this is my place to think thoughts about things, and those thoughts involve the guts of stories. That’s it.
What I am reading:
“Vamphiri!”— Brian Lumley. Carryover from last week, so far it’s not as lurid as the last one. There’s a whole lot of backstory.
“Blindsight”— Peter Watts. It wasn’t my intent to read two vampire novels at once, but apparently I am reading two vampire novels at once. This one is about space vampires. But it’s also apparently about philosophical concepts, so we shall see. From the context in the book thus far ‘vampire’ is more a term of art than an undead being who doesn’t drink… wine. But we shall see.
I’m not even a big fan of vampires, I swear. There’s a tendency to make them super overpowered until it’s convenient for some weakness to end them. I will give Brian Lumley credit for not falling into this trap. His vampires are just really hard to kill symbiotes.
I’ll also at some point read Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom” as part of my upcoming “Bottom’s Dream” read, I guess. More on that later.
The Lithole 