Fiction Book Reviews

(Great topic, huh? Especially since the only thing I seem to be keeping up with this this “feature”. I WILL WRITE MORE BOOK REVIEWS SOON. I PROMISE. …Just as soon as I finish my gorram thesis…)

Last November, a number of my friends participated in NaNoWriMo, something I’d sort of been meaning to do for a couple years but never had because I was always just too busy. (Objections about quality aside, NaNo would be a great way for me to focus on content and maybe learn to ignore my inner editor for a while, ’cause…as much as I love writing, my inner editor tends to be a lot louder than my inner writer. Or my muse.) This past year was definitely no different–I was on a semester abroad in England, and even though I had fewer classes than I’m used to and ostensibly less to do, I still had a bunch of major assignments I at least should have been working on, and travel coming up, and…stuff. You know how it goes.

Instead I joined WriSoMiFu , a sort of poor-man’s NaNo in that it only demanded you write something (well, the name means “Write Something, You Miserable F***”, so  yeah), whatever that something might be, for 10 minutes a day. It was a  great community,  actually, and even though I didn’t participate as much as I wanted to, it was at least a good way to track how much writing I was actually doing, since I could count things like blog entries, e-mails, and academic writing, as well as the fiction writing I actually would have done for NaNo. People in the community were awesome, too, really supportive at every check-in to people who were actually making real progress, and to people like me who…weren’t.

The really unfortunate thing was that I didn’t keep going with it at the end of the month. I meant to–I know several others in the community said that they planned to keep up whatever writing commitment they’d made, for 200 words or ten minutes or whatever. I meant to, even if it was just for my today.com blogs, which…well, if you’re following me, you know how that went. >_<

Anyway, I’m not sure how much my writing schedule actually changed when I was doing WriSoMiFu, but it was a terrific way to realize that I was doing more writing than I thought, even if I wasn’t writing as much fiction as would be ideal. Probably it would be smart if I started doing that again, or rewarding myself for every x words, or making myself sit down for a certain amount of time and just write, or…something. But that’s me and my lack of organization, I guess. How about you? Do you have any kind of schedule to keep you on track, something to make sure you get everything done on time–school assignments, fiction, freelance articles? And if you’re one of the hardy few who successfully fought through NaNo at least once, how’d you do it? (I’m guessing “stayed up until ungodly hours of the night frantically trying to hit my word count” will be a popular answer.)

(In an effort to get myself to write in here more regularly even when I don’t have time for a book review, I figured I’d start a weekly feature where I talk about matters of craft and style in writing, mostly because that’s one thing I can almost always ramble about easily.)

I had a professor who liked to talk about economy of language. Whether he was as much a good example of this as one might imagine from how much he emphasized it, I’ll leave to your imaginations, but it’s an important thing to remember for any kind of writing…and it’s not exactly something I’m good at. (You might notice just how long some of these entries are.) I go on and on forever in my blogs or any other casual-writing environment; I often find myself butting up against the maximum word limit in my papers (and then there are the times when I deliberately use more words to say what I need to because I need to hit the minimum word count). (more…)