Reading
I might have gone a little crazy. I had a lot of holds at the library, and though some of them said they had weeks until they’d get to me, they all arrived at once. I wrapped the dust jacket back on Dangerous Women (which is me setting the book aside for a bit). I went to the library and picked up Dark Matter by Blake Crouch, Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire, and The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Muramaki.
I started with The City… because it was the longest. This novel concerns a teenager whose girlfriend goes missing. The boy grows up and ends up in a fantastical city that his girlfriend introduced to him. It’s standard Murakami fair. I’m a fan of his work. I’ve read every single one of his novels and short story collections at least once, and his non-fiction title What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a delight. So I was surprised when I dropped this book 30 pages in. It felt too much like I was reading Hardboiled Wonderland again, and Murakami’s writing style doesn’t dazzle me the way it used to. This novel seems to be well-received by Murakami fans. I’m going to take the advice of a few of the dissenting opinions on Goodreads: re-read an old Murakami to soothe your soul.
Next I read Dark Matter. This novel concerns a physicist who’s abducted and wakes up in a world that isn’t quite like his own. He spends the novel trying to get back to his world. I finished this one in 3 days. It was a propulsive, cinematically-plotted novel, with short paragraphs and punchy sentences. This is the third Blake Crouch novel I’ve read, and while I thought Upgrade was okay, I really liked Recursion. With Blake Crouch, you kind of know what you’re getting, and I was along for the ride.
Next I read Come Tumbling Down, the fifth novella in Seanan’s McGuire’s Wayward Children series. I liked this one well enough, but I think I’m starting to get burned out on the characters and the writing. I do want to continue this series, but I think I’ll be taking a break from it and coming back to it when I start to miss it.
I haven’t read The Bear and the Serpent in a while, but now that my schedule is clear, I’m going to focus on it.
Writing
I had my critique group look at the first half of my story about magi. They loved it, and had only a few comments to make. I was honestly shocked that it received such a positive reception. It was a story I wrote very quickly without a plan, making it up as I went along. I usually don’t do that; I’m very much a careful plotter, even for short stories.
I did a couple of things differently this time. I ran the story through an online proofreader (the one I used was Pro Writing Aid). I’m usually skeptical of these websites, not because I don’t think they work, but because I’m paranoid that the story I pasted into the proofreader will now be used to train AI. I used Pro Writing Aid to specifically look for passive voice, something that I struggle with. It found several instances which I changed to active voice.
Next, I used this article about filter words, which are words that add extraneous actions that interrupt the flow of the story. They break the cardinal rule: show, don’t tell. I did a “find” in my document for the specific filter words and analyzed them on a case-by-case basis, tweaking sentences when they needed a tweakin’. I think this went really far in making my story readable and enjoyable to my group. I might try to come up with a different way of searching for passive voice in my stories so I’m not unwittingly training our future overlords.
I decided to resurrect an old horror novel idea I had a few years ago and see where it takes me. I’m in the brainstorming phase currently, sitting in silence and writing plot points, character details, and worldbuilding notes into a spiral notebook. This part of the process is always very fun and exciting, because I just get to play. I write out scenes that may or may not happen in the book at all, but they’re a fun exercise to see where my brain goes.
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What have you been reading and/or writing this week? Let me know in the comments below.
The Night Bulletin 