Reading
I listened to The Silver Chair, the fourth book in the Chronicles of Narnia series by CS Lewis. This one was a weird one. Instead of following the four main characters from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy), we follow one of the characters from the previous book, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustice Scrubb & one of his schoolmates, Jill Pole.
They enter Narnia after asking for Aslan the Lion’s help in combating bullies, but Aslan informs them that he called them on a mission to save the son of Prince Caspian who has been missing for ten years. As I was reading this, I couldn’t shake the impression that Aslan kidnapped these kids to do his dirty work. Jill makes it very apparent that she doesn’t really want to be in Aslan’s world, and he intimidates her into saying yes to this “mission.”
The school the kids go to is another amusing feature of this story. It’s called Experiment House, and it’s clearly a criticism of secular education to the Christian-minded Lewis. It’s charmingly outdated, but it didn’t bother me when it came to my enjoyment of the story.
I also finished The Hyena and the Hawk, the concluding volume in the Echoes of the Fall trilogy by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I can’t talk much about this without spoiling it, but I really enjoyed the conclusion to this series. In this final volume, we have all of our main characters joining together to fight an existential battle for the fate of their world against an inscrutable and violent enemy. I really like the writing style in this novel, even though I’ve seen negative reviews criticizing it. It has the quality of a fable, and some sentences take more work to parse out than others. It is by no means a difficult book, but it’s unlike most fantasy that is being written now. I’d definitely recommend it if you’re looking for something different.
I’m continuing my audiobook of The Towers of Midnight, which I’m listening to exclusively on my commute to and from work. I’m about 20% of the way through, and should be done in the next few weeks.
After finishing The Hyena and Hawk, I started The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey. This is a re-read for me, so I’m super excited to see how my perception of it has changed over the years. The book is a classic, following a group of eco-terrorists as they destroy infrastructure that is spoiling the natural beauty of the American Southwest. It became a seminal text in the early environmental movement, and has remained controversial for its comic celebration of criminal activity. I think the book is a fun read, and if you don’t take it too seriously, you’ll have a great time. Let’s see if that impression holds up.
Writing
I have written very little this week, and that’s because I’m trying to find a new writing schedule. Mornings have become unusable. By the time I get in the zone, I have to start work. I have trouble refocusing on my writing once my day job takes hold of my attention. Instead of trying to squeeze 45-60 minutes of writing in every morning, I’m going to try to write for 2 hours 2 days a week. That means I should be writing for the same amount of time every week. Currently, my plan is to steal one weekday evening to write and write on Saturdays for a couple of hours as well. This seems less daunting than it sounds, because now I have to only block out 2 times a week instead of 4-5. Let’s see how this new routine goes.
Unfortunately, the word counter will be missing this week, as I’ve actually lowered the amount of words in the manuscript. That doesn’t mean I wrote nothing; I actually wrote a few pages in my new first chapter, taking the story in a more interesting direction straight away. I also deleted an entire chapter, which is why the word count dropped. This might keep happening over the next few weeks before I catch up to my previous self and can start moving the story forward once more. Stay tuned for that.
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What have you been reading and/or writing this week? Let me know in the comments below.
The Night Bulletin 