A Dance with Dragons

Gloomy Monday here in Mexico City, a perfect day for staying in bed reading or writing, or for fighting an ear infection!

Books

This week I finished reading A Dance with Dragons, book 5 of George R.R. Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire. I have to be honest about this one, after the 4th book, my expectations were not really high for this book, and the notoriety the series had gotten made believe that this would not be a very good book, just some more fodder before the conclusion of the series came. I was mistaken. The book is just magnificent. It is balanced and well written, like all of the series has been so far, but the scheming and the plotting is reduced and the action is what drives this book. I will not slip any spoilers but suffice to say, this is one of the best books I have ever read. The richness of the characters is superb, the vastness of the world coupled with the different types of food, dress and customs make Westeros one of those worlds where you can easily loose yourself and visualize, and feel and taste everything that characters are experiencing. A fine piece of art and an even better piece of literature,

I will read A Way of Kings and Blood Noir this week, so I will keep everyone posted on that front.

Writing

Writing was stalled to a dead stop while was on vacation, being in the pool with the kids from sunup until sundown is really tiring, and if you add the fact that I had a book to read, my priorities got a little screwed up. I did manage to write a simple outline for another story, featuring a character my two year old invented for himself, so I will probably work on that during the week. The other two stories I have already written on my head are itching to come out onto paper, but I will rein in the devils and will only write their outlines as I work on the chapters of the novel I am currently working on. The Druid's Grove is not to be denied and I am too far into the process of writing it to just let it go and begin writing the other two novels I want to write. Also, a lot of short stories have popped into my mind but will have to wait until I finish working on the one I want to submit to a contest.

My problem has always been procrastination, I am easily distracted. I only have the afternoons to write, but it is also a time to unwind from work, to be with the kids or to finish up any work left from the office, so time is precious and I have not been doing a good job of managing it, until now.

I am truly invested in my writing and I am finding new ways of staying focused and using the time I have productively, so I am certain that the first draft chapters of the novel will be finished before the year ends. That is my deadline and I will stay true to it. Two more short stories should be done and sent as well and the outlines for the other stories should be well underway. I am one of those that needs to set realistic goals and deadlines to function properly, I need to be driven by the deadlines, and that has been working wonders for me this year, I have gone up from roughly writing 1,000 words daily, to almost 2,000 and even though not everything goes into the draft, the exercise of writing has been liberating and exhausting and rewarding. Chapter one is almost done. In my head it is, on paper it is not.

I know that sometimes I am too stubborn when writing a chapter or a scene, because I want the beginning of each to be perfect, and I loose those the creative thread because my vision of how things should be is not consistent with what the story needs the beginning to be. For example, on the prologue, I wanted it to be a about Moonthrust and not about Pentholas, even though most of what I had written about it had Pen as the main character of the scene. So I labored for a couple of days trying to fit the new way of writing the scene with the way it was meant to be written. It has been the same with Chapter 1, but I noticed my stubbornness earlier, so I just let the scene I had detailed in my overview flow and the results have been better, both in terms of the writing and of the content. I wont try to make the scene perfect by adding new stuff to it, the scene felt perfect when it was constructed, so this is a typical case of less being more, and not the other way around.

Games

This week I plan to finish off FF VII, I am already on the last part of Disc 2, so it wont be long now. On the other hand, my fascination with Guild Wars has grown the more I have played it, and the more I have played I have reduced my time of writing. I have to understand that in the future, I might be able to spend all the time I want playing, but this is not that time. So, I will still play Guild Wars, and I will play the Star Wars MMO as well, but I will not play if my allotted time for writing is used up.

Series

We are almost done with Firefly, a series that I truly don't want to end, and will be done with Game of Thrones in a week or two. Camelot and the Borgias are next.

See you all next week!