The gods have a name.
Wow, this thing kind of ground to a halt, didn't it? I suppose it's safe to say that I was a little blown out of the water by the Solaris going on sale thing. It rearranged a lot of the plans I had made for this year, and it was a year I had arranged very carefully. But I've been reading, and playing videogames, and monitoring developments. Some good, some bad. It'll all settle out and there's nothing more I can do right now. But waiting? I'm one of those people who doesn't wait well. I can be patient, I can play slow games, I can keep the long eye. But just sitting, with nothing much to be done to advance my cause? It does poorly with me.
I am working on something else, though. That sucks more than I can tell you. Veridon took a while to make, and while I've been fiddling around with this other thing for a couple years now, it's not like I sat down and really grinded at it. I'm grinding. But I don't even have names for places, or people, or cities. None of that stuff. Just ideas of what these places are, and what sort of people might occupy them, and what those people might do with their time.
On the radio this morning I heard that this is the start of national Act Happy week. So I thought you should know, you know, that I'm doing okay. I'm getting through.
posted by Tim Akers @ 12:07 PM
2 Comments:
The kind of trouble you're in with this new book is the exactly the right kind of trouble for a writer to be in. To re-post something Chris Roberson just dug up, here's what Alan "I'm More Eccentric than My Own Creations" Moore has to say on the subject:
"It is much more exciting and thus creatively energizing if you are attempting something where you are uncertain of its outcome, where you don't know if it will work or not. And this is only the beginning. Eventually, increasingly confident of your talents to make a workable story out of most anything, you will come to regard being merely unsure of a work's outcome as far too facile an approach. Instead, you may graduate to only attempting works which you privately suspect to be impossible. This is no bad thing, and if rigorously applied would weed out a great many dull and repetitive creators from the world while at the same time increasing the world's relatively meager cache of genuine unexpected marvels."
http://www.chrisroberson.net/ramble.html
Well after the concerns about 'Realms of Fantasy' going kaput it looks like it's being bought now; hopefully the same will happen with Solaris.
Choosing names for people and places always strikes me as a curious art; euphony aside, it's presumably mostly a case of creating the right resonances through a kind of autosuggestion. In my own scribblings I've often found it can take a while - yet once a name is right I know it straight away.
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