Day: August 10, 2005

One Click Away

elvisLeave a comment

Whirlbrain, one of those lovely people I know only as another blogger, but whom I’m glad to know, hits it right on the fucking head.It’s funny, that blog depression thing, silly as it is, distills something floating in the ether for a lot of us who’ve been blogging for a while.

Whirlbrain, one of those lovely people I know only as another blogger, but whom I’m glad to know, hits it right on the fucking head.

It’s funny, that blog depression thing, silly as it is, distills something floating in the ether for a lot of us who’ve been blogging for a while. Something about the point where the blog stops being an outlet and starts being something else, a frustration, a responsibility.

We always say to each other, like some twelve-step sponsor saying no don’t take a drink, ‘don’t stop, just take a break.’ But there’s the need to make some stupid self-destructive gesture. It’s not the stopping we want, it’s the feeling of putting a bullet in its head.

But that’s the sort of pointless thing we all know is stupid even as we say it.

Still, I understand. I’ve had moments. I’ve twice taken my blog down in rage and frustration, moved it all aside, a mental ‘to be deleted’ tag on the files. One ‘rm blog/*‘ command from nuking the files, one click of the ‘delete this blog’ button. I know I won’t do it, I’ve deleted work before and always, always regretted it. But there’s that moment, like a bridge jumper thinking I could, but today I won’t.

There’s empty beauty in pointless gestures. Silent sorrow in empty boats.

Authors who make you crazy

elvisLeave a comment

I’ve been waiting for GRR Martin’s A Feast for Crows for – hell, it seems like a decade. It’s the fourth book in his phenomenal A Song of Ice and Fire.I just read that he’s done, and I went looking to see when my book will ship.

Dammit.

I’ve been waiting for GRR Martin‘s A Feast for Crows for – hell, it seems like a decade. It’s the fourth book in his phenomenal A Song of Ice and Fire.

I just read that he’s done, and I went looking to see when my book will ship. And found this.

In short, the damned guy has written such a fucking brick that his publishers demanded he split it. Which is a great idea, I hate reading a total brick of a book. Only, he decided to do it his own fucking way, and instead of slicing it down the middle, he split it along character lines.

This epic has many POV (Point of View) characters, shifting by chapter from character to character. Martin’s so good that this works, though sometimes you wind up waiting to get back to your favorites.

Here, he split it such that this book has one set of POV characters, and the NEXT has the other. So now we have to wait another, what, five years to get back to the characters he left out of crows.

Grumble. Grumble.

If these books were not so goddamned good, I wouldn’t care. But it’s already been so long I forget what was happening; I’ll have to go read the whole series again, or hope for a complete plot synopsis. I’ll then devour the new one, like with Harry Potter, reading it as fast as I can. And then I’ll be done with it and have the eternal wait start again.

Go read A Song of Ice and Fire. Some of the best fantasy ever. But wait until the last book is out. Martin will make you crazy otherwise…