Day update

Okay, today I mostly sat sadly looking at Chapter Two and thinking about how I am not very good at writing or thinking, and I will never be able to write the book I want to write. But, I just looked at what I did today, and I've actually done quite a lot to transform the draft of Chapter Two - it doesn't look at all like it did when I started, and I have a better idea of the shape of it - so I'm sternly reminding myself that I am getting somewhere.

Also, I'm getting into quite a good routine, where I write in the mornings, taking tai chi breaks every now and again, and then read after lunch. Having a specified time to stop writing works to block some of the head-voices which are trying to make me sit at the computer berating myself for laziness and stupidity until I suddenly write the whole thing in one sudden flash of genius (that's not a strategy that works, I've found).

Also also, I should be congratulated for doing any work at all when the new Diana Wynne Jones novel arrived in the post this morning. I haven't even opened it yet (well, only to read the blurb on the dust-jacket).

And finally also, I figured out who it is I want to write like - it's Tom Cho, of course!

Damnit, though, because I never will. Tom writes sentences like:

But there is something in the way that discussions of popular culture can bring people together and thus our discussion soon leads to Johnny and I having sex.

(from his story 'Dirty Dancing', extract online here)

and, left to myself, I write sentences like:

There was something still about him, as if the rage that had driven him fast and hard through all of last year had gone into the darkness with Sirius and been lost; he looked bony and smudged and watchful.

which, as you'll notice, is basically nothing but adjectives. Oh well. nec vero terrae ferre omnes omnia possunt, I guess. (That's from the Georgics; it means something like 'Not every piece of earth can bear every crop'.)