The next batch of words

I've been a bit stuck for the past few days, but the next scene has come to me. Thanks muse! Now I feel the floodgates will open again soon... Sometimes I feel like (given my limited experience writing novels) the first 20 or 30% of writing is pulling things out of thin air. Then the …

Doers and preservers

I just listened to the section in Crime and Punishment featuring the talk about Raskolnikov's article. (very minor spoilers) The article talks about what Raskolnikov calls 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary' people, and their differences. The ordinary people, he says, are happy to be ruled and told what to do, and have not many exciting or interesting …

Reaching milestones quicker

I have reached 20k words on my current novel and I've been writing it for about three months now. My first novel it took my nearly nine months to reach that point--which I know is a ridiculously slow pace that I should not be that proud of beating, bu--I have beat it! If I can …

Solaris (film)

I watched this, partially on the plane and partially after arriving, and my first thoughts were 'they sure don't make movies like this anymore' and 'music is very overused in modern movies'. This was a very slow, quiet, and subtle movie. There were lots of long, silent shots of scenery, and of characters looking at …

Alternate Worlds: in which empathy is literal

Everyone feels everyone else's pain, hunger, fear, joy, etc, at a level of strength inversely proportional to the distance between them. If there is a hungry person nearby, you feel their hunger. If there is a happy person nearby, you feel their happiness as your own. Would this world be better, or worse? People would …