John Jeremiah Sullivan tires of his voice. (Via Elif Batuman.)
Anthony Sampson's archive: the corridors of power.... (Courtesy of I.H.D.)
I went to the memorial service for my friend Carey yesterday and am still feeling discombobulated, with a very busy week ahead. Haven't had much time for light reading, but did enjoy Seanan McGuire's latest October Daye book (it is very good, she has really upped her game with each entry into the series) and also devoured, helplessly, Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels (you can get the quartet in a book or a bundle).
If I can make it through the next week and a half, it's spring break and I get a respite and time to work on novel revisions, but this week is looking mighty daunting!
Showing posts with label habit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label habit. Show all posts
Monday, February 27, 2012
Friday, January 28, 2011
Tourism as hygienic precaution
From Mann's Death In Venice, translated by Michael Henry Heim:
The soothing regularity of this existence quickly cast a spell over him: he was charmed by the soft, resplendent benignancy of it all. What a place indeed, combining as it did the appeal of a refined southern seaside resort with a strange, wondrous city in intimate proximity! Aschenbach did not care for pleasure. Whenever and wherever he was called upon to let his hair down, take things easy, enjoy himself, he soon--especially in his younger years--felt restless and ill at ease and could not wait to return to his noble travail, the sober sanctuary of his daily routine. It was the only place that could enchant him, relax his will, make him happy.(It is obnoxious, but I feel compelled to note that Michael Cunningham's introduction to this edition is exceptionally weak.)
Saturday, January 01, 2011
Production of quota
c. 1,800 words, for a total of 30,066 words.
It is the end of another section; I am not quite sure whether the next one picks up with the third character of my main three or whether I return to the first one whose point of view I hewed to in the initial pages. Perhaps the latter, with a few weeks' gap in time in which things have happened of which she knows naught and whose consequences/aftermath will generate the energy for the main events of the tragedy? Really I am just thinking out loud!
(I made sure to get up fairly early this morning and go to the cafe to write quota; we have an 11am reservation for 8 people for brunch at the Ritz, and it was clear to me yesterday that I would enjoy that infinitely more if I had done the day's writing beforehand! I will also try and either run or bike later on [traffic is anomalously and exceptionally light on New Year's Day in a way that makes it tempting to try for the latter]; I believe in starting the year as I mean to go on....)
It is the end of another section; I am not quite sure whether the next one picks up with the third character of my main three or whether I return to the first one whose point of view I hewed to in the initial pages. Perhaps the latter, with a few weeks' gap in time in which things have happened of which she knows naught and whose consequences/aftermath will generate the energy for the main events of the tragedy? Really I am just thinking out loud!
(I made sure to get up fairly early this morning and go to the cafe to write quota; we have an 11am reservation for 8 people for brunch at the Ritz, and it was clear to me yesterday that I would enjoy that infinitely more if I had done the day's writing beforehand! I will also try and either run or bike later on [traffic is anomalously and exceptionally light on New Year's Day in a way that makes it tempting to try for the latter]; I believe in starting the year as I mean to go on....)
Friday, November 06, 2009
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Streak!
I have just had a blissful thirteen-day writing streak....
Starting on Jan. 6, which was the first day I could really and properly sit down to write new pages rather than still typing and cleaning up the chunk of draft I wrote in August, I have met my quota every day.
(It has more to do with pages covered than with word count, since I'm writing in a notebook rather than on a computer, but I suppose quota falls in the region of 1500 words a day - I have found that if I do more than that, the quality plummets and it becomes significantly less likely that I will write again the next day.)
The first half of the pages were written here and the rest were written here. (Crepes!)
(It is important for me to go somewhere I can't be distracted by the internet. I prefer doing first drafts in longhand, but I also have an excellent and slightly hilarious anti-procrastination device for typing - the Alphasmart! I last used it extensively before I had a laptop, while transcribing sources for the breeding book in the Rare Books and Manuscripts room at the British Library. It is a very loud and clattery keyboard, and I regret to observe that several gentlemen contemplated its effects with absolute dismay - I do not blame them, I feel certain it was very annoying!)
And now I both superstitiously and pragmatically feel that I will only be able to meet my Feb. 2 deadline for The Snow Queen if I continue to write new pages every single day without exception until I am finished. I was toying with the idea of taking this coming Tuesday off, so that I could redirect my attention to the first day of classes, but I think it would be a fatal error!
So I've written the hours into my appointment book....
I am not at all complaining, things are good with me right now and it will be the best of all possible things if I can acquit myself honorably and make this deadline and actually for the first time in many years not have a book submission deadline hanging over me, but it is not helpful to the novel-writing cause that the next two weeks are pretty much the busiest of the whole school year and that I am running a marathon in seven weeks which will be utterly horrible if I do not get on track with my long runs!
For those with an interest in the eighteenth-century novel, here's the list of books I'm asking my spring seminar students to buy (there are other readings also, including excerpts from Clarissa and Tristram Shandy and quite a bit of criticism).
I need to post a catch-up account of various light reading round here, only it is more pressing right now to get out of the house for my 12-miler before it gets too much later!
I might try and have a second writing session this evening, though usually I do not, because I am excited to report that the European Federation is as we speak invading Denmark, and within twelve hours Sophie and Mikael will be evacuating on their bicycles (Sophie's has been customized with a basket for carrying the cat who appeared at the end of The Explosionist under the name Blackie but whose real name turns out to be Trismegistus) via Elsinore (Hamlet!) and a ferry to Stockholm, where they will stay in Mr. Petersen's dreary rented lodgings for a few days - at least until Mikael vanishes and Sophie has to track him up north into Swedish Lapland and to the Snow Queen's Spitzbergen lair....
I am very, very excited that I am almost at the part where I finally get to write about reindeer!
Starting on Jan. 6, which was the first day I could really and properly sit down to write new pages rather than still typing and cleaning up the chunk of draft I wrote in August, I have met my quota every day.
(It has more to do with pages covered than with word count, since I'm writing in a notebook rather than on a computer, but I suppose quota falls in the region of 1500 words a day - I have found that if I do more than that, the quality plummets and it becomes significantly less likely that I will write again the next day.)
The first half of the pages were written here and the rest were written here. (Crepes!)
(It is important for me to go somewhere I can't be distracted by the internet. I prefer doing first drafts in longhand, but I also have an excellent and slightly hilarious anti-procrastination device for typing - the Alphasmart! I last used it extensively before I had a laptop, while transcribing sources for the breeding book in the Rare Books and Manuscripts room at the British Library. It is a very loud and clattery keyboard, and I regret to observe that several gentlemen contemplated its effects with absolute dismay - I do not blame them, I feel certain it was very annoying!)
And now I both superstitiously and pragmatically feel that I will only be able to meet my Feb. 2 deadline for The Snow Queen if I continue to write new pages every single day without exception until I am finished. I was toying with the idea of taking this coming Tuesday off, so that I could redirect my attention to the first day of classes, but I think it would be a fatal error!
So I've written the hours into my appointment book....
I am not at all complaining, things are good with me right now and it will be the best of all possible things if I can acquit myself honorably and make this deadline and actually for the first time in many years not have a book submission deadline hanging over me, but it is not helpful to the novel-writing cause that the next two weeks are pretty much the busiest of the whole school year and that I am running a marathon in seven weeks which will be utterly horrible if I do not get on track with my long runs!
For those with an interest in the eighteenth-century novel, here's the list of books I'm asking my spring seminar students to buy (there are other readings also, including excerpts from Clarissa and Tristram Shandy and quite a bit of criticism).
I need to post a catch-up account of various light reading round here, only it is more pressing right now to get out of the house for my 12-miler before it gets too much later!
I might try and have a second writing session this evening, though usually I do not, because I am excited to report that the European Federation is as we speak invading Denmark, and within twelve hours Sophie and Mikael will be evacuating on their bicycles (Sophie's has been customized with a basket for carrying the cat who appeared at the end of The Explosionist under the name Blackie but whose real name turns out to be Trismegistus) via Elsinore (Hamlet!) and a ferry to Stockholm, where they will stay in Mr. Petersen's dreary rented lodgings for a few days - at least until Mikael vanishes and Sophie has to track him up north into Swedish Lapland and to the Snow Queen's Spitzbergen lair....
I am very, very excited that I am almost at the part where I finally get to write about reindeer!
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