Pieces on Speculative Fiction

Not too many posts this week, I’m having fever for the second week in a row and it does take a lot of my enthusiasm away. Did manage to do quite a bit of reading though. I guess my experiment is officially over. Now I’ll just continue posting for the fun of it, probably aiming at four posts a week, depending on everything else. I think I’m moving more and more away from traditional book reviews, as I really don’t aspire to be that serious critic and besides, I really don’t like to spoil a lot of books. So I guess I’ll be concentrating to my opinion even more, if possible.

I would like to be one of those bloggers who get review copies, solely because while I like to read a lot, I don’t like collecting books that much. I’m enough of a penny pincher that I don’t like paying $20 for a book and then selling it on for $4 as is bound to happen with lots and lots of books. Sadly I don’t think that I’ll ever receive any review copies living in Finland and all.

What I’ve found while writing this blog is that good writing habits are hard to form. I’ve often started writing while watching some series or chatting in IRC or doing some other little activity that takes away my concentration.

I’m really sorry that I haven’t been able to post that often this week, I’ve been a bit feverish, so haven’t got the energy to write. Also was away for the weekend, so no writing done there either.

Sad news this week for some, Robert Jordan passed away. Apparently the last part of Wheel of Time is still going to be published posthumously. I’m really curious whether some hack picks up the WoT franchise. Haven’t been fan of all that tugging and smoothing in a while.

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You know, writing this blog has really been an interesting experience. It has shown me that self discipline is something I lack. That’s okay, generally reaching every goal means that the goals weren’t that hard to achieve anyways. However this blog has definitely gotten me into reading more. For a few years I’ve read only maybe 20-30 books a year, which is really miniscule amount. I used to read hundreds of books in my teens, 365 exact in my best year. Perhaps that time instilled the speed style of reading into me. That and my low tolerance for shared shame.

All in all I’m pretty happy with what I’ve accomplished so far. My ambitious side would like to see me writing more pillar content, the stuff of legends! I’m realist enough to know that that is going to need the spark of creativity from somewhere. I’ve never been too good at forcing myself.

As an aside. It never ceases to amaze me how little people read. Or rather how little the people who moan about lack of good speculative fiction have read. There are huge amounts of good SF books just waiting to be read. Not finding out about them isn’t really hard these days, with the net and all. Just browsing quickly through Jay Tomio’s Top100 books of the last 10 years has quite a few unread books for the most of us.

Last Sunday I set out to do a lot and only wrote a review on World’s End. I did do a lot of reading and bit of traveling, which cut into writing time. Mostly I just chose to read instead of writing. Goal for next week is to get more reviews out and write at the very least one of the bigger posts I’ve intended. Anyway, finished Scott Lynch’s latest Red Seas, Under Red Skies, which was pretty good and quite entertaining read. Till tomorrow then.

First week of writing pretty much behind me now. Experiences off the top of my head:

• Writing good quality posts is really hard. Writing good quality reviews is harder! Hats off to all of you who do it week in, week out.
• Reading other blogs takes huge chunks of time. That time would be better used writing posts. Most of the time when I intend to comment on a post, I end up thinking that I should write about it here and then I sort of forget about it.
• Commenting superficially on other people’s posts is deceptively easy and yet produces crappy posts.
• Thinking about good topics is easier than writing about them.
• 200 words is not enough for a good review.

My foremost goal was to write 3-5 posts per week. This is my ninth post, so not writing is the tougher than just spewing half-formed scribblings out. The content is not quite what I imagined to write, as I thought I would write couple of longer, more thoughtful posts.

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I was inspired by Steve Pavlinas article about trying to change your life with 30 day challenges. The idea is that, if you know that you only have to do something for only 30 days then you can do it. On the other hand, if you try to say start to running five miles every morning for the rest of your life, you probably fail unless you have iron self-discipline. Most people don’t. I readily admit that I’m not a disciplined person, therefore the experiment. The goal isn’t necessarily to write about speculative fiction permanently, but rather to think about things. To write something meaningful, you generally need to think a lot. I’ve found that lately I’ve been avoiding that. Or that I’ve mulled the same thoughts over and over again. This blog offers a set way and reason to think about one specific thing.

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