Sorry I’ve been gone so long. I’ve just emerged from one of my periods of serious writer’s block, which this time extended as far as blogging and answering emails. I’ve got quite a stack to reply to! For anyone who is patient enough to still be reading after all these months, let me see if I can catch you up. It’ll probably take several posts! Read the rest of this entry »

I’m almost afraid to write another post here after the response to my last post. You might be tempted to ask “What response?” since only two people put comments on the blog. But if you count the private e-mails, PMs, and phone calls, then it would easily qualify as the hottest post I’ve ever written. There were the people who felt like they’d been plagiarized expressing their feelings and fears and asking for advice (my response: I sympathize, but have no advice). There were the people who said plagiarism within fanfic is perfectly fine (I agree to disagree). There was the writer who said they only did it to show respect for earlier fanfics (I suggested that the writers of the earlier fanfics could be credited directly in that case). There was the writer who, on re-reading one of my books, realized she’d unconsciously been influenced by a couple of my scenes and offered to change them (I told her they were fine and commended her honesty and sense of responsibility).
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In From Lambton to Longbourn, Darcy and Elizabeth banter about practicing the virtues of self-control and charity. When it comes to each other, they’re both better at charity than self-control. That passage keeps coming back to me lately because I’ve been thinking a lot about self-discipline – specifically how to make myself sit down and write. I feel better when I write, but I’m having trouble finding the motivation and perseverence to actually do it. I think I’d better go back to setting concrete public goals, which has sometimes worked in the past. Read the rest of this entry »

Just when I was ready to give up hope and settle for something second-rate, the last scene of Bounds of Decorum finally crystalized for me. I’ve been fighting with it for months, and no matter what I did, it seemed anticlimactic. I needed a conversation between Elizabeth and Darcy after their wedding, and I tried doing it outside the church (insufficiently private) at the wedding breakfast (unintelligible due to interruptions) and on the carriage ride to London (boring, boring, boring! I wouldn’t want to spend time with those people!). The tone was always slightly off, too, not enough humor and happiness to balance the serious elements.
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My muse dropped by briefly, took one look at the scenes I posted a few days ago and sniffed. So today I have a rewritten version of the scene with Charlie, plus another new scene which may or may not stay around. I needed a break from the long series of scenes of X talks to Y in Meryton – it gets dull after a while. We’re a lull in the action at the moment. I struggle with stepping back from a plot to see what its problem is – or rather I can usually see what the problem is, but my muse is notoriously uncooperative with my attempts to fix anything based on an intellectual decision. It’s writing from the gut or not at all. But at least I got something this time, and I’m happier with the Charlie scene now. Read the rest of this entry »

Uh, oh. I seem to have been outed. Either somebody posted a link to this blog somewhere, or there was a sudden influx of curious people to the experimental AI blog. In any case, to new readers, welcome! I’d tell you all about what I’m doing with this blog… if I happened to know myself, but I don’t. I’m experimenting with this and that. It’s a general writing blog, and while I’ll probably post snippets here, it won’t be a story-posting blog. At some point I may do that as well. The snippets are a way to deal with my difficulties writing when I’m not posting anything (yes, I know, this makes it hard since I also have trouble writing when I am posting something, but I’ve never claimed to be consistent!). My goal is to make it to the end of my current three projects (Bounds of Decorum, Morning Light, and a nameless short story) so I can take on something new. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a dilemma — having decided to start blogging about my writing, I immediately hit one of those icy patches where I can’t write at all. I told my friend Elaine about this, and she said I should blog about not being able to write. It’s just paradoxical enough that I decided it was worth a try. Read the rest of this entry »

To those who have encouraged me to continue Bounds of Decorum, your kind words have brightened my day and reminded me that my writing may indeed benefit someone. My muse is more susceptible to reasoning like that than “Well, I ought to be writing!”

This is just the latest in the delays on Bounds of Decorum. It would have been done months ago if I hadn’t made the mistake of trying to write to someone else’s dictates. My publisher is only interested in publishing my stories if they have sex scenes in them, and Bounds of Decorum doesn’t. Now, I have no problem about writing sex scenes (you may have noticed that), but I just can’t write gratuitous sex scenes to save my life. BoD has plenty of mushy, romantic, and I hope provocative moments, but sex scenes just don’t belong in it by the nature of the story.

So I’ve been stuck on the question of whether to try to make myself write something that doesn’t come naturally (a big source of writer’s block) or to write something that’s destined to be rejected (also not a muse-friendly activity). What I need is to get back to the place where I feel it’s safe to write, and to remind myself that I write for the sake of writing, not to please a particular person or for a particular outcome.

I’ll try not to keep you waiting too long!

I’ve been stuck in writer’s block for longer than I ever have before, and I’ve been trying all sorts of ways to get out of it. Today I made a promise to a reader that I would finish a scene of it and post it here as proof. I don’t particularly recommend reading it unless you happen to be fond of random unimportant scenes completely out of context, but at least I wrote something. Not much – part of this was completed before my Muse decided that a tour of the South Pole was just the thing for her – but some of it is new. Read the rest of this entry »