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It seems to have been a weekend for people to die. Which is odd, because it was an otherwise unremarkable weekend in this part of the world, and as such I had a fairly pleasant time of it. Now, of course, in true human fashion, I'm feeling rather guilty about that.

I heard - entirely the wrong verb; I read - this morning that Jim Rigney, known to the most of us as Robert Jordan, died yesterday afternoon. Not a surprise, exactly, since he had a pretty well-publicised terminal condition, but still something of an "oh, fuck," moment.

I first came across Rigney/Jordan's work in 1997, in my first year as an A-Level student at Blackburn College. I was introduced to the Wheel of Time by Dan Critchley, the same guy who turned me on to Ultima Online (about which there's a post to be written if I ever find the time). I remember picking up a hardback copy of The Eye of the World in the also now sadly gone Wardleworths in Accrington and being reassured by its very heft. This was a book that, I felt, could have stopped just about any offensive weapon at any range. I took it home, devoured it, and returned a couple of weeks later (it took me rather longer to read it than I thought it would) to buy the next book in the cycle.

And so it went for a couple of months; the series capturing me in a fashion that only Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons had hitherto managed. I bought some books, borrowed others from the library, borrowed yet others from Dan himself, pretty much by annoying him until he lent me them as I recall, until I was as up-to-date on the cycle as I could be (without having referred to the interwebs, of course; I was unaware in those days just how much material there was to be found out there. Oh innocence, why have you deserted me so?).

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I fell out of love with WoT, mostly due to what I saw as overlong, over-intricate plot lines that left me cold and more than a little confused, and I stick by that opinion, not least because an author's death doesn't serve to change what they've written in any way. But longer-time readers, and long-time friends, especially those from University, upon whom I tried to foist my copy of Eye at just about any opportunity (the other option was to offer them Lord of the Rings, but a lot of them seemed to balk at that), will know that Robert Jordan and the Wheel of Time left an indelible mark on me.

Naturally, looking back at the stuff I wrote back then (not much because I didn't have proper writer pants in those days and most of my "I'm a writer" moments were confined to statements made whilst inebriated), I tried to ape his style and failed miserably. This is what usually happens when I fall in love with an author's work, before I realise that there's already someone in the world doing the job of being that author and realise that I'll do a better job (hopefully) of being myself.

Well today there's no-one doing the job of being James Oliver Rigney Jr., and the world is worse off for it.

Bedtime now, after a little more writing (feels good, I tell you) and a lot of fuckaboutery with Pyrex and libmtp, which has nothing to do whatsoever with the next bit of the post.

I thought I'd repost this here because it's worth remembering and I'm more likely to do that if it's on my own blog than on someone else's. It also struck a chord.

This essay is by a Viable Paradise classmate of Mur Lafferty. This essay is under a Creative Commons Attribution License. Read, enjoy, be enlightened.

Author: Greg London Title: "The Zen of Nanowrimo"

Writing is a weird skill.

It is, at least at the moment, a skill that is far more Zen like in nature than, oh, say, engineering. The reason there are so many damn writing books is because it isn't a skill that can be boiled down like a complete set of instructions on how to fold a paper airplane.

On top of all the weird, almost alien skills you must develop as a writer, such as "Point Of View", plot, characterization, and world, you must also, at several stages of your education in writing, overcome an even more powerful issue:

Yourself.

Fear of rejection, fear of judgement, fear of failure, fear of starting but never finishing, fear of finishing and never publishing, fear of publishing but never publishing again, fear, fear, fear, fear of criticism from previous fans of your work.

No instruction on writing can really get very far if it does not address in some way the writer's fear.

The thing is that fear is handled differently by different people. This is probably one of the reasons that there are a whole section in the bookstore about how to write, because on some level each one addresses fear in a different way.

Another thing is that the same person might handle fear differently at different times, so they may end up buying and reading a book that did nothing for there fear, but then may end up reading that same book again years later and smack their forehead with a big "Aha!".

I haven't done nanowrimo myself, but what I've read from it and heard about it, it is first and foremost a tool for dealing with lots of fear. The end result of coming out the other end of nanowrimo is, if nothing else, the notion that you CAN actually write a novel. It will be a rough draft novel, but the approach of DEMANDING that you write 50k words in 30 days is a tool for dealing with the fears that stop writers.

Coming out on the other side of nanowrimo, you may be extremely surprised of what you really are capable of as far as writing rates and cranking something out.

Now, the tools and approaches needed to address point of view, plot, character, world, and other issues, those remain. But I view nanowrimo as providing people with the fear equivalent of skydiving for writers.

If you can overcome that fear, you've gone a long way to put a lot of that fear permanently behind you.

But writing, to me at least, is like Zen. You do the zen koans, you meditate, you do exercises, and then one day, you're washing your bowl, exactly like you've done a million times before, and suddenly, BLAM! You finally grok satori. You finally "grok" writing.

And there are many koans for the writing monks. Nanowrimo is one of them. That everyone doesn't get enlightenment after doing nanowrimo is missing the ineffability of zen koans and writing.

(end rant)

A depressing thought struck me as I was wandering through the Science Fiction and fantasy section of Borders in Preston - as an aside here I have to say that Borders doesn't feel like a proper book shop, but it's the biggest not-a-proper-bookshop nearby and, as such, is probably my best chance of finding something that whets my appetite.

The thought that struck me was this: no-one - or at least only a very, very small subset of all the authors in the world - is writing the novels that I want to read.

It's a conceit, true, and doubtless it's an inaccurate one, but the point remains: I'm having difficulty finding anything that interests me in the bookstores, particularly in the genres that I've spent most of my life reading in avid fashion.

I'm well aware that this isn't exactly the best way to go about following one of the cardinal rules of writing, which is 'read a lot.' Come to think about it, I might actually take a trip to Waterstones (which does feel like a proper bookshop, even if it is an overpriced one) and just buy four or five books whose covers or blurbs produce even a flicker of interest, just on the offchance that I'm being very snobbish about this whole thing.

I have a real desire right now to read some good, old fashioned 'hard' sci-fi. Clarke, Asimov, Dick et. al. are favourites of mine, and every once in a while I feel the need to read one of their works just to remind me how good good Sci Fi can be. Too much of the Sci Fi that I've been picking up and reading these days borders on fantasy, in the sense that there are certain deus ex machina elements of it that are the kind of thing that you'd expect to find in a fantasy novel where, importantly, they don't require a logical explanation. Sci Fi for me has to remain grounded in that most basic of literary foundations: truth.

I must confess that I've also got a hankering for writing some proper Sci Fi (for a given value of proper, obviously); to write a story that keeps us at once in the real world and at the same time uses fantastical - but logically plausible - elements to enhance its plot would be a fantastic bit of fun, I think.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that I love Firefly and by extension Serenity so much. The story has classic elements of Sci Fi of course - spaceships, psychics, lasers and interplanetary alliances - but it stays honest and truthful by meshing those with the best elements of the Western, including the almost-antihero protagonists and the fact their life, in essence, is that of frontier tradesmen (and criminals). The fact that its creator is a raving genius may have something to do with its greatness, but let's not dwell on that too much. But before I churn out my SF masterwork-to-rival-the-imagination-of-Joss, I suppose I'd better get back into the habit of writing anything very much at all. Once again, blogging has been procrastination; I really should be writing.

"Aha!" I hear you all cry, "An update at last!"

Well, yes. And yes, I'm going to stick my usual excuse in, which is "Busy, very busy." Also, I've developed a stinker of a head cold, which has left my sinuses filled with something not unakin to that white, fish-smelling glue that they give you to use in Primary school; the stuff that boys have endless fun making fake skin with in order to peel it off in front of some unsuspecting compatriot, usually female, always squeamish, just for fun. I'm in the happy position of having a new, full-time, salaried job. And as my day jobs all seem to go, this one has gone down the route of being hellishly busy. A deadline is looming at the end of the week and I'm having to work quite a lot of overtime to get the thing done, so once again there isn't much time for writing or editing. But that doesn't mean I'm not doing any.

I've edited the embarassingly explicit story and I'm quite happy with it. I'm probably going to give it another pass and maybe put some stuff in that I think is missing. I realised, thinking about it last night whilst trying to sleep, that although I know what's special about the main character, I've made a point of not saying it specifically in the story, wanting to let the story let the reader know in its own time. Unfortunately, I've found myself wondering if it's not a little too vague; there's a chance, I think, that people might come to completely the wrong conclusion and, if they do, that means they're not going to get the point of the story which largely... well, misses the point.

Yesterday, in a mini-splurge in Borders, I bought myself the Writer's Block (along with a couple of Python books, because writer I may be but geek I've always been; Python is my new favourite language), which I've wanted ever since I first saw it. My plan, once I've got some time, is to try and do a little work triggered by it each day, as a way of keeping my hand in the writing game and to keep my mind active. I might even post some of the stuff here for the sake of keeping you all amused when I haven't got anything better to say.

Of course, all this working and not writing (and, by extension, not posting) means that I've missed several key events during the last few days. England lost the ODI series to Sri Lanka, which I'd expected, and on the same day lost one of their greatest ever fast bowlers, Fiery Fred Trueman. Oh, and t'other England dropped out of the World Cup, though I couldn't really give two stuffs about that.

Lessee, what else did I want to comment on at the time? The anniversary of the London bombings is coming up; I'm waiting to see whether the new workplace will be any more affected than the old by it (I didn't write about it at the time because I was working there, but the Mob staff seemed disturbingly uncaring about the whole thing). If not I'll probably go into the town centre to observe the silence; it would mean more that way, somehow.

I spent this evening working with one eye on RealPlayer, which was showing NASA TV. I watched last year's launch of STS-114 and it sent chills up my spine. STS-121 was no different; I had goosebumps in places I didn't know geese could bump as Discovery roared into the sky. I'm going to have to go to the Cape some day, just to see a launch for myself (though they'll probably have retired the shuttles by the time I get there; maybe I'll go when they launch the next moonshot (pause for irony...). Oh, and PayPal cancelled my LibSyn subscription without asking me, so I'll have to set it up again if I decide to carry on podcasting. Thanks for that, PayPal people.

Anyroad. Back to work. As Fred would have said, I'll sithee.