novels i have bought

Over the last four weeks (since the Yorkshire creative writing workshop), I have bought a lot of novels, many from charity shops. In addition, I was given a whole pile for my birthday.

Here they are:

• Philip Roth, Indignation (am in the middle of it right now; it's great)

• Adam Thorpe, Hodd (I've read this one; it has a fantastic premise, a great ye mediaevally prose style but then sinks into a number of turgid bits where I found it hard to keep going)

• Harper Lee, To kill a mockingbird (read this decades ago and can't remember a lot)
• J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (ditto)

• Madeleine Wickham, Swimming pool Sunday (alter ego of chick lit bestseller writer Sophie Kinsella whose chicklits I adore; her early Wickham books are more stolid but interesting to see a writer develop)

• Bernice Rubens, A five year sentence (a silly and badly-written book with a cute premise that kept me going, surprisingly)

• Harold Pinter, The caretaker (not a novel, I know, but a play and fantastic)

• Charles Webb, The graduate (the book upon which the Dustin-Hoffman-film was based; has surprisingly good bits and snappy dialogue but then descends into mannerism)

• D.H. Lawrence, The Fox (unadulterated Lawrence rubbish; reminded me how little I can stand this misogynist bore)

• Cassandra Clare, City of Bones (I lost interest by page 83 but may persevere as it's by a fellow slasher and I always like to support that lot, *g*, even if they would insist on writing in the fantasy genre wot i can't get into)

• Tatyana Tolstaya, The Slynx (I'm a fifth of the way into this and have decided to read it alongside another novel as it is too grim and Russian to sustain me 24/7; but it's grim in a good way and very classic post-apocalyptic science fiction as political allegory)

Not yet read:
• Markus Zusak, I am the messenger
• Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip
• Patricia Highsmith, The glass cell
• Agatha Christie, The body in the library
• Amnesty International, editor, Freedom (short stories by David Mitchell et al.)
• Chris Cleave, The other hand
• Michelle Spring, Nights in white satin
• John Grisham, The testament
• Kate Grenville, The secret river
• Daniel Kehlmann, Die Vermessung der Welt
• Thomas Mann, Dr Faustus
• Anne Enright, The gathering
• Philip Hensher, The bedroom of the mister's wife
• James Joyce, Ulysses
• Margaret Atwood, The year of the flood
• Stephenie Meyer, Eclipse
• Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Ah, I just love having a long shelf of novels to look forward to and not to worry that I may be running out of reading matter any time soon! Delicious! Plus I have an amazon voucher from t'parents and brick-and-mortar book vouchers from t'h. How happy am I!

shit must out

I fell in love with my own comment so I swiftly (and adverbially) decided to post it. But sheldrake got it first! *g*:

I have come to the conclusion/ insight that fun stuff is irrelevant. We have been SPOILED by fanfic into thinking that all writing must be fun. But it isn't. Yesterday I wrote 4745 words (yay!) by sitting at a write-in for 4 hours and spending some of those hours procrastinating by ordering lunch / eating lunch / getting a glass of water / getting a glass of pineapple juice / ordering cappuccino / drinking cappuccino / reading (because of course I cannot put any food or drink near a keyboard so cannot write while ingesting same) / going to the loo / asking the other write-in nanoites how many words they'd done / inspecting the other nanoites' writing softwares / looking. And for 3 hours and 3.500 words I wrote RUBBISH. It pains and bores me to read the rubbish. But then I wrote a few paragraphs that were okayish. And this proves: if you want to write fun fanfic, go for it. If you want to write a novel, you must endure the pain of rubbish because the nuggets will not emerge until the rubbish has been ejected, it seems. So embrace the rubbish, I say!

Oh, and I also wrote several pages of steamy sex. You can get the writer out of slashy fandom but you can't get the slash out of the writer. It were het, no less!

i haz nyu riting macheen

T'h gave me an Alphasmart Neo for my birthday! I love it!

Yes, the LJ friends I took advice from all advised against it but why take advice if not to ignore it with worried abandon? Anyway, after pussyfooting around the machine on my actual birthday, I then plunged in and gave it test drives and I am loving it.

Why am I loving it?

• It weighs nothing. I can balance it on a finger.

• It is green.

• It is something from the 1970s. It takes me back to the hardcore, hands-on, lo-tech days of industrial typing.

• It is 100 percent portable. I am free of powerpoints, sockets, cables and extension leads. I need not the national power grid!!

• Its batteries last 700 hours.

• It has no internet and nothing on it to distract. Well, it has a typing programme (fantastic for use with t'sons except that I don't want them to get their paws on it), and it's amazing how distracted one can make myself by doing word and character and paragraph counts, but in sum: no distractions!

• It is a bloke magnet. I sat in the university grad café and a young American chap came up to me, very polite, and said, 'Excuse me and sorry to disturb you but what is that?'

• I have already typed 7818 words into it.

• Every night I move text onto my laptop so the fear of the machine being stolen is much less. With the laptop, I lived in constant panic: what if it gets stolen and my life is gone? What if it rains? What if it falls out of the bicycle basket?

• It has no hinged screen. You need not lift up anything or be afraid that it's not robust enough to withstand being carried about. One person on t'interwebs said he'd dropped it on the floor repeatedly to prove how robust it is; I'm not trying this on purpose but it is not a racehorse, it's a draught horse!

• When you plug the USB cable into the machine and into the laptop, it transfers text in a most interesting and 1970s way. The words get typed, letter by letter, as if typed there and then by a ghost figure, onto your screen. You can sit and watch them appear, as per an old-fashioned dot matrix printer or telegraphic ticker tape.

• There is no mouse. It is amazing (and unexpected) how liberating the loss of the mouse can be!

• I thought the tiny screen would be the one drawback. It contains six lines against an LCD background, reminiscent of a pocket calculator. (You can set it to 2 - 6 lines.) But it hasn't proved to be a drawback at all. When I'm out and about, doing portable writing, I'm not editing anyway. And when I do edit, I need to print out because I find even the laptop and desktop screen too limiting: I need to see all the pages. In fact, it encourages a forward momentum because there's not the distraction of reading everything back to yourself.

• It turns on instantly. This saves about 5783 hours of my adult life spent waiting for computers to boot up, applications to load, files to be located and passwords to be entered.

• It saves automatically. All you do is type; you need think of nothing else.

• It is basically a pencil. It does everything a pencil does, except that you don't need to type anything up in order to transfer it to an electronic medium and that it is legible.

• When I have it on my lap, I feel like Rodney McKay with his 'tablet'! It is a Mary Sue!!

love