this "early bedtime" thing is for the birds

An attempt to go to bed early last night backfired spectacularly, with me waking up in the wee hours of the morning and spending god knows how long attempting to go back to sleep, before giving up around 7 a.m.

Remember, folks, my usual schedule has bedtime around 3 a.m. and waking up at maybe 11 or so.

I suspect this afternoon will feature a sizeable nap. At least if I want to make it through kobudo and karate tonight without falling over.

On the bright side, the utter screwing up of my sleep schedule has produced the impossible, namely, me getting some writing done in the morning. Since my sleepless brain decided to entertain itself with my Yuletide story, I knocked out just shy of two thousand words when I got up. I probably have another thousand or so to go, putting it pretty near the average for Yuletide fics, if maybe a bit longish. Feels about right to me.

It's an interesting challenge, writing this thing, trying to match the characters' voices: the perennial difficulty of fanfiction, and not one I deal with much as a professional writer. And I have an extra challenge in that I'm trying to get one of the characters wrong in a deliberate fashion -- but even that is proving complicated, because the manner of the wrongness also has to arise from the source. (I hope that's sufficiently vague as to not give things away that I shouldn't.) Suffice it to say, I made it through that part of the story, and we'll see what I think of the result when I've slept. Hopefully by then I'll have figured out how to do the next bit, too.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: Lord of Chaos

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books after Crossroads of Twilight, as that's the last book I read before starting this project.]

In my post on The Fires of Heaven, I said that we were beginning our journey into the swamp of bad pacing.

With this book, we jump into it feet-first.

This is rather worrisome, since my recollection was that this aspect didn't get really bad until The Path of Daggers (two books from now). I'm hoping that was just when I took off the rose-colored glasses, as the alternative is that the pacing tanks twice: once here, and again there. I'm rather afraid to see the result, if that's the case. But it cannot be denied that the story starts wandering badly in this book, much more so than previously. Stuff happens -- this isn't Crossroads of Twilight, thank whatever deity you like -- but it's padded out with a whole bunch of crap that doesn't deserve nearly so much page time.

We get off onto the wrong foot with the prologue. The funny thing is, back in the day, I quite liked the prologues. Remember that I didn't pick the series up until just before the publication of A Crown of Swords; by then, Tor had gotten into the habit of posting the prologue online, some time before the book's street date, as a kind of "trailer" to get people excited. It worked, at least for me; the prologues touch base with a lot of characters, reminding you of where they are and what they're doing, and providing hints of what's to come.

The problem is, outside of that context -- a pre-publication goodie -- they really don't work at all. They fundamentally aren't prologues, not in any meaningful sense; the only thing separating them from ordinary chapters is their (increasing) length and the number of points of view packed into them. Furthermore, they rarely contain anything truly exciting: their main function is to remind you of the current state of affairs, rather than to launch anything important. The significant content of most of these scenes could be condensed to a single sentence -- and not a complicated one at that.

( Rather more ranting this time, I'm afraid. But also a few positive notes. )

. . . whew. I've made it through a whole year of this: six books' worth of blogging, plus a couple of side posts. A bit terrifying to think that's less than half of the way, but still, it's a good start. I know one post every two months or so isn't the best pace, from a blogging point of view, but it seems to be right for sustaining my momentum -- fast enough not to fall off, slow enough not to burn out. Look for the ACoS post in January, most likely, and then we'll see how the series fares when I'm simultaneously mired in the WoT books I don't like as much and a new book of my own.