David’s sent a long a brief update piece. Full text after the break. Enjoy!
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A Quiet Week
The chaos that is Easter is fast receding, the relatives have gone home, and Sue and I are back to work – she on her Corrie scripts (which have a lot of rewriting to do), me on completing the first draft of ROADS TO MOSCOW, Book Three.
Before the shut-down happened, I was struggling with the final section – 3 scenes – of Part Thirteen, “Pretzel Logic”. And by struggling, I really mean struggling. What was emerging onto the page was certainly not up to my usual standard, nor was it properly focused in terms of story.
In fact, I might as well have hired a chimpanzee for a week.
As usually happens when I get into this vague, pushing cement uphill kind of writerly phase, the answer is actually to leave the damn script alone and go do something else (which in my case meant watching THE HOBBIT part one – a film I won’t be watching a second time!) But this morning, when I sat down here, it began to flow… and I began to see what I ought to have been writing – and setting that down.
So now I’m 68500 words in, Part 13 is behind me, and I’m working on the opening to Part 14, “Loose Ends”, with 60 scenes to write before the first draft is complete. And there’s some drop-dead good stuff in this penultimate section.
Ahead lies a relatively quiet week. The best kind of weeks for writers, who thrive on being anti-social and hermitical. By the end of it – ie. by Saturday evening – I hope to have twelve of those scenes written. That’s three scenes a day. And if I can keep that pace up, I’ll have it under wraps by the end of May.
I’m also hoping that, in those same weeks, we can get things up and running on all fronts. I’ve no news from the Book Fair about foreign interest yet, but I’ll be pushing things on that front, along with following up on the film/TV mini-series paths. I’ve just got the money in for Corvus for the reversion (they had to pay me a fee for all twelve volumes that remained to be published) so some of that will go into the covers kitty, which I’ll be setting up to make sure we can keep the wonderful Larry Rostant on the case.
Oh yeah, and somewhere along the line I’m going to be painting Sue and I’s bedroom, the hallway, the downstairs hallway, and finishing off landscaping the garden. All of which tasks will have me jotting down notes and ideas into my little notebook, even as I’m doing the physical work. Oh, and that’s not to mention daughter Jessica’s 30th birthday party and…
Lots of things. But finishing ROADS will be the most important. And then, late summer, I’ll be sitting down in the garden office and starting on Chung Kuo, Book 17, “The Father Of Lies” with the aim of having that written by the end of the year.
So that’s it for now. More in a week or two. I’ve been watching, and enjoying, series four of GAME OF THRONES. I’m finding it fascinating how they’re changing Martin’s original. Usually rather well, I think. Bye for now!
David Wingrove Tuesday 22nd April 2014
“which in my case meant watching THE HOBBIT part one – a film I won’t be watching a second time!”
Hahaha! Don’t watch the second one even once, in that case. Yes, it CAN be worse… …slightly…
“which in my case meant watching THE HOBBIT part one – a film I won’t be watching a second time!”
lol!
Don’t even look at the second one once, in that case…. Yes, IT CAN be worse! (Slightly)
Great :(…i guess i’ll have to be the black sheep on this site again. I personally liked the Hobbit part 1 and LOVE The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. “But that’s not how it happened in the book!!!” you guys will say. Yes, that’s true, i also read the books, after all. However, i personally like the changes the script writers made. They are good changes, and good additions. I personally applaud the decision of leaving Tom Bombadil out of Perter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. That character was ridiculous. Throw rocks at me, if you will, but i stand by my opinion – these movies are gems.
In LOTR, Jackson still had SOME respect for the works of Tolkien. I don’t care about changes and the absence of Bombadil either. But the Hobbit movies are just stupid action movies that have NOTHING to do with Tolkien. Bird shit in beard? Elves and dwarfs in love? Fighting in open barrels on the river? A dragon running behind dwarves for half an hour and not even a hair was singed? I can’t even begin to describe how these movies are ridiculous, tailormaded for every idiot child in the our brave new no-thinking world! I don’t care about “changes”, you understand? Those movies are not art.
People, the focus is not on Tolkien or Hollywood simulacrums, it’s on Wingrove and Chung Kuo, which completely poos all over Tolkien in regards depth, theme, plotline, characters, complexity and prose.
I don’t know about anyone else, but my reading life is seriously dampened by what’s happening to the series, yet again. A whole depression has set in, where this plastic crap world is only interested in regurgitated pap, and masterworks such as Chung Kuo get overlooked. We don’t need any more dragons or androgynous elves. We need more Wingroves and vast, plausible, breathing worlds.
And then, of course, there’s the whole goofy publishing industry, a bloated Triassically outdated leviathan which couldn’t tie its own allegorical shoelace without buggering it up.