Good excuses for non-productivity
Jan. 15th, 2008 04:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jaceyI should have spent all day today working. Instead I kept finding excuses to pick up 'Memory' by Lois McMaster Bujold (a Miles Vorkosigan novel). I missed all of these the first time round and I've been catching up with them via the omnibus editions. And very good they are, too.
Having avoided them for years (feeling that Miles didn't sound like my kind of hero) I eventually fell in love with Bujold's writing via the excellent 'Curse of Chalion' in which she created the best hero ever in Cas. I figured I liked Cas so much that I could trust LMB to make Miles sympathetic, too, and she does. I'm sure he's insane by every logical definition of the word; and he's certainly not an attractive man (a stunted dwarf, in fact, with fragile bones and a slightly crooked spine - at least at the beginning) and he makes colossal mistakes, but always manages to redeem himself by his humanity and by by thinking his way to ultimate success.
So it's now 5.30 a.m. and I've finished Memory, so I should go to bed and then get up tomorrow morning and do some damned work! And maybe I'll find a couple of hours to work on the book revision. I should be frisking my characters fior hidden quirks - not in the style of Miles because where would be the point in that? - but looking for their own quirks.
Having avoided them for years (feeling that Miles didn't sound like my kind of hero) I eventually fell in love with Bujold's writing via the excellent 'Curse of Chalion' in which she created the best hero ever in Cas. I figured I liked Cas so much that I could trust LMB to make Miles sympathetic, too, and she does. I'm sure he's insane by every logical definition of the word; and he's certainly not an attractive man (a stunted dwarf, in fact, with fragile bones and a slightly crooked spine - at least at the beginning) and he makes colossal mistakes, but always manages to redeem himself by his humanity and by by thinking his way to ultimate success.
So it's now 5.30 a.m. and I've finished Memory, so I should go to bed and then get up tomorrow morning and do some damned work! And maybe I'll find a couple of hours to work on the book revision. I should be frisking my characters fior hidden quirks - not in the style of Miles because where would be the point in that? - but looking for their own quirks.
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Date: Jan. 15th, 2008 06:41 am (UTC)Digression: There've been various attempts in science fiction to portray genuinely sane human beings. Or, in some stories (such as Fritz Leiber's short story "Sanity), people who are sane by our standards but perhaps not by other standards.
How successful? Let's just say Philip K. Dick came about as close as anyone (in Clans of the Alphane Moon.)
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Date: Jan. 15th, 2008 02:48 pm (UTC)I like how her stories could really only happen in her universe - world and plot are irresistably entwined. And I like how Miles remains proactive, regardless of what life throws at him.