Worldbuilding & Procrastination

I’m procrastinating on my revisions tonight, although given this is the first amount of time I’ve felt almost human in the last 48 hours, I’m willing to give myself a bit of a pass. And really, there’s only so much of lying around in one’s own filth that I can take, so eventually I managed to haul my sorry carcass into the shower and that helped.

(And honestly, I slept until noon yesterday, got up for an hour to find something to eat and then went back to bed. NyQuil is my friend. Mr Myn was good enough to take the day off from work and escaped somewhere with the children for most of the afternoon, and for that I am utterly grateful.)

Sadly, my head seems to be waking up quite nicely, although I’m still feeling pretty weak overall. You wouldn’t think something as simple as snot would be enough to wipe a body out, but there it is.  Although for some reason I cannot seem to stop eating today, so my diet has gone straight down the shitter.

I have been catching up on a bit of my reading, though. Thanks to the Kindle, I can pretty much download whatever I want and *poof*. So I finish one book on a series and then it’s onto the next one.

That being said, I decided to give a rather popular Urban Fantasy author another try. I’d read her first book several months ago and quite frankly, I detested it. But people do seem to rave about the series, and she has a pretty big following, so I figured what the heck and bought the next few.

And they did get better, at least up to a point. I can almost draw a few parallels to myself, in that the first book seemed like it was trying to fit more of a romance mold –  while these last few do have romance in them, it doesn’t seem to be the central focus so much as struts for the world building. And that’s okay, even given that some of the scenes are getting a bit repetitive. Certain phrases are starting to make me twitch each time I see them as well, but this may be more of an issue of the fact that I’ve read 4 or 5 of these books back to back now, so it’s a little more obvious.

However, since I’m working so hard on making sure my own world building is as solid as I can make it, I’m really trying to pay attention to how it’s done in the “big leagues.” But one advantage of being able to read them one after the other is that I can see where the author attempts to fill in the gaps that may have been left open in earlier books…and I can also see where it’s starting to unravel.

On the other hand, she’s got quite a few of these books out. I’m only working on my first. Quite frankly, the thought of keeping a story-line together for five to ten books is suddenly rather daunting. I look at my pile of revisions and can’t help wondering what happens if I fuck it up? What if the most innocuous of details in Book 1 suddenly becomes the pinnacle of issues in Book 3 and because of the way I set things up previously I write myself into a corner?

I suppose one could argue that a good writer can’t really do that, but then you get authors who routinely start breaking their own rules to suit their storyline. I’m not sure that’s a particularly good thing to do either.

This entry was posted in craft, revisions, writing. Bookmark the permalink.

3 Responses to Worldbuilding & Procrastination

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.