It's a little like eating my vegetables

I have a hard time, sometimes, reading books I know I should read.

Currently, I have "One Thousand Year of Solitude" and "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" sitting in my to-read pile, alongside things like a collection of horror short stories, a Doctor Who tie-in book and a Hawkeye trade. There's definitely, among those books, an imbalance of likely quality.

And yet, when I go to pick up one of those good books, the ones I know I should read, sometimes I find myself swapping over to the comics, or the manga, or the fluffy sci fi rather than reading what I fel like I should be reading.

I know part of this ties into my reasons for reading Fantasy and Sci fi almost exclusively. There's little escapism likely to be found in those books. But at the same time, reading is largely an entertaining pursuit, but its also a way to inform oneself of important matters. I *want* to read these books. I just never seem to be in a proper mood to seriously and deeply contemplate them. It took me positively ages to get to "The Air Between Us" or any Gaines.

Still, I have moved Angelou's book up, so I should be starting it soon. Maybe it the weather holds, it can be the first book that I read while I'm taking my afternoon walks.

Interestingly enough, I got that book at the library book sale a little bit ago. I'm somewhat amused that whoever gave it to the library neglected to take a number of things out of it, including a 15-year-old train ticket, a piece of paper with a memo on it and a bookmark with info on a bookstore in Philadelphia. It was a weird glimpse into the previous owner.

Top Ten Tuesday: Authors That I'd Put On My Auto-Buy List

Top Ten Tuesday is a regular feature on the Broke and Bookish blog. This week's list is a look at the authors that I'd put on my auto-buy list. I may be cheating a little, as I'm splitting out series in some cases,w here I'd be an insta-buy for some books but not always for others.

1. Jim Hines: At this point, I'm a first-week purchaser for any novel he releases. I'm not sure I'd hop in for short stories or collections, but I've yet to be disappointed by one of his full-length books.

2. Chris Wooding (Tales of the Ketty Jay): Probably my favorite current series out there. Steampunky adventure. <3 font="">

3. Seanan McGuire (Toby Daye): I adore Toby's stories and since being introduced to them have purchased each new book as it's come out. Very much looking forward to this year's entry!

4. George R. R. Martin (Game of Thrones): While the last couple were not as good, in my opinion , as earlier volumes, I'm still heavily invested in this series and always looking for the next bit.  

5. Brandon Sanderson: While I haven't picked up his Wheel of Time books since I'm behind on that series, I try to make a point of picking up everything else he's put out.

6. Guy Gavriel Kay: He's another whose earlier books I liked much better than his later work, but I still like his later work enough to never regret getting it.

7. Seanen McGuire (Incryptid): She may be the only author who has two series I absolutely adore and another that I couldn't care less to continue reading in. Speaking of this series, March 5!!!

8. CLAMP: They are very hit or miss, but I try to give at least the first volume of every new series a chance.

9. Kaori Yuki: A very specific brand of hilariously awesome that I embrace quite happily. :)

10. J. K. Rowling: While I haven't yet read Casual Vacancy, I had to get it when it first came out and I suspect I will continue doing so.

Excelsior!

I read the collected trade of "The Adventures of Superhero Girl" Saturday night. I enjoyed it quite a lot - nothing groundbreaking, but it was cute and funny and I liked all the characters. Plus, there's just something really fun about the particular niche of the genre that it occupies.

I don't know why, but the more fun, innocent looks at superhero stories are often among my favorite. G-man, Monster Society of Evil, Mini Marvels. I think it has to do with what I see as the basis for superhero stories - that they're stories about hope, about overcoming struggles, and it doesn't always have to matter how BIG those struggles are. The important parts are the hope, the perseverance and the attempt to remain good throughout it all. 

Superhero Girl played a little with the whole "super-siblings" thing, which I also tend to like. In this case, I found her older brother, Kevin, to be a really fun character. He comes across as a bit full of himself, but it's hard to tell what's ego and what's just persona. 

But I think my favorite character was our hero herself. I loved her dedication to her little town, her serious efforts at even the smallest acts of superheroing and her refusal to be the kind of superhero other people want her to be. She's in it for her own reasons and stays true to that. <3 font="">

This isn't to say I don't like more serious superhero stories as well. I certainly do. But a lot of the time they get to ratcheting up the angst over and over and over and OVER. It gets tiresome and drives me off, which is why I keep books like this around. they're... refreshing. :)

Cliffhangers of a different stripe

As a reader of comic books and manga, I'm no stranger to the end-of-issue or even end-of-trade cliffhanger. But as many times as I see them, there's one sort that I like better than all the rest, is the joyful cliffhanger - and if there's one series I'm reading that does that better than most, it's probably Fairy Tail.

As always, spoilers may be beyond the cut so proceed at your own risk!

Milestones

I hit the 2/3 mark in one of my stories today - the end of act two. It's funny how round the word count came out - 60,250. I expect the third part to be a little shorter than the others, but that should put the thing comfortably between 82k and 88k, which is I think an admirable first draft, especially since I think there's some stuff that'll be added back in when I get around to rewrites.

It all turned out working a little better than expected, to be honest. The story was a NaNo, one of the few I didn't delete totally after November because I had most of it posted in an LJ. I think I started with about 46k when I picked it up in January. If everything stays as it is, I think I may actually get it done in another couple months. It might go faster if I stopped working on the other book at the same time, but I'm finding myself unwilling to do that.

I guess I'll just ride the urge while I have it!

Progress: Blessed (27,723); Sci-fi (60,250)

Aren't you a little young for unending despair?

Have you ever noticed how many stories of a dystopian future seem to center on kids?

I guess I get the urge. Kids are a symbol of innocence and purity, so showing how a dystopia affects them can be a powerful way to show just how screwed up things have gotten. But it's starting to get on my nerves a little - not in the sense of me not liking the stories, but me getting to the part where our protags are kids or perhaps teens and thinking to myself "again?"

It's a little bothersome, because one of my favorite books, "The Long Walk" is pretty much entirely made up of kids' place in a dystopia.  I'm also a pretty big fan of "Battle Royale" and for book club right now we're reading "The Darkest Minds." I'm enjoying it, but I can't stop thinking about how specifically so many of them focus on kids.

This is part of why I have yet to read the Hunger Games books. I know a great many people who have read them and enjoyed them deeply and have told me that I NEED to read them, or at least the first one. And I suspect they're right. they sound like good books and I would probably enjoy reading them. But this trope is just a little too... centered, maybe, right now. 

Maybe I'll give it a little time and put a no-kid-centered-dystopias rule on my book selections for a while and then see how I feel about it. :)


This week was the library book sale. I was both grateful and sad that I didn't find more to purchase while I was ther, because while I don't need more physical books trying to find space on my shelves, I like books and I like supporting the library. But now I am the proud owner of "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" and four of the first five volumes of "Pluto" because I am a total mark for anything with Tezuka's name on it other than Kimba and Astro Boy (and who knows, maybe eventually those too!"

Top Ten Tuesday - Favorite fantasy characters

Top Ten Tuesday is a regular feature on the Broke and Bookish blog. This week's list is a look at the top 10 favorite characters in X genre. I've picked Fantasy, but for some interesting reading I highly recommend heading over to their blog - they collect links from more than a hundred other bloggers with their own lists,a nd the things that draw people to particular characters can be fascinating.

1. Neville from the Harry Potter series - I liked him from the first book, and by the time the series was over he was one BAMF. He had bad things happen to him in his life, but he always carried a sort of innate desire to see good in people and not to rock the boat unless it was important. His interaction with his parents in Book 5 just broke my heart, but I loved how well that scene encapsulated him - the compassion and unconditional love for his parents, his willingness to take his grandmother's barbs without comment, and then the steel underneath when he realizes Harry and co. have seen it - that absolute certainty Harry has that he won't brook anyone laughing at what they went through.

2. Jehane, from The Lions of Al Rassan - This is not my favorite of Kay's books, but she is definitely my favorite of his characters. I love her no nonsense attitude. I love her devotion to her patients. I love that I could relate to almost every step of her story, that at no point was there a decision she made that I could look at and go "why?" I loved the way she tried not to love, and the way she eventually surrendered to the feeling without surrendering her own autonomy or subverting it and becoming just a love interest. she was fantastic.

3. Sam Vimes of the Night Watch Discworld books - His frustration with life and society and the world in general makes for a fantastic bit of snark, but his position also allows him to see the entirety of society as a web, and this knowledge seems to be some of what breaks him early on. I love the way he can cut through all that bullshit when the moment counts though. He can think of the rich and the poor in the same exact way, and while it may pain him to do it, he almost always drags himself back from the precipice of going too far when any number of others might have gone over. And it's always a struggle for him, which I think makes me like him all the more. :)

4. Sophie from Howl's Moving Castle - She's all business and has no time for frivolous things like love or, occasionally, politeness. She sees herself as having a particular role in her world, and there was something both heartbreaking and heartwarming at the way she insisted she was stuck in that role while at the same time defying it. The relationship with Howl is probably one of my favorite character relationships in all of fiction. 

5. Eddie from the Dark Tower books - Even when he was a junkie focused on his brother almost to the exclusion of all else, there was something steely and sarcastic and fascinating about Eddie to me. He went at even the most hopeless situations with an almost manic sense of humor, and he didn't always do the right thing, but that just made him feel more real to me. King's good at that in general, but I really found Eddie to be a grounding force in the series.

6. Molly from The Last Unicorn - From the moment she gives her speech to the unicorn when they first meet, I knew this would be a character who would stick with me. The magician may know more of the world as a thing, but Molly knows about people and emotions, and she's a source of staid wisdom and a sharp tongue, each depending on the need of the situation. Her clear love for Amalthea shone through a lot of the murkiness and heaviness in the plot around her.

7. Quentin from the Toby Daye books - There's something I and I think a lot of other people find compelling about a character with a fairy-tale view of honor having to come to grips with the realities of life in a world which is decidedly not a fairy tale. Quentin's idealism doesn't get ripped out from under him as it if some so many characters like him - but the slower pace of his adjustment to reality I think makes for a much better story. In a series filled with incredibly interesting characters, he just barely edged Toby as my favorite.

8. Breeze from the Mistborn trilogy - He was never really a main character, but I loved the gray morality of Breeze - the way he insisted on the finer things in life, the way he pretended he didn't really care and was doing everything for the money, but the way he always showed that he really DID care, when the chips were down. The way he'd put his life on the line despite not really having any useful offensive abilities. I thought he was one of the most interesting in a varied and compelling cast.

9. Sansa from the Game of Thrones series - I know a lot of people hated her for being so weak-willed, but I always thought she was a very strong person - just also a very young one. She displays an adaptability and a fortitude that a lot of other characters might not have managed even had they lived past their stopping point. Sansa endures and she learns. And in the world of GoT, those can be some of the most powerful abilities a person can have. But most of all, I just really felt bad for her - a child who was allowed, for a time, to retain her childhood and who was ripped out of it at a much older age and reacted accordingly.

10. Toby Daye from the series of the same name - I said earlier that Quentin just barely edged her for my favorite character, but I still like her enough to make an overall top ten right now. :)  I love her determination and her ability to make do with less magical gifts than the people around her often have. I love the way she's so devoted to children especially - it makes sense  in the world of Faerie, but it seems with her it's even more pronounced. I love how she can both embrace her feelings and completely misread them. I always look forward to the next book she's in with great gusto!

Looking back in time

The trend of getting all their old comics (or at least large portions of the more currently marketable) into current trades is one of the few things I think both Marvel and DC are doing well.

For a lot of fans, they may already have all the old stuff they want, but for someone like me, who didn't pick up her first comic until she was nearly in her 20s and didn't start collecting with any regularity until much closer to 30, a lot of stuff I might have liked quite a lot passed me by.

Some of the stuff, I've gone back and bought individual issues of over the years. I am the proud owner of the full run of Booster Gold's first solo series, the less proud owner of a full run of one of Guy Gardener's solo series (including Warrior), and the utterly hysterically amused owner of "Extreme Justice." (Seriously, if you get a chance, read it! It's a hilarious product of its time, and if you can get over some... intense art, let's call it, there's a few small actually good bits in the midst of all the DRAAAAAMMMMAAAAAAAA)

And the money that I spent on those, I would happily have paid to DC for collected trades of those. (Well, maybe NOT Extreme Justice). And to be fair, they DID put out the Booster Gold stuff in trade, and I did indeed buy it. But if I thought I would be able to get rid of my individual issues because of that, I was sorely mistaken. The trade they put out was in black and white, and while I'm sure some readers have no problem with the black and white, I found it much harder to get invested. Especially when color was a pretty key part of one arc O.o

That said, I picked up the second trade of classic Gambit this week, and reread the first one before reading this one. I love Gambit and a character, and I think the route they chose with compiling these was pretty good. The stories aren't necessarily from Gambit's series, they're just involving him - they come from all over. I like them in the same way I liked the idea at least of putting all the different Civil War comics into trades in chronological order. Didn't buy those, myself - already had the series-specific trades I wanted. :)

I hope this trend continues though. It seems like every time I read a new character with a bit of history in comics, it leads me to wanted to check out some of their older stuff. Easier is better for that!

The Pull List: Feb. 14

This week's offerings were Demon Knights No. 17, Avengers Arena No. 4, Marvel Universe The Avengers Earth's Mightiest Heroes No. 11 and Hawkeye No. 7 from a few weeks ago.

As usual, there may be spoilers beyond the cut.

Genderswapping and female main characters

I'm working on two stories right now. One has an ensemble cast, but the other one really only has one main character, a man, who's surrounded by aliens and has exciting doctor adventures in deep space.

The cast list of the ensemble story is pretty well balanced, with both male and female characters taking center stage at times. But with the other, there's only one spotlight and it's unavoidably on a male character all the time.

Now, there's nothing wrong with him being a guy. I want to get that out of the way right now. He's perfectly fine as a male character. I like him as he is, and I enjoy writing him. 

But there's a part of me - the part that looks around and laments that there aren't more awesome ladies in main character roles, especially in more adventure-style stories - that's been asking recently if I need to leave him as a man, or if I could change him to a woman without changing too much of the story or making her less fun to write.

And honestly, I think the answer I've come up with is no. Changing this character to a woman wouldn't actually affect the story all that much. He doesn't use physical strength very much so the one possible physical difference doesn't really come into play. There would be some different personal concerns, but they're easy enough to work in. And since none of the aliens has much of a concept of human gender, they would be unlikely to treat him any different if he became a she. 

And yet, I'm hesitant to change it. I'm sure part of it is just long familiarity with the character as a man - he was a roleplaying character long before I first tried to put him into prose in 2011 - but as I continue debating the merits of making him a her, I have to wonder if part of it's just an unconscious feeling that a man is "right" for the sort of loose sci-fi adventure story he's in. :-/

Progress: Blessed (24,400); Sci-fi story (56,716).

Why I read fantasy

I love fantasy. A glance at my reading list on Goodreads tells anyone as much. I would submit that the lion's share of everything I read is a variation of fantasy, be it books, manga or comics. (Followed closely by sci-fi). And I love it that way.

Part of it is that I love worldbuilding. I love the idea that things where this story is taking place are different from here, and seeing how those changes affect the ways in which people interact. I love seeing the creative things people come up with. you'd never get something like allomancy in a our-world novel, and the dynamics of that system are amazing.

At the same time, I also like that while fantasy is a genre, it's more rightly a setting. It's a place into which any story, any characters, any themes and any plots can be fitted.

I've been reminded lately that a lot of people see fantasy as a fluff genre. It's not a wrong perception, really, since most writers in the genre kind of treat it that way as well. And there's a lot to be said for fluff. People want escapism, and there's a certain beauty in the way that fantasy and sci fi can allow us to look at real-world issues in a ... let's say less threatening way.

And for me at least, there's a beauty in being able to divorce the terrible things people do from reality. I work in newspapers. I don't need to pick up a novel to read about people in our world being horrible to one another or being kind to one another. I do that all week long. If I'm going to read a book, I need it it separated, at least a little, from that reality. Is that somewhat cowardly? Perhaps. But its a preference that hasn't changed in more than two decades of picking my own books :)

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite romances

Top Ten Tuesday is a regular feature on the Broke and Bookish blog. This week's list is a look at the top 10 favorite romances. Though in my case, it's a top five because romance is just not my thing, and the romances in books I've read and enjoyed even where the romance isn't front and center tend to slip out of my mind rather quickly.

1. The Perilous Gard - I think this may be the first book in which I ever registered the romance and it didn't bug me. It just felt so natural and beautiful, so ingrained a part of the story without supplanting it or being the point of the book.  Christopher's words to Kate have always stuck with me - "If you were any other woman, I could tell you I loved you easily enough, but not you - because you've always seemed to me like a part of myself, and it would be like saying I loved my own eyes or my own mind. But have you ever thought of what it would be ]to live without your mind or your eyes, Kate? to be mad? Or blind? I can't talk about it. That's the way I feel." <3 font="">

2. Ashes of Honor - After five books of them messing around and avoiding coming out and saying it, Toby and Tybalt finally step forward in their relationship, and the care they show one another, the fierce protectiveness and trust, really struck me.

3. The Lions of Al Rassan - Notable for being the only love triangle I've read that I truly and deeply bought into, I get so tired of love triangles which are really a couple and then a third wheel with some claim on the proceedings. In this? I could understand why she loved both men. I could see her finding happiness with either, and finding heartbreak with either. The way that decision got made broke my heart.

4. Mistborn - I enjoyed the turnaround in Vin and Eland's relationship, the way they played off one another and the very real insecurities each of them dealt with. Another one that felt very organic and real to me.

5. Library Wars - Guilty pleasure time! This is not a very good manga and I won't claim otherwise. The romance is contrived as anything, and I'll admit that too. But something about the two characters just draws me in and makes me cheer for them even as I'm laughing at the ridiculousness of the story.

Haven't I seen you somewhere else?

I read the comic version of "Beautiful Creatures" this week.

I'm not the sort of person who tends to believe one version of a story is ever inherently better than another based on medium. It's all in execution, and two media can handle the same story in very different ways and have both be great stories in their own right in very different ways. As always, there may be spoilers behind the cut.

The Pull List: Feb. 6

This week we have a couple of number ones - The Fearless Defenders from Marvel and FairyQuest (1 of 2)

The music in my mind

I've always found it difficult to write without a soundtrack. Sometimes it's just a general mix of music playing to keep the silence at bay, but other times, there's specific music that I tend to listen to that gets me in the mood to work on a particular piece, or even a particular type of scene.

Oddly, the tougher a type of scene is for me, the less likely I am to find an appropriate type of music to help me with it. For instance, there's nothing I can really do when it comes to a romance-type scene other than push through it and hope to goodness there's music that speaks to the characters for me. Because it's not something I care much for, I guess I just don't have much in the way of music that matches.

On the other end of the balance - I have a TON of music I can use for action scenes. I've actually set up, over the years, at least four different playlists for such scenes, with a collection of slightly different music in each to match different flavors of action.

Right now, the two pieces I'm working on have associated bands, with the sci-fi story being largely written to the sounds of Union Underground, while Florence + The Machine currently soundtracks Blessed. It's not precisely right, but it's close enough for something which is largely a rewrite at this point.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who does this, but sometime I think part of the fun of starting something new is to come up with the songs that match it's tone and characters. :)

Somewhat related, I'm always torn between amused and irritated when I realize I've taken something in part from another source. Like, the large market setting appears in a number of different stories, and a planet-size market is not unheard of either, but I realized last night that the one I wrote into my sci-fi story last week was probably unconsciously patterned on Deva, from the MYTH Inc. books. The genesis is different and the feel of the place is different. Even the tone of the story is different. But it's like... its like whenever I read about a huge marketplace, my head sort of patterned it after Deva, so it was no surprise that when I made my own it did likewise.

Progress - Untitled sci-fi (53,523) ; Blessed (20,869) .

To like or not to like

Anyone who knows me, knows I love an unreliable narrator. I love the idea that we can't just trust that what the character whose head we're in thinks.

But it's really a fine line between  an unreliable narrator and an unlikeable narrator. I had that featured front and center recently as I read "The Magicians. As always, there may be spoilers under the cut!

Top Ten Tuesday: Best Bookish Memories

Top Ten Tuesday is a regular feature on the Broke and Bookish blog. This week's list is a look at the top 10 bookish moments in our literary lives (I could unfortunately only come up with 9). I feel I may have cheated a little bit in my list, but I'll leave that judgement ultimately up to you :)

1. I had the good fortune to be invited to Balticon some years ago by a friend who wanted to go and listen to Neil Gaiman, one of the guests, speak. Now, travesty of travesties, at the time I had never read any of his work. But even if I had, while I find Gaiman to be a technically amazing writer, his stories just do little for me emotionally. I was thinking about saying yes anyway just for the experience, but then I glanced over the rest of the guest list and saw Peter Beagle was also going to be in attendance. Suddenly, I was VERY interested.

We got to listen to a very interesting Q&A by the pair of them together, then went and got in line for autographs. When I got up to the front of the line, I had only a copy of Tamsin in my hands so, to the somewhat amusing surprise of some of the other people in line, I offered a polite wave to Mr .Gaiman and went directly over to Mr. Beagle, who was in the second seat at the table. He was not the first author I've met in person, nor the last, but I think he may have been the nicest. He saw I was a little tongue tied, so he signed the book and asked how I came to be a fan and told a story about the writing of Tamsin.

I was walking on air the rest of the day :)

2. Midnight release of the fifth Harry Potter book. I'd never done a midnight release party for anything besides movies before. the energy was incredible, as was the knowledge that the people around you were all fans of the exact same thing so you could geek out to your heart's content and no one would give you That Look. It was all I could do when I got home to tamp down the energy of the evening and go to sleep.

3. Getting my hands on the fifth Dark Tower book. After the long breaks between books and then the accident, I had sort of thought that it would never come to pass that I'd be able to move with the characters of the Dark Tower books past the end of Wizard and Glass. While I would not characterize any of the 5th-7th books as among my favorites, the ability to finish that journey was incredibly satisfying.

4. Peter Beagle again! He came to Otakon one year. While the animated Last Unicorn movie is not really a book, I was a fan of it because of the book. The con played the movie on a big screen, and Peter Beagle had a microphone at the front and told all manner of stories about the book itself, the process of getting it animated and the people he worked with. It was incredible. (As was meeting him afterward and being treated to stories about his time in Japan during the making of the movie.)

5. My first library book sale. I was just little at the time (maybe first grade?), but I still remember that I was given a small amount of money (50 cents I think) and told I could pick out books on my own. I looked around and it just hit me in a weird way - there were so, SO many books out there, and I could choose to read whatever of them I wanted - it was completely limitless. Of course, at the time, I wasn't interested in anything without pictures, but the principle stands. :)

6. Reading "The Long Walk" for the first time. I have no idea what it was about that book, but when I finished it, I was left with this weird, profoundly sad feeling. We were driving to Kentucky at the time, and I remember looking out the window and thinking how weird it was, all those houses we were passing had people in them who were living lives that I would never know anything about, that would never contact mine in any way, and they were probably facing the same sorts of disappointments and loneliness and everything else that I did. And even though that really has nothing to do with The Long Walk, I still get that feeling to a lesser extent every time I read it.

7. Getting the first volume of "Crimson." I knew of comics as something that nerds in movies read sometimes, but I'd never really had any contact with them myself. But I was deep in a vampire phase and the story sounded interesting so I picked it up. That book opened up the world of comics to me, and I'm now a very happy comics fan.

8. The first time I had a chance to read a published book by a friend of mine. I actually get this happy feeling every time someone I know gets published. There's just something about looking at the author's name on the cover and having a wealth of personal experiences and good times to remember with them.

9. The first time I got positive feedback from a comment I made on Jim Hines' blog. I respect him very much as both an author and a person, and while it's a totally small and simple and human thing, it gave me quite the little thrill.

The eye of the beholder

Sometimes I wonder what it is about the interaction of art and style and writing that impacts the readability of a comic. The art doesn't always have to be beautiful or detailed or even particularly good to carry a story sometimes, yeah? But other times, even good art - or even especially good art - can be a problem to the enjoyment of the book.

Rewrite vs new write

I'm not quite sure whether I prefer writing something from scratch or whether I like rewriting something I've already written.

To be sure, there can be a certain frustration with revisiting something you've already done and recrafting it wholesale instead of updating what you wrote previously. But I've found that quite often, if I leave a story for more than a couple years and come back, my writing style and view of the story have changed so dramatically that recreating is easier and faster than trying to pick through what's already there and salvage what can be salvaged.

And sometimes there can be fun in it as well. Sometimes I look back at what I had and hate hate hate it, but there are some decent high points or details or whatnot. So stringing together new prose and new ideas between the details I wanted to keep can be an interesting challenge, especially when I'm married to an idea for the first draft (as I so often am - I don't know about other people, but I find that I often won't admit a plot element won't work until I have a finished story and can see it in context.

On the flip side, sometimes starting from nothing is incredible- the ideas just bud and flower and the words pour forth almost as fast as your fingers can commit them to your medium of choice. But when that's not happening, whether it's writer's block or just a simple disinterest in the part you're writing (just not in the mood to write a romance, a fight, whatever) .

My preference probably depends on the day. but I can say this without doubt - rewriting is certainly the faster of the two for me. :)

Updates - Blessed (18,025), untitled sci-fi (51,701).

The pull list: Jan. 30

No new single issues this week - I've been paring down my pull list lately and it's meant there's more than a few gaps in my scheduled.

One of the things which I'll soon stop getting is the Batwoman series. Ever have a comic series you enjoy, but which you really enjoy *more* when it's read as a trade rather than in individual issues? It's not that I have any problem enjoying things on an individual issues basis, but somehow, for the type of storytelling Batwoman does, it always flows so much better in one big chunk rather than a bunch of pieces.

I feel a little bad, since with this, I'll have removed all but two DC titles from my pull list, and with a change recently, I think I may stop picking up Demon Knights as well. We'll see. So that just leaves Batwing, and while I'm still enjoying it, I'm wondering if I wouldn't get more out of it buying it in trade as well, since some of these crossovers are tedious.

It's sort of sad, because a couple years ago, I was almost entirely a DC girl, with only one ongoing Marvel title in my pull box per month. but now it's just about reversed, especially with the upcoming release of three new group books that I hope to at least give a look at.

I guess all things evolve. Even the pull list...