[meme] Day 20. A song that you listen to when you’re angry

Oh, I could give you a list of stuff I used to listen to during my Angry Young Man days back in the 80s...

Ministry's "Flashback" was always good for those moments you just wanted everyone to eff off...especially since the lyrics are violent and amusingly bad at the same time. Nine Inch Nails' "Terrible Lie" was good especially my freshman year in college. And of course there's Public Image Ltd's "Angry" which I actually quoted in an essay I had to write for english class in high school.

A recent song, though?

This has pretty much been my anger song for the last few years, I think for obvious reasons. ;)

[writing] A Division of Souls is slow going

*sigh* This could turn out to be a stupid idea. Or just a slog. Either way, it's one I need to get through, if this trilogy is ever going to see the light of day.

I've decided that the revision of A Division of Souls needs to be done on the Spare Oom PC, so I can have both the original and the new version side by side. Given that I have a widescreen monitor, I can get away with this and it works just fine. No, that's not exactly what's bothering me.

What's bothering me, of course, is just how UTTERLY CRAPTASTIC these older chapters are. As I'd said on Facebook a few days previous, these were written sometime around 2000 or so, so Asimov they certainly ain't. Which means with these older chapters, I'm pretty much writing over completely from scratch, using the original as a guideline, cutting and pasting in only bit parts that I can truly salvage.

Not that I'm flogging a dead horse, here...if I were forcing myself to do something that didn't feel right, I'd be getting nowhere. No, this is more about forcing myself to take this writing biz seriously. Sure, I was talking about setting up a schedule, and that's all well and good, but it's not the most important part. THIS is. Writing the damn thing, and writing it to the best of my ability, not just spending a few hours a day half-assedly playing around with words and calling it progress.

Why am I saying this now? Because of Jim Van Pelt's LJ post from a few days ago, which I linked to. Specifically, this passage:

One of the many problems new writers have is that they go for the obvious choices. They write from the tops of their heads. The problem is that the "tops of their heads" are generally like the tops of our heads. The stuff that comes easy for the writer often comes easy for the reader too, so the writer will say things that the reader is perfectly capable of saying.

That makes for boring writing.

As soon as I read that, it was like a revelation.

The revelation being Damn it, that's exactly what's been wrong with my stuff all this time. Whenever I read my own stuff, I knew there was something missing, and I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Aside from some of my usual writing crutches, I always felt that I was almost there, but not quite. Reading the above, I realized that it was completely true for me. For all my preaching about not wanting to react to surface emotions, my writing suffers from exactly that. I rarely if ever go that one level deeper.

Which means that I still have a lot of work to do.

But at least now I have an idea of where I need to go.