aurorawatcherak "I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical."
We’ve talked about writer’s block. Have you ever had reader’s block?
I used to love reading as a child. In school holidays Mum and Dad would go off to work, and I’d curl up on the sofa with a book and would often still be there at 2pm when Mum came home. I read for the pleasure of it, and always had a stack of books to get through. Books have always been a source of comfort to me.
However, when I began writing novels in 2013, all this changed. First of all I preferred to write and not read, even though I knew that I should be reading much more than I was. Secondly, when I read anything I began to find faults as I went along (it had never occurred to me to do this beforehand) and somehow the pleasure of reading was…
I’d never heard of “reader’s block” before the question was asked, so, definitions are in order:
Readers Block is a phenomenon where a person cannot proceed with a book. They are frequently distracted from the book or after flipping a page realize that they have been reading individual words mechanically without processing and understanding the meaning of the text in their mind. It has been named in sync with Writer’s Block, where a writer suddenly loses interest in writing.
b) The book is itself bad and not written to generate interest.
c) You are too tired and exhausted to read pretty much anything.
What is Common To Humankind
The answer is – yes. Pretty much everything other human beings have suffered, I have suffered also. I’ve said I don’t believe in writer’s block, but that’s because I’ve never allowed myself to be mugged by it. That doesn’t mean I’ve never experienced the processes behind it, but that I’ve taken control of them and used them to my advantage.
Reader’s block, however ….
I don’t know when I first experienced it, but I do know when I became aware of it for the first time.
In high school, a friend gave me a copy of The Hobbit. For a fantasy and science fiction geek reader, it was right up my alley and I eagerly sat down to read it. I read the first page. I set it down. I didn’t pick it up again until college when someone was raving about The Hobbit and I felt like I couldn’t claim to be a fantasy geek if I didn’t read it. I picked it up and I read maybe a page and a half. I set it down. I didn’t pick it up again until my daughter was a new reader and she begged me to read the story to her.
I read 10 pages to her that night and then she had to go to bed and I finished the book before morning, then read it aloud to her over several nights following.
The Hobbit starts with an info-dump and I struggled to get past it to the meat the story. It kept boring me and that boredom “blocked” me from the story. I didn’t have a teacher (how I got through the info-dump that starts The Tale of Two Cities) or my dad (who expected me to read all the classics) pushing me to keep reading and so, I didn’t — until a seven-year-old pushed me to do it and then I got past the hard part and found a lovely story.
Too Rich for My Blood
But I’ve also blocked on Conceived in Liberty by Murray Rothbard because it just is so historically dense. It’s hard to read big chunks of it because it’s so rich. Reading is an intellectual exercise, and not always an easy one. I’ve never encountered a book that demanded more than my intellect could handle, but I’ve definitely been humbled by an occasional struggle with how smart a writer might be. I am still reading Conceived. It’s just that I’ve learned to take it in small bites.
Life Happens While You’re Reading a Book
When my son was a baby and my daughter was an elementary schooler, time for reading became the constraint. Yeah, there were the frequent “Mommy, will you read this book for me?” moments, but the times to sit down and read a book for pleasure just wasn’t happening. There was about five years there when reading for pleasure was a forlorn hope and writing was squeezed into minutes between life events. I totally don’t regret not having much time to read during those years.
Try a New Genre
Sometimes there’s no explanation but that you’re tired of reading. Frankly, I’d been in a reading slump for a while this summer. I had several books to read and I wasn’t reading any of them. I felt badly about not cracking the spine on Brandon Sanderson’s Oathbringer after I’d longed to read it for over a year. Then a friend suggested something totally outside of my usual interest – a romance. I do occasionally enjoy mysteries or thrillers that have romantic elements, but pure romance where the focus is man meets woman and they fall in love, usually after disliking each other for a while — naw, not my style. I am a skeptic of Happily Ever After, especially for people who have nothing in common but sexual desire. But my friend suggested I read Ghosted because it involves a second-chance romance between a recovering alcoholic and his baby mama who is deeply angry at him. I could feel myself yawning even as I opened the Kindle file, but I truly enjoyed the story — probably because it was more true-to-life than most romances — and that got me back reading other books (almost entirely non-romances — still haven’t changed my opinion on the genre). I realized something from my foray into this genre. Several of the reviews for Ghosted mentioned it was long. For me 450 pages is nothing. I’m a fat fantasy reader. I guess that’s pretty long for a romance (which might be why I keep thinking “nobody falls in love that quickly”). But — wait, maybe that was why I was in a reading slump. Fat fantasies are a commitment. You start it and it will consumer your evenings for a while – days, sometimes weeks. And maybe that’s why I couldn’t start it. I felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. After I finished Ghosted, I still wasn’t ready to read Oathbringer.
Rereading an old favorite is one of the best ways to cure the book blahs. When you revisit an old favorite, you remember why you love to read, how a fictional character could resonate so deeply with you, what ingenious word-play exists in the world, and what diabolical drama a writer is capable of concocting. You can reignite your love of reading. After Ghosted got me reading again, I went through several old favorites that have been sitting on my shelves for years and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I then cracked open Oathbringer and finished it in about 10 days.
Downside
The downside of igniting your love of reading when you’re a writer is that you may be inspired to write your next novel. Or is that an upside? Hmmm?
The world as you knew it is gone. Who is your neighbor?
Isolated amid a crippled country, the people of Emmaus strive to survive through Midwestern grit and ingenuity as winter looms and desperate people threaten the town’s borders. Distant opportunities beckon, food and medicine dwindle, and disease flares. With starvation just around the corner, a time of gathering in begins. Not everyone’s going to live to spring.
Shane Delaney prides himself on his ability to stay cool in troubled times, but he can’t save everyone and now it becomes clear he may not even be able to save himself.
When the world as you knew it goes off the rails, who would you bring home?
The medical center held the
priority for fuel, so had lights, kept low to save electricity. The patients
all slept. Shane went into the room where Mike slumbered under a heavy dose of
sedatives. His temperature still ran high. Shane looked at the blood-tinged pus
in the bag hanging beside the bed. The yellow-green color didn’t bode well for
his friend’s survival.
God, we could use your help here.
Where did that come from?
Driving through a mortar barrage, he found a rudimentary belief in the god he’d
so long denied. Shane found it convenient to blame the eternal crap bag for all
the evil in the world, but he didn’t expect him to be a cosmic sugar daddy.
That kind of delusion belonged to people who thought the meddlesome old man in
the long white beard loved them. He
knew if his parents’ god was real,
he’d lose no love on a monster like Shane. God’s love of monsters stood in the
way of Shane even believing in him. Men like King David, with hundreds of
deaths on their hands, didn’t deserve heaven.
I deserve death.
Did Mike? Probably a
card-carrying member of the asshole in arms did, yeah. Did Alicia deserve to be
alone, pregnant and unprotected in a world now spun out of control? All of
morality pivoted there for Shane. He knew he
deserved death by painful torture, but he also knew that would hurt his parents deeply and the knowledge kept his
9mm in its back holster and not in his mouth. He had to do his best to not hurt
himself while they still needed his skills.
Do you try to be more original, or to deliver to readers what they want?
I have only been writing for three years, so I cannot claim vast experience in the writing and publishing business. I have, however, been a huge reader all my life.
When I looked at this blog hop question, in my mind it immediately boiled down to a basic money question. Publishing is a business that aims to make money. Making money means you have to provide the products that people want. So, what is it that people want?
I think most readers are looking for mental relaxation and entertainment. Modern people are always short of time and overly rushed and busy. They want instant entertainment gratification. They do not necessarily want to dwell on the ills of the world or read three pages describing a river during a storm [think Charles Dickens] or anguish over…
Julian headed off in the
direction he’d indicated, carrying two gas cans, the wrecking bar he used for
self-defense trailing out the back of his coat like a metal tail, his feet
crunching dried leaves.
The empty street of clapboard
houses and neat hedges on narrow sidewalks gave Perry the creeps. It felt like
one of those horror movies where you find a deserted town and then the zombies
climb out of the cellars. He popped the hood and methodically worked his way
through the fluids – oil, transmission, brake, steering, and radiator. The
truck’s age made windshield wiper fluid unnecessary. They needed to find a gas
station with a working air hose. That back left tire looked a little squishy.
They needed to get more trade goods. Perry had always been an honest man and it
didn’t come naturally to think about stealing, but there might be stuff in
these houses they could exchange for what they needed. Joseph had enormous
resources that he couldn’t access in the current circumstances, but surely Ren
Sullivan’s fortune didn’t go poof when the electrical grid fried. He’d have to
talk to Joseph when he and Katharine came back.
He heard a scrape of a sole
on pavement a split second before he felt the barrel of a gun in his right
kidney.
The night
of the pulse, Geo Tully and Wes Marcus were in the basement of Wes’ aunt’s home
that had become their safehouse.
Wes, a wiry com tech barely
old enough to shave regularly, held up a photo album that showed a man standing
in front of the post-World War 2 bungalow with a shovel. The front door stood
behind him, but not the view of the house that Geo recognized. The articulated
arm of a backhoe could be seen on the edge of the frame.
“The porch is an addition,”
Geo acknowledged.
A Navy Seal from Kansas, Geo
towered over his Seattle-raised compatriot. They’d thrown in together when
Bunnell & Wilson’s Knights Industry division seized control of the city by
murdering military personnel. Wes’ uncle Fred had been an urban survivalist
before he died a few years ago and his aunt Connie had died in Portland’s bomb
attack. Their house had been a safe haven for two fugitives, so far.
“And look at how deep the
hole is behind him.”
Geo turned to the front wall
of the basement. The shelves had kept him from investigating here. They
appeared to be attached to the wall, but when he ran his hand along the back
edge of the shelving unit, he found a throw-bolt. He pulled it down and tugged
on the shelves, swinging them out away from the wall. Hinged on the far side,
they glided on hidden casters. Behind the shelves an open space stretched the
length of the porch. Geo tried the light on the ceiling, but it didn’t turn on.
He used the flashlight on his phone to illuminate the small room. A ham radio
sat at one end, covered with plastic, while storage boxes filled the other end.
“I knew that tower had to
still have a use.” Wes squatted down to look under the table the radio sat on.
As an Army communication tech, he knew radios. “He left it disconnected. It’ll
take me a moment.”
The light bulb in the main
basement flared and popped off. Wes smacked his head on the underside of the
table. Geo’s phone light went out.
“What’s that smell?” Wes
stood, sniffing.
“My phone just fried, I
think.”
They fumbled around in the
dark to find the stairs and make their way to the kitchen. Duke, the Labrador
retriever, stood in the living room, staring at the window and whining.
Geo peeked out the curtains
as the neighbors came out on their porch, staring around.
“You smell that?” Wes asked.
“I’m going to go check for fire.”
“Do you hear that?”
Duke whined louder. Raucous
voices filtered in through the glass. Geo watched as the neighbors ran off
their porch. Wes swept the front door open.
“What the hell?” Geo growled.
“They need help.” Wes ran
into the street.
“Stay, Duke,” Geo ordered and
followed his stupid partner into the street, where the neighbors could get a
full view of their high-and-tights. They’d agreed they wouldn’t do that, but
Wes had forced them all in. A municipal bus sat at the corner, smoke pouring
out of its windows as the people inside tried to get out, screaming, kicking,
punching at the glass, but when one window shattered, it just fed the fire that
doomed them.
Wes ran to the rear passenger
door and tried to pull it open, convulsing and chewing his tongue, smoke rising
from his body.
Today is the launch of Gathering In (Book 5 of Transformation Project series).
I’ve put my characters through a lot (terrorist attacks,
radioactive rain, an air-handling system failure, a corn-field fire, confiscation
of crops by the USDA) and they’re going to lose big in this latest book. Such
is life for characters in an apocalyptic novel series.
Have you ever thought about how food gets to your local
grocery store? How would it get there if the major transportation hubs were
destroyed and rendered no-go zones?
Have you ever thought about where antibiotics come from and whether
those avenues would be available in an apocalyptic situation? What about heart
medications? Antidepressants? You name it. It’s unlikely it was made within a
few miles of your home. So what do you do if the apocalypse happens? What can
you do?
I live in Alaska, where everything comes through the Port of
Anchorage. In fact, Anchorage International Airport is the second-busiest cargo
airport in the United States. Last year Anchorage was hit by a 7.1 quake (which
is NOTHING compared to the Anchorage Quake of 1964 – 9.2 or the Denali Quake of
2002 – 7.9) and roadways collapsed all over town. The airport was closed for a
few hours. The railroad was offline for about 24 hours. The main road between
Anchorage and Fairbanks was fine, but there are three “structurally deficient”
bridges between here and there, so maybe it might not have been. So imagine
what happens here if the Port or the airport are rendered unusable? Starvation,
people without meds, no heating fuel which is a disaster if it’s winter.
I have to imagine that because I live at the end of a
tenuous supply chain in a place where certain kinds of natural disasters are
expected. We build for those disasters, but even then … roads collapsed all
over Anchorage.
You should imagine it for wherever you live because the time
for these thoughts is not after the damage has been done. It’s too late to do
anything about it then.
Do you try to be more original, or to deliver to readers what they want?
aurorawatcherak 