Sunday 06/25/2023
The morning was taken up with studying the vendor quote that the IT department has obtained for auditorium work. There are a number of problems with what they plan to, and things the vendor has not properly or completely specified. I spent a couple hours on that, partly consulting with Jerry.
After lunch I drove down to the local nursery and bought myself a coleus to replace a different plant that has been struggling in my living room. Hopefully this guy will feel more at home with my sporadic watering.
Then I printed a bunch of new pictures for my hall picture rails The old display which was big blossoms of one kind or another, had been up for 2 months or more.
Finally I looked at some prize-winning young adult SF novels. A big annual award deal was announced and thought I would look over the nominees for YA SF, because that’s what I’m trying to write. It was pretty discouraging. I read the samples on the Kindle pages of 8 nominees, and they were all really good. One, the winner, was good enough I actually bought it. (This one.) Two things that discouraged me.
One, all of them are written in first person point of view. That is, “I did this, I saw that, I said…” story telling mode. Back in the 90s when I was trying to write fiction and reading a lot of “how to write” advice, every single guru strongly advocated against first person, saying it is a common trap that newbies fall into. Now apparently it is the thing. In the story I’m working on, first, there are two protagonists, what would I do, switch between them, one chapter him, next chapter her? I’ve seen that done but it’s artificial. But also, I want to have scenes that take place where the protagonists are not present. You can’t do that in 1P. In 1P, the only way to report something that happened when they weren’t there, is to have somebody come and tell them about it. Awkward.
The other thing that stood out is how every single one of these award-nominated stories starts bang with strong emotion, danger, or violence. No messing around, no build up, no scene setting. I’m not good at the strong conflict ever, and need to build up to it. Maybe I should change genres, move to Cozy Mystery, where any violence is off-stage and the strongest emotion is wondering who did it.
Codgerville 