Happy Halloween | Retrospective | Nearing the End
How are the WIPs going?
I'm getting closer to finishing the first part of my Dragon Hunters story. I'm finding a little bit of an approach avoidance growing in me. I don't know why I get like this when I near finishing something, but I very often have an instinct to sheer off and to do something else when I'm closing in on the completion of a thing. Imp of the Perverse, I reckon.
Which is a really great short piece by Poe. I don't know if you've read it; it starts off real slow, but he's not wasting his words, though the meandering opening feels like he is. I had it playing as an audiobook recently, and I was shocked to realize just how well all those unconnected digressions fit together once you understand the conclusion.
I also used some of my reading time to enjoy something from my childhood, one of the Animorphs books, The Ellimist Chronicles. I'd never finished it. I remember reading the first chapter once, but that was all. Now that I have, I have mixed feelings about it, but it does tie in, strangely, to a theme that's been haunting my reading a bit, that of childlessness.
The opening, written in simple, straightforward prose, touched me deeply with pathos. A meaningful tragedy plays out in words a child could understand. The ideas which followed were plentiful, imaginative, and dealt with in such a cursory manner that I felt as though I were looking upon the tragedy of a premature birth, dead, half-formed, but still beautiful. Passing the midpoint, each subsequent chapter tears you, slowly and surely, from being within the story until you feel as if you're just reading a list of events near the end. I cannot help but find parallels to Methuselah’s Children by Heinlein which, following a similar plot and structure, manages to keep the narrative flowing until the end.
To defend the book, it dips into the mythopoeic, and outside of the execution, that myth seems poignant; it only failed to be poetic in the actual way it was told.
Well, that's about it. It's Halloween this weekend. I'm going to try to get some posts up and ready on my blog. The theme I've chosen for these last few days of October is Witches. After that, I'll go back to my normal posting.
Let me know how your WIPs are going? Do you ever read books from your childhood? Are you a fan of Poe? Are you doing anything fun for Halloween? Let me know in the comments below.
