Tuesday, December 01, 2009

One Lesson Learned

Much as I may enjoy reading (or watching) sci-fi/fantasy stories, I am utterly unable to write them. I've tried it before. This last attempt, through NaNoWriMo has sort of put the nail in the coffin on that dream for me.

But maybe I just need to read more of it. Even (or maybe especially) children's. Which makes me grateful to Son-of-Milk-Guy, who gave me his entire collection of Spiderwick chronicles. I'm pretty sure he never read them himself, but I was rather pleased that he thought I might like them . . . all by himself.

3 comments:

Jeff said...

Might I reccomend Neil Gaiman? He's got stuff from picture books through adult novels... And nearly all of it, is amazing. Some of his adult stuff is theologically challenging (he's not a Christian-- in fact, his novel, "American Gods"is about this sort-of battle between the old pagan Gods and our contemporary gods-- so Thor goes toe-to-toe with the personification of the internet, for example.)

"Graveyard Book" and "Neverwhere" are particularly good places to start.

Jennwith2ns said...

His books give me weird dreams, but you're right--he's a master of the craft. And if I space out the novels enough, maybe I can handle it. ;)

Jeff said...

That's a fascinating statement. I find myself wondering if you're aware of his earliest work. (I'm outing myself here, as a pretty majo0r league geek.)
Before most of his novels, he wrote a series of comics called "Sandman" The series was mostly focused on Morpheus, an embodiement/God of dreams. There was all kinds of fascinating commentary on the nature of dreams and dreaming; dreaming itself was treated as a journey to the realm that he ruled over.