Friday, July 15, 2005

The Dreaded Reading Slump

This morning I started reading a book that I fully expected to enjoy, based on the dozens of other books I've read by this author over the years. But 30 pages in I wasn't enjoying it at all. Worse than that, I actively disliked it. So I set it aside. I don't keep pounding my head against a book that's no fun to read.

I guess that must have thrown me off-stride mentally, because now I can't find anything I want to read. And with all the books, pulps, digests, etc., around here, it's a real chore not to be in the mood to read any of it. Usually when I get like this, I can't read novels but can still handle short stories. Not this time. I have several different anthologies sitting around that I'm working my way through, but I don't want to read anything from any of them. I'm well aware that this feeling will pass, probably by tomorrow morning, but it's disconcerting to somebody like me. Reading has been one of my major activities for decades.

Page count for today: 8. I have a little over a week left for this book and need to start moving a little faster on it. Whether or not that will happen, though, is anybody's guess. Today I started editing what I wrote yesterday and realized that some of it was all wrong. I was about to delete the offending section and start that part over when I realized that the writing was actually okay, the problem was that the scene was in the wrong place. I was trying to force it into the story too early. So I just cut it out and moved it to the very end of the manuscript. It'll be there waiting for me when I get to the spot where it needs to go.

2 comments:

Juri said...

As for the reading slump, it sounds that if's stress-based. (This is just my two-penny kitchen self-psychology.)

James Reasoner said...

You may well be right about that. I did find some stuff I wanted to read, thankfully. Last night and this morning I read a couple of stories from an anthology called THE BEST MILITARY SCIENCE FICTION OF THE 20TH CENTURY, and tonight I'm about a third of the way through a novel I'll probably post about tomorrow, if I get it finished.