Week in review: Week to 21 February

My second attempt at a random book for February, Perfume by Patrick Süskind, came to the same end as the first: fifty pages in I didn't care about any of the characters (apart from maybe a couple who had appeared in one scene each and I was confident would not be appearing again) and I had no curiosity about where the plot, such as it was, was going, so I abandoned the book and moved on. Perfume struck me as a book that might appeal to the kind of reader who enjoys bathing in written language: parts of it are beautifully crafted, and there was some interest in the way the narrative was centred on the sense of smell instead of something more usual like sight or sound, but I'm not that kind of reader and I didn't feel like I was getting anything out of it that rewarded the time I was spending on it.

My third attempt, The Visitors by Clifford D. Simak, was more successful, in that I read nearly fifty pages in just the first sitting and went on to read the whole thing before consigning it to the box of books I intend to get rid of. It's a story about the arrival on Earth of a group of very alien aliens, and how the people of the United States (where the first one happens to land) react to the situation. In the first part of the story, when everyone's just trying to figure out what the first arrival is, I found myself less interested in the aliens than in the detailed account of a group of reporters and photographers covering the landing (I wasn't surprised when the opening sentence of the author's bio at the back of the book turned out to be "Clifford D. Simak is a newspaperman"). Later, we get more detail about the aliens, but I felt a lack of drama, partly because the presentation is very dry (lots of scenes of people in conference rooms telling each other things the author wants the reader to know) and partly because both the aliens and the key humans are so darn reasonable about the whole business. In the last third of the novel, the author starts developing the idea that the aliens might cause a lot of trouble with the best of intentions, just by not understanding the economic and political consequences of their attempts to be helpful, but the novel ends without the author committing to the idea, and trails off into more scenes of people in conference rooms talking about what might happen next. Even the obligatory last-second sting in the tail happens thirty pages before the end and gets talked to death before the novel's finally over. There's a kind of half-baked attempt to compare the aliens to the European colonialists in the New World, both early on when people are afraid the Visitors plan to move in and take over Earth without regard for its existing population and again later when they start handing out advanced technology, but it doesn't go anywhere deep or insightful and in the meantime it means we get stuck with a bunch of scenes of white people talking about Native Americans with varying degrees of knowledge and sympathy, including a character going on a four-page rant about, among other related topics, how the Europeans were doing the Native Americans (he doesn't say "Native Americans") a favour by stealing their land off them. (That guy isn't meant to be sympathetic, and he's only in that one chapter, but it left a bad taste).


At the board game group this week, I played Chomp (arrange tiles with dinosaurs and landscape on them so that the dinosaurs that will score you points don't get eaten, starve, or fall into tar pits), Ticket to Ride: Europe (lay out the best train routes on a map of Europe), and Santorini (build towers and be the first to have a worker at the top of a tower while preventing your opponents from completing their own towers or stealing yours).


During the periods when I've been using 750 Words regularly, I've mostly been using it as a place to keep a journal, but one day this week I used it for the original intended purpose of furthering creative writing. I'd been reminiscing about a story idea I had years ago, as a spin-off from another story I also never completed, and decided to dig out my old story notes and see if I could add to them. I looked in the folder on my computer and found the story notes for the original story idea, but there weren't any notes about the sequel story. So I decided that my 750 Words session for the day would be a brain dump of everything I could remember about the story idea, including the bits and pieces I could remember having made up for WIP memes and things over the years. When I was done, I tried a word search on my computer to try and find a scene fragment I knew I'd written out at some point; I didn't find that, but I did find that I had, after all, written an extensive set of notes on the story idea - I'd stashed them in a separate folder, because I was trying to make it work as a standalone story instead of a sequel, under a code name that I'd subsequently forgotten referred to that story. I don't think the brain dump was a wasted exercise, though, because it's useful to have a record of which parts of the idea have stuck with me over the fifteen years since I wrote the original story notes; in the unlikely event that I do ever write the story, that'll give me an indication of which parts of the story are the ones that really resonate with me.

I'm still mostly doing my 750 Words sessions in the mornings. I'm not happy about how it cuts into the time I could be using for morning exercise or other useful things, but one day this week I did the session at night because I hadn't found time earlier in the day, and was reminded how much of a struggle it was to do when I was tired.