I need more tea

Should be working on last revision of novel, but haven't quite brought myself to that point. Maybe because I know that once I do, I'll be in it up to my neck, and there'll be no room for other things. And I have other things I need to do first. Projects with deadlines that won't wait.

It's funny, cuz I've had a very productive couple of months; the productivity has just been in other arenas.

Read a young adult novel recently called "Premonitions" by Jude Watson. It's a lesson in vividness and brevity, and I enjoyed it immensely. I got into her writing many years ago when she was writing the Jedi Apprentice books. Yes, I was in my 30's reading young adult Star Wars books. Yes, I bought the entire series as they came out. I visited the bookstore frequently, waiting specifically for the next book to hit the shelf so I could snap it up. I bought not one but two copies, and gifted my best friend with the second set, because we both love SW that much, and she had also fallen in love with Jude Watson's writing. You couldn't pry those books out of my collection, I love them too much. The first one she wrote, "The Dark Rival," is still my favorite. It was bloody brilliant, and I was an instant fan.

So, browsing around online, I found some non-SW books she'd written and bought "Premonitions." Ah, what an enjoyable book. Very similar to the SW books, in that she doesn't wimp out on the difficult topics. She dives right in and makes her characters deal. It's one of the things that grabbed me in the SW books. I've been proofing a lot of fanfiction recently for a print version of a zine, and if I see one more overwritten, prepositional phrase-loaded, participial phrase-loaded, dangling modifier (oh God, this one is killing me, kiiiiiiiiiillling me!), and adverb-loaded sentence, I'm gonna scream. And yes, I read examples that shoved all those things into one single sentence. You'd think the page would bend out of shape from all that word weight. This novel was the biggest breath of fresh air after drowning in prose that simply doesn't work. Short, concise, direct. There's much to be said for reading (and learning from) good young adult novels.