Today has been one of those days, Squiders, where trying to get anything done has been a huge drag and everything seems too hard. This, sadly, includes blogging. And so I took to the interwebs in search of inspiration (and instead got sucked into YouTube, alas), and I found a blog topic generator. You plug in some SEO keywords for your website and it spits out titles of blog posts for you.
So, I put in reading, writing, and fantasy. And it gave me:
- Why We Love Writing (And You Should, Too!)
- 10 Quick Tips About Fantasy
- The Worst Advice We’ve Ever Heard About Reading
- The Ultimate Cheat Sheet on Writing
- 7 Things About Fantasy Your Boss Wants to Know
Not sure what sort of fantasy your boss wants to know about, honestly. Anyway, I am generally amused, because they don’t quite work, but I kind of want to make them work.
But onto real content. You know how sometimes you pick up a book and you start reading it, and you fall in love with it immediately, with the style and flow of the words themselves? I have found one of those books. And I am reading it almost ungodly slowly, because it’s so pretty I want to make it last as long as possible. It’s frankly ridiculous, because I’m only three chapters in, and maybe the book will take a terrible turn halfway through and I will be horribly disappointed in the end.
To be frank, I’m a little jealous. You know how everyone says you need a good hook right at the beginning, something to drag your readers in and keep them reading? To be honest, I feel like most people aren’t great at this. Or they’ve got a really interesting first line/paragraph/page and then it kind of trails off, like they put a lot of work into the very beginning and less work into the rest. It seems really rare for a book to be uniformly good, in terms of prose, all the way through.
And, of course, what works is different from reader to reader, so no doubt something that I find great someone else will find plain, and something that someone else finds great I might feel is overwritten nonsense.
But for now, I keep my hopes up and shall continue savoring.
Do you have books/authors that hit all the right notes for you, Squiders? Not necessarily plotwise, but in the flow of the words? What are they?
