Ennui

This week's been very, very meh. Most of the time I'm not particularly affected by writing ennui, but when it hits, it hits hard. Every word, sentence and paragraph just feels dull, hackneyed and flat. I stare at the screen and wonder if my ibook really deserves to be punished by one more word being punched into the word processor.

It's a feeling that always passes, but not without hanging around for a couple of days first. One way I get over it is by reminding myself that I actually get paid to write, and paid well enough that right now I don't need to find a day job, and that if I wandered into a convention and whined like I've been doing in the previous couple of sentences I'd probably be torn asunder by rabid unpublished writers before having my half-gnawed bones tossed to the dogs. So yes, it's dumb. Still.

Some things I've noticed in the Holy Crap! Did you know box recently ...

Holy Crap! Frederick Pohl has a blog?!? How cool is that?

Holy Crap! Phil Dick's widow has gone and written The Owl in Daylight, a Dick book that only ever existed in outline form and in vague details mentioned in interviews shortly before his death. It's on sale at Amazon.com as a self-published work. And ... it's really, really terrible, if just the first few pages I previewed are anything to go by.

Well, okay, I think it's fair to say that trying to write the last novel of not only your long-dead husband but one of the genre's most highly respected authors would squeeze pretty much every other contender out of the Big Box of Really Bad Ideas, and the preview does rather, I'm afraid, confirm it. I do seem to recall reading Dick discussing 'The Owl in Daylight' in, I think, SF Eye, a couple of geological periods ago. If you can find that interview, it's very worth checking out.

And finally.

Holy Crap! Watchmen is almost out! And Alan Moore is presumably getting ready to climb inside a specially made coffin mounted on a motor-driven lathe set to fast spin (is that too obscure?)