Glare Report 10/4: Research reading; reading other books re: ice palaces; title (in comments)

[pegkerr]

Last night's work was research reading, Ice Palaces by Fred Anderes and Ann Agranoff. I worked on reading it, flagging pages, and typing notes into a research file. I have not entirely made up my mind about how to handle research reading. Although I did lots and lots of research for my previous two books, I took no notes. This is a matter of great astonishment to kijjohnson, but it's true. I have a peculiarly retentive memory, and I have the knack for remembering where I read a research tidbit, so I preferred to write with my research books more or less on my lap, so I could consult directly out of them as I wrote. When I wanted a bit about what 17th century fire irons looked like, I would be able to go to the book where I read that part, and more or less quickly turn to that section, sometimes by consulting my memory, and sometimes by consulting the index. For the most part, it worked pretty well.

I'm trying to decide whether I actually need/want to take notes on what I read as I go along. I'm starting out trying it. Problem: I find it soooooo laborious, and I feel impatient. C'mon, you're wasting precious time, here. And if I take notes on my computer, I'm pretty much stuck with doing my note taking when I'm home. I guess I can read the books wherever I am (on breaks at work), flag them, and then do the notes later, but that then means going through the books twice. Haven't quite made up my mind yet what I am going to do.

I remain extremely uneasy about the Larry Millett book floating out there. I would have entirely preferred it if I had been the first fiction writer to use the ice palace as a setting, but I'm not. Larry Millett did it first, with Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders, writing about one of the 19th century St. Paul palaces. The reason I am so intimidated is that he is the architecture critic for the St. Paul paper, and a writer of nonfiction architecture books, dammit. He knows an incredible amount about architecture. And what am I? A rank amateur. I don't dare read his book, for fear that his way of describing an ice palace and how it's built would "contaminate" how I try to do it. And yet I'm sure that he has done it so much better than I ever could.

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I heard it from Steve as Neil Gaiman quoting Gene Woolf. So I suspect it goes waayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy back into the annals of SF Recieved Wisdom. *g*

And yeah. If it ain't broke, don't fix it....

On the other hand, it can't hurt to shake things up if it's not working. Like this damned book of mine that seems to want an effing outline.