Reading ≠ Writing

Let's see my wordcount has stayed steady this week (i.e. Zero) while my reading has spiked sharply.

So…Octavia Butler's Adulthood Rites. One of the brilliant things about Dawn--for me, anyway, is how bleak and bitter Lilith is and/or must become. Dawn was written first, of course, and my sense is that it was written without depending on the structure of a Trilogy. There are clear shifts between Dawn and Adulthood Rites and those are important shifts.

Maybe because I'm re-reading Butler's books in a funny sequence (Parable I, Parable II, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago---what next? Fledgling?Kindred? I'm starting to see something in her worldview that I had not noticed before. The model of humanity that she's creating has some commonalities with Frederick Jackson Turner's theory of the Frontier as necessarily shaping the US. (and with Manifest Destiny) Also--is this ironic for science fiction?--the idea that essence of humanity is to be found in the small, base community, and that what comes afterward is corruption.

I'm going to have to think about this some more.

But will I write?