Binging

I do that. I binge. Not on food--at least not TOO much. ;-)

I binge on activities.

Last week I binged on slush-reading. If you don't know what that is, I'll explain:

I work as a slush editor for an online fiction magazine. I read slush, which is stories that have been submitted for potential publication through our site. I read close to 100 stories a month, and out of those I give the thumbs up to about 20. Of THOSE about 5 or 6 end up being considered, and of THOSE one or two actually get published.

I've been reading a lot of slush this week--probably fifty or sixty stories.

See, two weeks ago it was my blogging binge week. Three weeks ago it was my Primary Music binge week. This week I'm binging on writing. I'm working on a very old and very big project that I hope to actually finish someday--my novel.

For those of you have read any of it, what it's evolving into is going to have very little resemblance to what I originally wrote.

This all started because I'm reading a book in preparation for our history study. It's called Daily Life in the Age of Charlemagne. (It's a pretty crappy book, full of inconsistencies and far to church-sympathetic.) Aside from its basic crappiness, it does two things successfully. 1) It focuses on a pretty narrow time frame, which means that the descriptions of daily life during that time period are actually relevant to the WHOLE time period. To contrast, a book about daily life during the Middle Ages is, to me, idiotic. I mean, the Middle Ages lasted a THOUSAND YEARS! It is inconceivable to me that life would be basically the same at the beginning of that thousand years as it was at the end of it. In fact, it is quite the contrary. At the beginning of that thousand years the average joe was a freeman. By the end the majority of Europeans were little more than slaves living as serfs, basically the property of the person on whose land they lived. Different.

But all that's neither here nor there. The other successful thing it does is that it gives a pretty good outline of all the relevant facts about daily life. Social pressures, Economic pressures, basic living, clothing, etc, etc. Like I said, the book kinda sucks (there are a few passages that are interesting and seem fairly factual if that helps redeem it), but I looked at that basic outline and thought, 'Hey, that would be a really great way to outline the background material for a novel!' So that's what I've been doing. I'm working out all the little details that are going to help me more deeply create characters, where they're coming from, why they make the decisions they do, that sort of thing.

So I'm outlining. Binging on outlining.

Better than binging on ice cream.

Maybe.