Read On Writing by S King. Really liked it. Straight and to the point. Mostly. Useful.

Read Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey. Interesting. Has caused me to start getting up before work to write for at least an hour. Getting up at 5:30 or 6 to write for an hour is OK and doable for me now. Though once a week I will have to get up at 4:45. As I do anaerobic exercise I want to sleep in more. Except for some tennis I will avoid anaerobic exercise.

Reread first 17% of Lyonesse by Vance. In some ways he's very impressive and unique but in other ways it's really not good story telling. Little dialogue. Just kind of meandering along. Almost like a history summary.

Reread first 6% of Bleak House by Dickens. For some reason I really want to be able to say I read this. He's such a highly thought out writer. But good lord this is terrible. Trying to at least make it to 10%. I seem to not be able to stand to continue around 5 or percent. So far what has happened....? There's some lawsuit that has gone on a long time and some orphan girl who is really nice and has lived a bit here and there. Not treated terribly but not super well. Not much for so many words.

Read some short stories from a Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe. Highly forgettable.

41% of Wind and the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. Surely Tolkien was greatly influenced by this? ...Yes. He was. And it's enjoyable in the same sense that the Shire was. 

Firefly Island by Daniel Arenson
Typical sort of fantasy. Girl has super powers that are undeveloped. (the hidden ace up the sleeve.) She's a slave for an ogre.

Started kind of nice but just too light. Stopped reading 70% in. Feel silly for having gone that far.

Drood: A Novel by Dan Simmons
Love the subject matter. Charles Dickens out prowling around through dark parts of London. Also loved Simmons' book The Terror. But the problem here is that no one is likable. Complex characters are one thing, but you've really got to make someone who's actually likable. The main fellow here isn't. And the way he's portraying Dickens makes him also not. Of course his POV may just be wrong. But it's pretty much all we've got to work with.

So I'm not even 25% in (of a long book) and straying away. Straying to a couple biographies of Dickens as I'm curious to see where he got this negative attitude about Dickens. What I've found is gushing in praise. Perhaps Simmons just wanted to be contrary? Also started reading (again) Bleak House.

And have been thinking about why Dickens was a writer and I'm not. Such things as him perhaps having instilled in him a lifelong desire to prove himself? Ever since taken out of school at 12 to work 60 hour weeks in a factory for over a year while money was found to send his sister to a pretigious music academy. That also giving him a direction for his writing.

But then he lived before TV, cars, radio and he lived in London. The world was full of people actually interacting so, so much more and being so much more into books. And he took very closely from his actual life.

Me taking from my actual life would be sad fare indeed. Well 'meagre' would be a better word. And that which I really want to communicate most of all happens to be impossible.

But, told my dad I'm going to start writing his biography. Thinking I need to write based on actual life, and so I want him to just relate stories from his life. Absolutely NO outline. Nothing chronological. Done like Twain did.

Also looking at a biography of Clive Barker. Too soon to know what to think other than wanting to download some books that Barker really liked. Also seeing how from a young age he was constantly making stories and I wasn't.