Jane Eyre, Dreams and a meme
Sep. 27th, 2008 03:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redfiona99On wishtheworst's recommendation, I read Jane Eyre. The first thing I want to say is that there was nothing wrong with it. It's well written, and it's not the language that the problem. Nor is it the characters. I loved Jane, I like that she's not perfect, she's tempted by things and that she's got a judgemental streak. Quite frankly I want to take her out to tea and cakes. And I like Rochester. He's the kind of decent rotter who resembles many of my friends. I adored Adele and her pretty pink princessiness. I felt vaguely disturbed by St. John, which I'm reasonably sure is what I'm supposed to feel (matters not helped by him looking excessively like Kim Newman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Newman) in my head). So yes, solid, well written, interesting characters. It didn't do anything for me though. My collegue V saw me reading it and we got talking and he feels the same way. There's nothing wrong with the book, but we're just out of sympathy with it.
~~~~
I've always had lucid dreams, which creates confusion when I can't tell the difference between things that have happened in the real world, and things that have happened in a dream. They've been getting worse recently. Last Wednesday, I thought my Mum was trying to shake me away. Thankfully I was with it enough to know that she was in a different part of the country so I told not-real Mum to go away. She didn't and continued to try and shake me awake, much to my annoyance.
Last night, I had a what I assume to be entirely imaginary housemate do the same thing.
Dear sub-concious - STOP IT.
~~~~
The first sentences of the last 20 fics I've finished
1 - What did Ron think he was doing, grabbing for his hand like that?
2 - It was the weirdest feeling in the world.
3 - Randy wasn't entirely sure what he'd let himself in for when he'd agreed to do this, he'd mostly done it for the kick of seeing Ric trying to get all this gear together discreetly, which he'd somehow managed, a feat especially difficult given that everyone they worked with were gossips with eyes like hawks, and because it must have taken some doing to find all this stuff, well okay, some of it Randy recognised as some of Matt Striker's stage kit, but other things like the uniform he was wearing and the gown and mortar board that Ric was wearing would have to have been bought in especially.
4 - Her hand still fit snugly into his.
5 - "You know, I'm not sure you should be watching that."
6 - Peter woke up with a start.
7 - He could not believe the situation he'd got himself into.
8 - He'd written those lines, but now he was living them, his Ethiop Queen with her strong fingers pressed into his head, pushing him to go further.
9 - Being dead was no longer a surprise.
10 - "Hank, I need your help."
11 - It started with a simple throwaway comment over the phone.
12 - He should have expected this from the first but he hadn't.
13 - There were times when Jack worried about Suzie, her sheer unlikeliness.
14 - "Are you sure this is okay, I mean for your knee?"
15 - The one thing the plotters could not understand was the strange loyalty of Octavian's Praetorian.
16 - The first person to notice, or at least to make it obvious that she'd noticed, was Esme.
17 - He knew he was going to die, the physics that he remembered from school told him that much.
18 - Contrary to popular belief, Sirius and I were never lovers.
19 - "Some athletes think that sex before an event enhances performance."
20 - If the situation had been different, Scott didn't think he could have contained his happiness, because Tobias was alive and well.
Overall average word count = 16
Average for the oldest 10 = 18.6
Average for the newest 10 = 13.4
However that includes one massive outlier (105 words), if that's removed it becomes:
Overall average = 12
Average for the oldest 10 = 9
Average for the newest 10 = 13.4
So I might be getting longer but not by much.
2 of the longest 4 are smut. 3 of the shortest 4 are gen-fics. I don't think there's a pattern though.
More English-y stuff. Well, I everything I write is third person limited. One of these days I'll try omniscient narrator, but I fear it's an experiment that will end badly. The two most verbose starts are from limited POV of Randy Orton and Shakespeare. Not a traditional combination. 4 out of the 20 start with speech. Most of them use something in the in media res end of things. There is a situation, and it will be explained, probably in the opening paragraph, but not in the first sentance. I write in the just past quite a lot.
Hideous errors spotted that I now wish to correct = 1.
~~~~
I've always had lucid dreams, which creates confusion when I can't tell the difference between things that have happened in the real world, and things that have happened in a dream. They've been getting worse recently. Last Wednesday, I thought my Mum was trying to shake me away. Thankfully I was with it enough to know that she was in a different part of the country so I told not-real Mum to go away. She didn't and continued to try and shake me awake, much to my annoyance.
Last night, I had a what I assume to be entirely imaginary housemate do the same thing.
Dear sub-concious - STOP IT.
~~~~
The first sentences of the last 20 fics I've finished
1 - What did Ron think he was doing, grabbing for his hand like that?
2 - It was the weirdest feeling in the world.
3 - Randy wasn't entirely sure what he'd let himself in for when he'd agreed to do this, he'd mostly done it for the kick of seeing Ric trying to get all this gear together discreetly, which he'd somehow managed, a feat especially difficult given that everyone they worked with were gossips with eyes like hawks, and because it must have taken some doing to find all this stuff, well okay, some of it Randy recognised as some of Matt Striker's stage kit, but other things like the uniform he was wearing and the gown and mortar board that Ric was wearing would have to have been bought in especially.
4 - Her hand still fit snugly into his.
5 - "You know, I'm not sure you should be watching that."
6 - Peter woke up with a start.
7 - He could not believe the situation he'd got himself into.
8 - He'd written those lines, but now he was living them, his Ethiop Queen with her strong fingers pressed into his head, pushing him to go further.
9 - Being dead was no longer a surprise.
10 - "Hank, I need your help."
11 - It started with a simple throwaway comment over the phone.
12 - He should have expected this from the first but he hadn't.
13 - There were times when Jack worried about Suzie, her sheer unlikeliness.
14 - "Are you sure this is okay, I mean for your knee?"
15 - The one thing the plotters could not understand was the strange loyalty of Octavian's Praetorian.
16 - The first person to notice, or at least to make it obvious that she'd noticed, was Esme.
17 - He knew he was going to die, the physics that he remembered from school told him that much.
18 - Contrary to popular belief, Sirius and I were never lovers.
19 - "Some athletes think that sex before an event enhances performance."
20 - If the situation had been different, Scott didn't think he could have contained his happiness, because Tobias was alive and well.
Overall average word count = 16
Average for the oldest 10 = 18.6
Average for the newest 10 = 13.4
However that includes one massive outlier (105 words), if that's removed it becomes:
Overall average = 12
Average for the oldest 10 = 9
Average for the newest 10 = 13.4
So I might be getting longer but not by much.
2 of the longest 4 are smut. 3 of the shortest 4 are gen-fics. I don't think there's a pattern though.
More English-y stuff. Well, I everything I write is third person limited. One of these days I'll try omniscient narrator, but I fear it's an experiment that will end badly. The two most verbose starts are from limited POV of Randy Orton and Shakespeare. Not a traditional combination. 4 out of the 20 start with speech. Most of them use something in the in media res end of things. There is a situation, and it will be explained, probably in the opening paragraph, but not in the first sentance. I write in the just past quite a lot.
Hideous errors spotted that I now wish to correct = 1.
