The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

I have a wonderful job.  Because I'm able to spend most of my day isolated from humanity, I get to listen to hours and hours of podcasts and audiobooks every week, which is much better than engaging in fascinating conversations about politics, the weather or the local sportsball teams.  The latest book I finished listening to was The Chessmen of Mars, the fifth in Edgar Burroughs' Barsoom series.

Burroughs is better known for creating Tarzan, but his Barsoom books are much superior.  The first few in the series focus on John Carter, a former Confederate soldier who finds himself transported to Mars, and gradually works his way up to ruling the whole planet.  The series was the originator of the planetary romance genre, and a direct progenitor of things like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.  The recent Disney adaptation was decent, but you might have missed it; given the box office, it seemed most people did.

By the fifth book, the story is focused on the daughter of Carter and Dejah Thoris, the princess whom he married in book three.  Princess Tara finds herself stranded in alien civilisations far from home, and with the help of her love interest Gahan of Gathol fights her way back to her family.  As is usual with Burroughs it's action-packed, and a hell of a lot of fun.  As is also usual with Burroughs, it has severe structural problems.

In researching the background of the book, I'm not surprised that it was originally serialised.  The constant stream of cliffhangers lends itself to that, as does the abrupt change of setting halfway through.  For the first half, Tara is a captive of the Kaldanes, a strange race of spider-like beings that ride around on headless humanoid bodies.  After about ten chapters of that, Tara and her crew escape, only to fall into the clutches of the Manatorians, a people whose justice system consists of chess games - to the death!

Now, let's get this straight: both of those premises are rad.  Either one could have sustained a whole novel.  Burroughs could even have combined the two with little difficulty.  Instead they're cobbled together, joined only by the presence of a friendly Kaldane named Ghek in the second half, and the Tara/Gahan romance that runs throughout.  The result is a book with a lot of creativity and imagination, but a real lack of focus.  As I said, it's not surprising that this was a serial; it probably worked really well in that form.

This is a structural issue that's popped up in more than a few Burroughs books that I've read, and I sometimes wonder if he's just too creative.  Make no mistake, he is undoubtedly one of the most vividly imaginative writers of his era.  Very few writers can construct a weird, alien civilisation as efficiently as he can, let alone multiple such civilisations per book.  But sometimes that tendency to include all of his ideas can work to a book's detriment, as it does here.  The Kaldanes were a fascinating creation, and Burroughs abandoned them too quickly to move on to the next cool thing.

The result is that The Chessmen of Mars is ultimately an unsatisfying book that barely hangs together.  It's fun to read, it's highly creative, but it's ultimately unsatisfying.

Word Count for 2014

I thought it would be interesting to look back on my writing progress for the year and see how I've been doing.  Below are the totals that I've reported on this blog since January 2014.  I've probably done more than this, as I go through patches where I can't be bothered blogging, but for the most part it's a good indicator of my progress:

Feb 7 - 1,948
Feb 24 - 871
Mar 19 - 1,794
Mar 24 - 2,794
Mar 31 - 2,514
Apr 6 - 2,080
Apr 22 - 1,521
May 7 - 2,144
May 19 - 1,080
May 26 - 1,200
Jun 1 - 1,993
Jun 9 - 2,349

Total - 22,288 (This is a bare minimum; I've probably done a good 10,000 to 15,000 that i haven't recorded on the blog.)

That's quite a way off where I had wanted to be by mid-year.  My best patch was from mid-May to early April, where I had a 14-day consecutive writing run.  As much as I'd like to keep that up, writing every day isn't something I feel I can sustain.  Currently I'm probably doing 4-5 days a week, but I'm trying to get my writing in earlier.  I'm finding that if I start writing after midnight I genuinely can't be bothered, and I'm lucky to eke out 500 words in an hour.  When I start earlier my total comes out closer to 700, which I'm happier with.  It's not a lot, but I find it difficult to wrote for sustained periods, unless I'm doing action scenes.  I'd like to think I'd get more of my novel done if I just stopped blogging, or writing about comics, or watching wrestling, but I enjoy those things.  The important thing is that I am progressing.  It could be quicker, but I'm getting there.

WEEKLY PROGRESS:

The Lightless Labyrinth: 2,349 words (37,998 total)

OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES:

What I'm Reading:
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Marvel Timeline Project Part 1 by Jeff Deischen and Murray Ward
Marvel Comics from 1965

What I'm Watching:
Turbo
Game of Thrones season 4


What I'm Playing:
 The Game of Dungeons (aka dnd)

A Change of Tactics

I had something of a health breakdown recently.  It was nothing serious, just a bout of flu that knocked me out for a week, but it got me thinking about how I schedule my life, and whether it's doing me more harm than good.

Like most people my age, I have a lot of things that drain my time.  The most prominent of those is a full-time job and a family.  I work every week-day until around 7.00pm, and when I get home I spend the time with my son until he goes to bed.  By the time I get to do my own thing it's usually about 10.00pm.

That's where I hit a snag.  I could quite easily get in a couple of hours of writing before going to bed, but not only am I trying to write, I'm also trying to cram in all the leisure time that I used to have in my twenties.  I try to read a book, then some comics, and I try to watch a movie or some wrestling, or play a video game.  Then, having exhausted myself doing those, I write some of my novel, try to crank out a blog post, and write about the day in my journal.  I get to bed somewhere around 3.00am, and get up around 8.00am to go to work.  Consequently, I'm a grouchy, unsociable bastard most of the time, running solely on a blend of caffeine and disillusionment.

So I've decided to change things up.  I need to read after my son goes to bed, because I don't want to have the laptop open should he decide to wander downstairs again.  But after that, I'm going to hit the writing straight away, and the blogging right after that.  Whatever leisure time I can squeeze in after that will be a bonus, and I'm going to try to be asleep by 2.00am.

I kicked it off pretty successfully last night, with my most productive writing session in a while.  Normally it takes me about an hour to write 500 words, but yesterday I broke 700 in 40 minutes.  I got in some secondary writing work (currently I'm transferring my old journal to a word document, which is sort of pointless but important to me), I read a chapter of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, I read a few comics, I played a sessionof The Game of Dungeons, and I watched an episode of WWE Smackdown.  All that, and I was asleep by 2.30am.  I woke up in the morning feeling pretty refreshed, and I'm happy with the result.  Hopefully I can keep it up going forward.

WEEKLY PROGRESS:

The Lightless Labyrinth:  1,993 words (35,648 total)

OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES:

What I'm Reading:
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Marvel Comics from 1965

What I'm Watching:
Lots of WWE

What I'm Playing:
The Game of Dungeons (aka dnd)