Saturday, June 13, 2009

Reviewing: sometimes it's beautifully easy. Sometimes it's painful....

Yep, I've just spent the entire night writing a review for Nate Powell's Swallow Me Whole. It's a fantastic book from Top Shelf dealing with mental illness amongst a dysfunctional yet relatively happy family. I read it last weekend. And loved it.

Then I sat down to review it on Sunday night. And Monday night. And Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The words just wouldn't come. Or at least not the right words. So much I wanted to say and yet I just couldn't get them to work. So last night I just went for it. Wrote and wrote and didn't worry about whether it was ordered right, or whether it made sense at the time.

I come back to it tonight and bloody hell, if I haven't got 75% of a good review there. Bit of re-arranging, bit of polish, lots of spell checking and write an extra few hundred words and it's very nearly done. But it's been a painful, frustrating week. Up until that point I was batting 5 in 6 days. Now it's 6 reviews in 12 days. But I can at least go to bed in a better mood than I did last night; convinced I'd just spent a couple of hours writing absolute garbage.

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