What about tricks for writing rather than reading? I mentioned the other day that I had come up a strategy for that.
Everyone has one novel inside them right? A few times over the years I have thought it would be good to get the novel outside of me. Normally what happens is that I have a bit of a think and come up with a really good idea, then I charge into it full steam ahead and write a number of pages that set the tantalising scene and which (if I'm any judge) are of reasonably high quality... or at least, as good as I can hope to get it, I'm not saying it's Paulo Coelho level or anything...
And then at that point I probably show it to a couple of people who are polite (or weak-willed) enough to feign interest and be brow-beaten into reading what I've done. And usually they'll express lukewarm approval and say something like "So what happens next?" or "How does it all tie up?" and I will say "fuck knows" and at that revelation I'll slowly run out of steam... each page will be dragged out of me more laboriously than the last and, though do manage to prolong the illusion for a little while, inside I know that the book is never going to be finished. And sure enough, soon I just stop thinking about it and pretend it never happened.
So, now we're locked down again I said to myself "You stupid fat cunt do something worthwhile - or if you can't manage that, then at least just do something". So I looked at what always goes wrong (see above) and thought I'll try and address those issues.
I guess it's obvious really but I decided to what I never did before and plan a whole story arc for the novel so I didn't face the first problem.
Also, a year or two ago I really enjoyed a
@jenks tip called Their Brilliant Careers which was loads of vignettes of the lives of made up Australian authors - very funny and it seemed like it might have also been a lot of fun to write. So I kinda copied the format but with an eye to making those vignettes link together to make an overall story - which is planned out.
So I really feel like I should be able to finish this time cos the story is there and the vignette format means that if I get bogged down ib one bit I can move to another part and write in a different voice or whatever. Also means I can control the length quite easily by putting in some 'newspaper clipping' or whatever to bulk it out. In fact, in theory, I could even delegate chapters to different people I guess, tell em the characters and what has to happen and I would authentically end up with different voices... but when I tried to trick
@woops into writing it for me he pushed back quite hard.
Anyway this is my trick to hopefully dodge my weaknesses, it brings in problems of planning and writing in differentstyles and so on, but I hope they will prove less problematic for me.