Lesson 37 & Marimite episode 6

So, I watched the first half of Episode 6 of Maria-Sama ga Miteru (known among its fans as just Marimite, "Mary Watches"), just after finishing Lesson 37 in my Japanese classes (only one month to go now and I'll be halfway through the course!), and it's really frustrating to listen to the show. I find myself pausing it incessantly. "What did she say? What word was that?" Over and over, with my laptop dictionary opened and trying to figure out what she was saying. And I know most of the common adverbs now, and how to count and tell the days of the week, and I'm familiar with about a third of all the verb forms, most of them very common such as present tense, imperative, necessary (yes, there's a "necessary tense" in Japanese, and the verb ending is a heck of a tongue twister... you try saying "-na kareba naranain desu" quickly!), past, and potential ("can do..."). I don't know the different verb constructions yet because the class is strictly conversational; the theory of Japanese structure isn't taught. I keep meaning to get to that, but it requires more than just quiet time, it takes a desk and paper.

I feel like I'm so close. It's all a matter of vocabulary now, in much the same way that I know Java, it's all a matter of knowing what the libraries offer. And I think I'm getting me head around the kanji, which is equally hard, because it's a matter of memorizing visual representations of a concept in much the way that conversation is the conversion of concepts into verbal representations, and I've demonstrated that I can do that. Now it's just practice.

Crisis of Writing...

So, I'm having this crisis of will, if you will, when it comes to my writing. I'm not entirely sure why, but for the past couple of weeks I've been butted up against two distinctly different emotions, neither of which has been very productive.

On the one hand, I'm starting to think that a lot of my current crop of ideas would make damn fine novels. Madships, Manumission, The Rock of the Cat, Empire, Embrace, Extinguish, and Janae are all novel-length, even serial-length ideas.

On the other hand, I'm intimidated by the prospect of actually writing a novel. The last three novels I wrote were straightforward, plot-driven things, but the authors I really admire don't just write great plots, they write fabulous, multi-layered, multi-themed wonders that I feel I'll never get close to matching. Every time I think about writing, say, Manumission in its entirety, I read a book like Use of Weapons (about which I recently commented) or Singularity Sky, which shows me how it should be done and I go back to quailing against the rising notion that, hey, I can write a book too. Once upon a time, I knew "I could do better than that," and I like to think that I was part of the small cadre' that, if we didn't succeed at banning really bad fiction from the net's erotica banks, at least we raised the bar and demanded a certain amount of skill. But "I can do as well as..." against the people I admire and adore... that's hubris I don't know that I feel.

The very idea that, in the final analysis, I might be as bad as S.M. Stirling or Kevin J. Anderson, leaves me feeling as if I might be sitting on a porcupine, rather than a good idea for a novel.