Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award

Well, this is a first!  I made it to the second round!

Appetite

If you like short stories, I recommend Appetite by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh.  It's about a guy who is a waiter and his adventures, if you will.  The thing I loved the most about this story is that he describes almost everything I've ever felt about work (anywhere - retail in particular, but some of it goes for the office, too).  The opening scene where the main character wants to ask for a raise is painfully vivid (in a good way).  Also, the character has a dream, but instead of faking out the reader by having something good happen and then PSYCH!! waking up, the author accurately describes a confusing jumble of memories and TV shows, and conversations that might have been.  When the character wakes up and realizes he's been asleep instead of watching TV, instead of feeling played, I think, "aww, that's happened to me too."

What bothers me about modern literary fiction in general (and what happened with this particular story also), is that sometimes nothing really happens.  There are a bunch of good characters who flash back and dream and interact, but when it comes to the ending, I'm left feeling a bit ... blah.  I will tell you that I'm totally lost when it comes to symbolism, and that might be holding me back with the genre.  Someone please clue me in: when reaching the end, am I supposed to feel something other than, "huh.  Well ... that's it, I guess"?

25,000 words removed

The first novel (in recent times) I finished and thought was decent totaled about 25,000 words.  It was a mystery -- decent one, if you ask me, but because of its stunted growth, I couldn't find a home for it except in a corner of my hard drive.  I can't bring myself to recycle the character names (although a few of the story elements have seeped into other stories), so maybe I'm not done with it yet.  Maybe I'll re-write it into something longer, or maybe once I've got a novel or two in the "S" section at Barnes and Noble, someone will be interested in publishing this novella.

Awake didn't share that story's fate (at least not yet).  Back a few blog posts, you'll see that I ended the novel at a grand total of 120,000 words (which is too long for a first-time novelist to get picked up by anyone), but let's face it: in a first draft, a good 10 - 20% of the text is crap.  So far, I've read through the entire story (parts of it were painful), and trimmed a lot of useless word-padding.  Starting at the beginning again, I'm steamrolling the entire thing, taking out unnecessary paragraphs and re-wording almost everything else.  So far, the words I've cut from this novel equals about 25,000 words.  If you remember from one paragraph above, thats about enough room to write a completely separate story.

So far, the edit is going well.  The characters are showing me how they feel rather than me having to say it, so reading through a newly polished chapter is giving me guilty feelings of glee, enjoying my own work.  Of course, for the past 2 days, I've had plenty of time to edit because the city has been shut down by piles of snow.

Besides writing, I've been working my way through Denise Mina's Garnethill, which is a good read so far (I'm about 3/4 finished).  Stylistically, I'm not enjoying the omniscient point of view, but hey -- she's not trying to cater to me.   For me, it's the ending that really matters, so here's hoping it goes alright.

Also, who isn't interested in the final season of Lost?  I'm pretty excited about it, especially since I can't predict what's going to happen.  It's either going to end really well, or it's going to be the biggest letdown ever.