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.

New Year

Blah.

So, the excitement of November is over, the comments have fallen off, and my updates have fallen off.  What's been going on?  Nothing.

I listened to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button after a failed attempt at watching the movie.  Really, after listening to the original short story, I can see why I had trouble watching the film -- it's sort of a novelty piece.  What happens when a guy is born old and slowly becomes a baby.  Not my thing when it comes to plot, but whatever.  It's short.

I also read Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner.   Now this was an excellent book.  I liked the characters, and the story was cute (and sometimes heartbreaking).  I chose this book because I was reading Miss Snark's blog, trying to figure out how to tweak my query letter.  She said the first few pages of Good in Bed were exactly the kinds of first pages she wanted to see from new authors.  Naturally, I had to check it out, and I got sucked into the story.  Of course, that's what you want.

I tried hard to "read as a writer" and pay attention to why the story was so good -- why the words flowed so effortlessly.  But since it was so smooth, I glided right through and I have no idea how to emulate this woman.  Perhaps reading a few more of her novels will teach me a thing or two.


Meanwhile, I'm getting hooked on British TV shows.  Funny stuff!

Refining my query letter

After reading such blogs as Miss Snark and the query section on the Nanowrimo forums, I'm overhauling my query letter so that it can go find me an agent.  Not much else to say about it, but as it's taking up the majority of my evening, I thought I'd mention it.

I've also removed about ten thousand words from the novel I wrote in November.  Yes, it's a lot, but a whole lot more are going to come out before I'm finished with it.  (Also, I'd like to apologize if any of the people I emailed my first draft to are reading this blog: parts of the novel are painful, aren't they.  It's very wordy.  It's very "tell-y".)

But I'm having a good time, and I can't wait to go back through my story to smooth it out -- to make it actually GOOD.  All in good time.

Mind's Eye by Håkan Nesser

Now that I've stopped writing for a little while, I've got to read a few books.  So I went to my library, and ended up borrowing Mind's Eye by Hakan Nesser, who is, apparently, pretty popular in Sweden.  I thought, Good! I like European things, and the description of the story sounded interesting.

The mystery starts out really promising.  Guy wakes up and doesn't know what happened (quite like what I just wrote -- one reason I chose this book), and discovers his wife is dead.  Guy goes to prison, but he didn't do it -- and gets murdered himself (don't worry, this is all in the blurb, so I'm not giving anything important away).  

That's all good.  Interesting.  Okay, now what?

The investigators investigate.  They talk to people.  Halfway though, they're talking to people.  At the 3/4 point, they're talking to people.  At the end, they're talking to people.  

I don't know.  If you read on Amazon, it got really good reviews, but I didn't feel it.  It was sort of like the middle sagged all the way to the end, and all the questioning became really repetitive.  Very much a plot-driven story, since the characters didn't really have lives of their own (not as much as I like -- i.e. they didn't really do any extra-curricular activities that weren't mentioned as a side-note).

Nothing strikingly "wrong" with the story or the writing style, just not my cup of tea.

Grand total: 120k words; just under 450 pages

Whew!

Well, that's done.  I finished the novel last night after pouring 6,400 words into it yesterday.  That's a lot!  But after all that, all the hard work, pushing through the boring parts ... I think the ending tied together really nicely.  I don't think I've left any loose ends, but I'm sure my test readers will tell me if I did.

Editing is going to be an adventure, though.  Not only have I never written 450 pages of anything before, I've never had to make 450 pages look presentable before!  I guess I'll tell you all about it when I get there.  For now, I'm leaving it alone to marinate in all its awesomeness.

And it's weird what music I got hooked on while composing this little (*cough*) tale.  Lady Gaga and Falco.  Why?  Maybe I went a little nuts toward the end of the novel ... but after a while, I was like, "I've really gotta listen to Bad Romance again!!"  So yeah.  Some crazy pop music lead to my crazy word count.  And now I've gotta come down off it somehow.

Still going

115,302 words.  412 pages.

That's the grand total at the moment.  Yep, I'm still working on the novel, and I'm actually ready for it to be done.  Once I've gone back over the thing with a heaping dose of editing, it's going to be a fantastic story -- and depending on how many test readers I get for my first draft, I'll be able to see how well it goes over with my "fans".

I'm even starting to think about other stories to write.  All of them these days have some sort of mystery to them -- just can't figure out how to end a literary novel.  Maybe I should read some more of them?  I don't know.  They're so beautiful, but with me, they ramble.  Just like I'm doing now.