Sailing along nicely
Pleased to say that after slogging (or perhaps drifting) through the not-so-roaring 40s, pages 50-55 on Truck Me have emerged with few labour pains.
Had a couple of story ideas in the past day or so – one has merit, I think, if I can find the right tone and setting (it's an alien invasion story, so it needs to bring something new to the table as well). The other is the sort of interesting philosophical concept that comes to me now and then, but which is extremely hard to turn into a readable story.
Reading Truman Capote's In Cold Blood at the moment, which sat on my bookshelf unread for nearly 10 years (it was a prescribed uni text and therefore dismissed after a few pages). Books tend to fall into three categories these days – those that I rewrite as I'm going (if I'm doing more rewriting than reading, the book promptly goes on the scrapheap*), those that consume me so totally that I forget to analyse the language, and those that are so well-written it's disheartening. In Cold Blood falls into the latter category. If I'm not savouring some particularly evocative image, I'm trying to memorise some plain-English but beautifully unique word that has not made it into my own fiction.
* Darkhouse by Alex Barclay was the last book to receive this dubious honour. I heaved my way through 20 or so lacklustre pages until I came across the line "as fast as her little legs would carry her". It was such a colossal cliche that I mentally gagged. I distinctly remember my mother exhorting me to do this same thing 23 years ago during a soccer match. I mean, it's not only a cliche, it's an unoriginal cliche. How does this shit get published?
Had a couple of story ideas in the past day or so – one has merit, I think, if I can find the right tone and setting (it's an alien invasion story, so it needs to bring something new to the table as well). The other is the sort of interesting philosophical concept that comes to me now and then, but which is extremely hard to turn into a readable story.
Reading Truman Capote's In Cold Blood at the moment, which sat on my bookshelf unread for nearly 10 years (it was a prescribed uni text and therefore dismissed after a few pages). Books tend to fall into three categories these days – those that I rewrite as I'm going (if I'm doing more rewriting than reading, the book promptly goes on the scrapheap*), those that consume me so totally that I forget to analyse the language, and those that are so well-written it's disheartening. In Cold Blood falls into the latter category. If I'm not savouring some particularly evocative image, I'm trying to memorise some plain-English but beautifully unique word that has not made it into my own fiction.
* Darkhouse by Alex Barclay was the last book to receive this dubious honour. I heaved my way through 20 or so lacklustre pages until I came across the line "as fast as her little legs would carry her". It was such a colossal cliche that I mentally gagged. I distinctly remember my mother exhorting me to do this same thing 23 years ago during a soccer match. I mean, it's not only a cliche, it's an unoriginal cliche. How does this shit get published?
posted by The Fearless Writer at 8:44 PM
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