Pop Quiz, Hotshot

Over in the UK a couple guys stole a copy of the forthcoming Harry Potter, and shots were fired. Sounds like a job for Thursday Next. If ever any of my books induces a gun battle, I will consider my life complete.

Cathy Wald has a neat quiz up over at Gallycat on the rejections all writers must endure. I think my rejections so far break down something like this:

1) It's too sci-fi to be literary.
2) It's too literary to be sci-fi.
3) Does it have to be about a teenage girl?
4) It's really original and I enjoyed the characters but it's not me.

Being a writer requires industrial patience. Especially if you're trying to get published. The last few months I've mellowed a little on I HAVE TO GET PUBLISHED FOR MY LIFE TO BE VALIDATED. Why? What will change? I'll still be broke. The people I try so hard to get the approval of still won't care. The only difference will be I won't have this pressure on me any longer, and it's just pressure I put on myself. And if I've learned anything in life, it's that the best things in life come to when you stop looking for them.

Anyways. I finished the dust-off of the old story last night. I'm having trouble with the title and of course I'm hung up with doubt about it, but I'm mostly satisfied with it. You read so much these days about people killing their familes, strangers, just walking in and out of the blue murdering everyone in sight. You wonder what on earth is going on in their heads, in this country where we have this so often, and this story is a meager attempt to understand it for myself.

I've sent out the first round of submissions for the story I finished last week.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Visit From The Goon Squad: Charting New Territory

Image
 Credit - Tessie Girl I recently finished A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and it's one of the best books I've read in a while.  It flows from one character to another in a kind of narrative relay.  At first it's disorienting and honestly I lost track of who the focus was or was supposed to be - the point, I think - and it required me to stop and start again once or twice.  The book also caroms from one era to another.  This narrative river just flows along and then washes ashore deep in the future, providing a brief, sober glimpse of the fate of the character we follow, before retreating back to the sea of the present.  At some point you almost long for a chart mapping out all these people, these places and times, and then as if on queue, Egan actually depicts an entire sequence of the book in a succession of flow charts.  I wa struck at how effective, and affecting, this was; the PowerPoint slides gradually became thought bubbles, accumulating tension
Read more

Get Lost Writing

Image
Writing for me has always been an act of discovery.  At various times you will feel like Magellan, or Columbus.  Others you will feel like the Donner Party.  You will feel these at varying times throughout the process of writing the same novel, if you're anything like me.  And at some point, you will experience another feeling - the sheer elation of knowing you are the first person to ever lay eyes on this undiscovered country of a novel.  That's the way it feels to me when a novel reaches that tipping point, when the mass is so great that the collapse from dust into light becomes to powerful to deny.  I've felt this feeling before, a couple times.  It's a great feeling.  I feel it now, as I'm 211 pages into the novel that I've documented here recently on the blog (otherwise known as the #scifijohnhughesbook ).  A lot of the disparate threads - fits and starts really - that I've experimented with over the last few years are finally bearing fruit.  This
Read more

Diamonds In The Rough

Happy to announce that my brother and I won the Main St. Waterloo 10th Anniversary Poster Contest, co-sponsored by the Metro Arts Guild . Our piece, entitled "Metamorphisis", is on display at the gallery -- unless it's somewhere else now. I'll try and get a scan of it to put up on the blog (why didn't you think of that before, Darby?) There's a new literary journal out there called A Public Space that could not have started off better. The contributors and bredth of the material really has me excited not just to pick this up, but submit there as well. The coolest thing is they have a new story by Kelly Link. Check out the excerpt . My own zine, Other Than , continues on pace toward completion. It seems like I may be hosting a joint reading at the gallery to launch it along side Osie's Murmur , which would be very cool and exciting. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter made it safely into orbit .
Read more