Louis Arata's Blog, page 15
April 22, 2015
Book Review: The Midwich Cuckoos
Great premise. Lackluster storytelling.
In John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, the residents of an English village experience an unusual alien invasion. One day all the people fall unconscious, and the next day they awaken, without any awareness of the event. The military intervenes but won’t say why. A few weeks later, the women of the village discover they are inexplicably pregnant. To ward off panic, the village bonds together to keep the pregnancies a secret and to communally raise the children the best they can. The only problem is that the children are otherworldly: golden-eyed and identical, they have the ability to control other people’s minds. Soon, the villagers are the captives of these children, whose purpose is the eventual conquering of the human race.
Wyndham sets up the story nicely with the discovery of the Day-out, the period in which the villagers fall unconscious. And he builds the suspense when the women discover they are pregnant. But after that, the story goes off the rails, primarily because of his method of storytelling.
The narrator is Richard Gayford, a relatively new resident of Midwich. Early in the book, he switches from telling his view of events to a more omniscient perspective, based on what he learns from other people. Overall, it doesn’t work because so much of the story is told off-screen, as it were. Everything is told after the fact, so you don’t get a sense of the immediacy of events. For all the talk about the capital-C Children, they don’t show up much.
The eyes are the windows to the soulThe predominant character in the book is Gordon Zellaby, an historian who loves to pontificate about the significance of the Children. Wyndham spends too much time on Zellaby’s discourse so that the book becomes an academic analysis of the Children. It’s such a detached perspective that the reader never really can empathize with the experience of the villagers.
Last year, I read Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, which I definitely enjoyed. It had that sense of emotional connection that Midwich lacks.

Wyndham sets up the story nicely with the discovery of the Day-out, the period in which the villagers fall unconscious. And he builds the suspense when the women discover they are pregnant. But after that, the story goes off the rails, primarily because of his method of storytelling.
The narrator is Richard Gayford, a relatively new resident of Midwich. Early in the book, he switches from telling his view of events to a more omniscient perspective, based on what he learns from other people. Overall, it doesn’t work because so much of the story is told off-screen, as it were. Everything is told after the fact, so you don’t get a sense of the immediacy of events. For all the talk about the capital-C Children, they don’t show up much.

Last year, I read Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, which I definitely enjoyed. It had that sense of emotional connection that Midwich lacks.
Published on April 22, 2015 07:20
April 18, 2015
Nathan Bransford, Author: 4 ways to avoid screenplayizing your novel
Nathan Bransford, Author: 4 ways to avoid screenplayizing your novel:
NATHAN BRANFORD: One of my favorite jokes on The Office is when Dwight Schrute boasts, "I know everything about film. I've seen over 240 of them."
It's funny because it sounds reasonable at first, but then you realize that's seriously nothing -- when you think about how many movies you've actually seen, it's surely thousands, not to mention thousands of hours of scripted TV shows (that's also when you realize just how much time you actually have on your hands).
NATHAN BRANFORD: One of my favorite jokes on The Office is when Dwight Schrute boasts, "I know everything about film. I've seen over 240 of them."
It's funny because it sounds reasonable at first, but then you realize that's seriously nothing -- when you think about how many movies you've actually seen, it's surely thousands, not to mention thousands of hours of scripted TV shows (that's also when you realize just how much time you actually have on your hands).
Published on April 18, 2015 09:18
April 15, 2015
Lauren Scharhag: Confessions of a Reformed Grammar Nazi
Lauren Scharhag: Confessions of a Reformed Grammar Nazi:
Don’t let the English degree fool you. I was never quite the Grammar Nazi that many people seem to think all English majors are required to be. I was never one of those people who bemoaned the poor grammar skills of people on the Internet, and I always understood that abbreviating text messages was a matter of efficiency. Besides, if people don't know proper punctuation and usage, that's job security for me, right?
Don’t let the English degree fool you. I was never quite the Grammar Nazi that many people seem to think all English majors are required to be. I was never one of those people who bemoaned the poor grammar skills of people on the Internet, and I always understood that abbreviating text messages was a matter of efficiency. Besides, if people don't know proper punctuation and usage, that's job security for me, right?
Published on April 15, 2015 08:47
April 7, 2015
Running The Same Mile
It’s during the first mile of a run that your body warms up. Muscles loosen. You settle into your pace. As your body finds its rhythm, the effort to keep running finally relaxes.
If I haven’t been running in a while, it’s that much harder to get my feet in my shoes and get out the door.
We're feeling lonelyWriting can be like that.
Lately my writing schedule has been intermittent at best. Life intervenes, and it’s difficult to set aside time every day.
The worst part of intermittent writing is that all sorts of anxieties crowd in. I begin to doubt the quality of my work. I start focusing on the tiny details rather than the big picture. I question everything I’ve written and wind up fantasizing about tossing the lot and starting over from scratch because the next time the first draft will come out perfectly.
Case in point: I’m stalled on Creepy White Man.
I’m about two-thirds of the way through the first draft, and because I’m losing momentum, I keep wanting to go back and fix things. Pull scenes into a more coherent shape. Give that added nuance to a characterization.
But if I give in, I waste time revising the same chapters without getting any further in the draft. It’s like running the first mile over again.
A couple years ago, I read the first five books in the twelve volume series, The History of Middle-Earth, edited by Christopher Tolkien from his father’s work. It is a massive compilation and analysis of the earliest versions of The Silmarillion, including the original framework tale of “The Cottage of Lost Play” in which a human, Eriol/Aelfwine, travels to the Isle of Tol Eressëa where the Elves reside.
Hobbit feet aren't made for running.
What I marveled at was the number of versions that Tolkien created of each story. Obviously this was long before computers, so hand-written copies were the only way to develop and revise. And yet it gave me a glimpse at Tolkien’s creative process, and he definitely ran that first mile again and again.
By the fourth volume, The Shaping of Middle-Earth, you get the earliest shapings of what would become The Silmarillion. While this series is focused on the variances across texts (e.g., Eriol becomes Aelfwine), it does give a sense of Tolkien’s creative process as he determines what fits into his cosmology and what falls to the wayside. In the end, the variations suggest a sense of sweeping the story forward – collecting the pieces into a neater, cleaner pile of fiction that will eventually become the final draft.
Right now, I’m going back (yet again) to sweep Creepy White Man forward, all the while trusting that once I get past that first draft / first mile marker, I won’t have to go back and start over again. Instead, I’ll be facing the new terrain of the remaining miles, and that’s always refreshing.
If I haven’t been running in a while, it’s that much harder to get my feet in my shoes and get out the door.

Lately my writing schedule has been intermittent at best. Life intervenes, and it’s difficult to set aside time every day.
The worst part of intermittent writing is that all sorts of anxieties crowd in. I begin to doubt the quality of my work. I start focusing on the tiny details rather than the big picture. I question everything I’ve written and wind up fantasizing about tossing the lot and starting over from scratch because the next time the first draft will come out perfectly.
Case in point: I’m stalled on Creepy White Man.
I’m about two-thirds of the way through the first draft, and because I’m losing momentum, I keep wanting to go back and fix things. Pull scenes into a more coherent shape. Give that added nuance to a characterization.
But if I give in, I waste time revising the same chapters without getting any further in the draft. It’s like running the first mile over again.
A couple years ago, I read the first five books in the twelve volume series, The History of Middle-Earth, edited by Christopher Tolkien from his father’s work. It is a massive compilation and analysis of the earliest versions of The Silmarillion, including the original framework tale of “The Cottage of Lost Play” in which a human, Eriol/Aelfwine, travels to the Isle of Tol Eressëa where the Elves reside.

What I marveled at was the number of versions that Tolkien created of each story. Obviously this was long before computers, so hand-written copies were the only way to develop and revise. And yet it gave me a glimpse at Tolkien’s creative process, and he definitely ran that first mile again and again.
By the fourth volume, The Shaping of Middle-Earth, you get the earliest shapings of what would become The Silmarillion. While this series is focused on the variances across texts (e.g., Eriol becomes Aelfwine), it does give a sense of Tolkien’s creative process as he determines what fits into his cosmology and what falls to the wayside. In the end, the variations suggest a sense of sweeping the story forward – collecting the pieces into a neater, cleaner pile of fiction that will eventually become the final draft.
Right now, I’m going back (yet again) to sweep Creepy White Man forward, all the while trusting that once I get past that first draft / first mile marker, I won’t have to go back and start over again. Instead, I’ll be facing the new terrain of the remaining miles, and that’s always refreshing.
Published on April 07, 2015 07:07
February 25, 2015
Book Review: Harlan Ellison's Watching
Several post back I wrote about whether to finish Harlan Ellison’s Watching. The collection of essays, written during the 1960s-80s, was a passionate diatribe against his perceived failures of contemporary cinema, the yahoos who produce the dreck, and the audiences who patronize it.
In my previous post, I wrote:
Listen to me: I've got a lot to sayReading this book, I feel like I’m at a cocktail party, and I’ve gotten cornered by an opinionated blowhard who has to tell me in a loud voice everything he thinks is wrong with the current state of cinema. While his ideas are well-informed, he cannot help but blast me with his passionate venom. It doesn’t matter what I think because he has no interest in any other person’s opinion. If I disagree with him, I am moronically wrong. If I do agree with him, it doesn’t matter, because I will never, never, never comprehend the true artistic depth of pure cinema.
I went on to question whether pushing my way through was going to be worth it. Well, stubbornness prevailed, and I finally got to the end.
And along the way, the book got better. In the second half of the collection, his tone lightened up and he poked more evident fun at his own curmudgeonly demeanor. He also better articulated his reasons for criticizing the inadequate state of cinema and how it was pandering to the lowest denominator. He executed lengthy critiques about why Spielberg’s thumbprint on movies like Gremlins and Young Sherlock Holmes was a bad thing, in the larger scope of things.
Did he educate me on what he perceived as the evident problems of Hollywood? Yes. Did I agree with his views? Sometimes. Was he full of himself? Definitely.
I still stand by my earlier comment about being cornered by a blowhard, but as with many encounters in life, I did come away a bit wiser. The essays probably were more engaging in their original format – published monthly. Reading them back to back only emphasized the long-windedness and redundancy.
In the end, was it worth it slogging through?
Meh.
In my previous post, I wrote:

I went on to question whether pushing my way through was going to be worth it. Well, stubbornness prevailed, and I finally got to the end.
And along the way, the book got better. In the second half of the collection, his tone lightened up and he poked more evident fun at his own curmudgeonly demeanor. He also better articulated his reasons for criticizing the inadequate state of cinema and how it was pandering to the lowest denominator. He executed lengthy critiques about why Spielberg’s thumbprint on movies like Gremlins and Young Sherlock Holmes was a bad thing, in the larger scope of things.
Did he educate me on what he perceived as the evident problems of Hollywood? Yes. Did I agree with his views? Sometimes. Was he full of himself? Definitely.
I still stand by my earlier comment about being cornered by a blowhard, but as with many encounters in life, I did come away a bit wiser. The essays probably were more engaging in their original format – published monthly. Reading them back to back only emphasized the long-windedness and redundancy.
In the end, was it worth it slogging through?
Meh.
Published on February 25, 2015 15:24
February 13, 2015
Soundtrack
And I scream from the walls inside the fortress of my skull As the storm rages on and puts a gash upon my hull “Mr. Simmon’s Arkansas Christmas Blues”
Michael McDermott’s lyrics resonate with Kenny Reston, the main character of Reston Peace.
When I was writing the first draft of Kenny’s story, McDermott’s music was a recent discovery. An unusual impulse buy on my part: I saw the album Gethsemane in the record store with a tag that this was a Chicago artist. Intrigued by the title, I snatched it up. After a few weeks of listening to it, I was back at the record store scouting to find any other albums. Eventually I got my hands on McDermott’s first: 620 W Surf.
The lyrics assailed my senses, providing the perfect angsty, folk-rock tone that fit the mood I wanted to explore in Kenny's story.
When I’m writing, I’m pretty selective about whether or not to listen to music. It can create a wonderful cocoon for the creative process, while other times it proves too much of a distraction. But McDermott’s music was the perfect fit; it expressed the soul-haunted tone that I felt was at the core of Kenny’s being.
In particular, the song “Mr. Simmon’s Arkansas Christmas Blues” helped me tap into Kenny’s struggles and depression:
Solitude swallows all the moonlight’s gladness And the whispers in the rain Saxophones sing of a lonesome sadness that threw Samson to the Philistine flame
The image of “screaming from the walls inside the fortress of my skull” was particularly significant, in that Kenny carried a rage inside that was barricaded from the outside world.
Even after I finished that original version of the novel, McDermott’s later music fit nicely with Kenny’s story, almost to a synchronistic degree. In one scene, Kenny has been fired from his burger-slinging job for showing up drunk. In defiance of his boss’s assessment that he has a drinking problem, Kenny goes off on another binge. When I heard McDermott’s “Unemployed,” the lyrics and upbeat tone dovetailed nicely with this particular scene:
Hallelujah, I’m overjoyed I’m drunk again and I’m unemployed
Even the phrase Ask if as a child I was somehow abused has an eerie correlation to the sexual abuse at the center of the novel.
Other songs that work well as Kenny’s soundtrack include:
“Wounded”--Michael McDermott(1995)
“A Mess of Things”“No Words” – Noise From Words (2007)
“I Know A Place”“The Silent Will Soon Be Singing”--Hit Me Back (2012)
When Reston Peaceis published, I am tempted to make a companion playlist (with permission, of course) showcasing McDermott’s music. The book and the lyrics, for me, are forever linked.
Michael McDermott’s lyrics resonate with Kenny Reston, the main character of Reston Peace.

The lyrics assailed my senses, providing the perfect angsty, folk-rock tone that fit the mood I wanted to explore in Kenny's story.
When I’m writing, I’m pretty selective about whether or not to listen to music. It can create a wonderful cocoon for the creative process, while other times it proves too much of a distraction. But McDermott’s music was the perfect fit; it expressed the soul-haunted tone that I felt was at the core of Kenny’s being.
In particular, the song “Mr. Simmon’s Arkansas Christmas Blues” helped me tap into Kenny’s struggles and depression:

The image of “screaming from the walls inside the fortress of my skull” was particularly significant, in that Kenny carried a rage inside that was barricaded from the outside world.
Even after I finished that original version of the novel, McDermott’s later music fit nicely with Kenny’s story, almost to a synchronistic degree. In one scene, Kenny has been fired from his burger-slinging job for showing up drunk. In defiance of his boss’s assessment that he has a drinking problem, Kenny goes off on another binge. When I heard McDermott’s “Unemployed,” the lyrics and upbeat tone dovetailed nicely with this particular scene:
Hallelujah, I’m overjoyed I’m drunk again and I’m unemployed
Even the phrase Ask if as a child I was somehow abused has an eerie correlation to the sexual abuse at the center of the novel.
Other songs that work well as Kenny’s soundtrack include:
“Wounded”--Michael McDermott(1995)
“A Mess of Things”“No Words” – Noise From Words (2007)
“I Know A Place”“The Silent Will Soon Be Singing”--Hit Me Back (2012)
When Reston Peaceis published, I am tempted to make a companion playlist (with permission, of course) showcasing McDermott’s music. The book and the lyrics, for me, are forever linked.
Published on February 13, 2015 07:49
February 6, 2015
Six Degrees of Ellison
I’m only about a quarter of the way into reading Ralph Ellison’s Shadow and Act, a collection of critical and social essays, and like many compelling books, it’s throwing concepts and writers and books at me at such a furious pace that I’ve already started adding new titles to my To Read list.
First off, it makes me want to go back and read Invisible Man. All I can imagine is that I will have a greater appreciation for this novel.
The essay “Richard Wright’s Blues” has gotten me curious to read Native Son and Black Boy, neither of which I have read before.
“Stephen Crane and the Mainstream of American Fiction”: I haven’t read Crane since college so it’s time to rediscover his work.
There’s also so much to learn about the historical context of race and racism at the burgeoning of the Civil Rights era.
See all those books behind me? Start reading! This is all to say that a good book gets you thinking beyond its own borders. It touches social context, artistry, political thought, philosophy, religious beliefs. It awakens a hungering curiosity that wants to devour the entire world.
For example, in his essay on “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” Ellison discusses the works of Twain, Hemingway and Faulkner. Connecting all these dots, he is performing a sort of literary Six Degrees of Separation.
Ellison leads to Twain leads to Crane leads to considering other writers such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, then on to writers I have yet to experience, like Alice Munro and Doris Lessing, Kenzaburo Oe and Mario Vargas Llosa.
Which of course gets me to thinking about non-Nobel winners, those writers fashioning their own generation of literature to influence the future. The writers whose names I haven’t heard of yet but will.
All this from the first 80 pages of Ellison’s book. That’s what I love about reading.
First off, it makes me want to go back and read Invisible Man. All I can imagine is that I will have a greater appreciation for this novel.
The essay “Richard Wright’s Blues” has gotten me curious to read Native Son and Black Boy, neither of which I have read before.
“Stephen Crane and the Mainstream of American Fiction”: I haven’t read Crane since college so it’s time to rediscover his work.
There’s also so much to learn about the historical context of race and racism at the burgeoning of the Civil Rights era.

For example, in his essay on “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” Ellison discusses the works of Twain, Hemingway and Faulkner. Connecting all these dots, he is performing a sort of literary Six Degrees of Separation.
Ellison leads to Twain leads to Crane leads to considering other writers such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, then on to writers I have yet to experience, like Alice Munro and Doris Lessing, Kenzaburo Oe and Mario Vargas Llosa.
Which of course gets me to thinking about non-Nobel winners, those writers fashioning their own generation of literature to influence the future. The writers whose names I haven’t heard of yet but will.
All this from the first 80 pages of Ellison’s book. That’s what I love about reading.
Published on February 06, 2015 07:00
February 5, 2015
Through the Fog ...
I can see it in my head: The Story. What the characters look like. How they talk. I know where they live and how many siblings they’ve got. I understand the thematic as well as the dramatic arc everything must take to reach the explosive conclusion.
I can see it, and everything works perfectly.
Until I start writing it down. That’s when the flaws creep in.
A sequence of events makes perfect sense in my head, yet once I start laying it out on the page … Nope, there’s a hiccup. This event can’t possibly occur in the order I imagined. Everything’s out of place.
The neighborhood mutates. One house is monstrously large, while next door they can’t decide if the front lawn has a maple or an elm tree. People who live next to each other now decide they need to be on different streets. Even the layout of the streets undergoes transformations as I discover the breadth of the landscape.
Characters insist on shifting the dynamics. Relationships change. One character stubbornly refuses to do what I have plotted out. Another character doesn’t fit in with the family I’ve provided. They are all asserting their independence, and no matter how hard I discipline them – literarily speaking – they insist on going their own way. And like a parent (I suppose) I step back and give them the space they need to be the people they want to be.
And yet it eventually works. Through draft after draft, the story takes on a concrete form. It sifts through its difficulties, shakes out the unnecessary bits, realigns the crucial facts, and eventually solidifies into a world different from the one I imagined. And somehow it’s all the more beautiful because of it.
No matter how much I want to translate the perfect vision in my head, I am always much more pleased with the bumpy, incongruous, messy, unexpected, devious, and startling reality that winds up on the page.
Tell it like it is, E.L.E.L. Doctorow: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
I can see it, and everything works perfectly.
Until I start writing it down. That’s when the flaws creep in.
A sequence of events makes perfect sense in my head, yet once I start laying it out on the page … Nope, there’s a hiccup. This event can’t possibly occur in the order I imagined. Everything’s out of place.
The neighborhood mutates. One house is monstrously large, while next door they can’t decide if the front lawn has a maple or an elm tree. People who live next to each other now decide they need to be on different streets. Even the layout of the streets undergoes transformations as I discover the breadth of the landscape.
Characters insist on shifting the dynamics. Relationships change. One character stubbornly refuses to do what I have plotted out. Another character doesn’t fit in with the family I’ve provided. They are all asserting their independence, and no matter how hard I discipline them – literarily speaking – they insist on going their own way. And like a parent (I suppose) I step back and give them the space they need to be the people they want to be.
And yet it eventually works. Through draft after draft, the story takes on a concrete form. It sifts through its difficulties, shakes out the unnecessary bits, realigns the crucial facts, and eventually solidifies into a world different from the one I imagined. And somehow it’s all the more beautiful because of it.
No matter how much I want to translate the perfect vision in my head, I am always much more pleased with the bumpy, incongruous, messy, unexpected, devious, and startling reality that winds up on the page.

Published on February 05, 2015 06:18
January 30, 2015
On Whether To Keep Reading
I try not to review a book until I’m finished, but Harlan Ellison’s Watching is bumping up against everything I believe about good writing: in his case, the writer is taking predominance over the material. The book isn’t so much a collection of film reviews but a series of essays about what Ellison absolutely hates or
loves
about movies. His reaction is the topic of the reviews, not the films themselves.
Ellison is primarily known as a writer of speculative fiction as well as TV shows, including the original Star Trek and The Outer Limits. His name comes up often as the inspiration for other writers. He’s the writer that other writers respect for his intellect and craft. So, I wanted to try out some of his work.
I've got my eye on you.Harlan Ellison’s Watching is a collection of reviews and critiques of film, dating from the 1960s up until the 1980s.
Reading this book, I feel like I’m at a cocktail party, and I’ve gotten cornered by an opinionated blowhard who has to tell me in a loud voice everything he thinks is wrong with the current state of cinema. While his ideas are well-informed, he cannot help but blast me with his passionate venom. It doesn’t matter what I think because he has no interest in any other person’s opinion. If I disagree with him, I am moronically wrong. If I do agree with him, it doesn’t matter, because I will never, never, never comprehend the true artistic depth of pure cinema.
This is all to say that I can’t decide whether to finish the book. Which is the real point of this blogpost: Is a reader obligated to finish every book?
I have slogged my way through books that have been a waste of time. I have forced myself to get to the end because, as a writer, I respect the fact that the authors have poured themselves into the work. I’m also insatiably curious to find out what happens.
But do I have to? If it’s clear that I’m no longer enjoying a book – or that the frustration outweighs the enjoyment – do I keep going?
As I get older, I find that I have less time to spend on something that doesn’t give me pleasure. Still, the old habits hold on tight.
I’m halfway through Harlan Ellison’s Watching, and I’m still debating whether to go on. The fact that the pieces are becoming more palatable makes it more engaging to read, but I doubt that I will finish the book with anything other than a sense of relief that it’s over.
Why do I keep plugging away? Because I hope to discover some movie I’ve never heard of that will be worth the viewing. But given that Ellison has trashed certain movies that I enjoyed and praised others that did nothing for me, maybe I should just accept the fact that Ellison knows an awful lot about movies and probably has deeper sense of cinematic quality, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with him.
Excuse me, Ellison, I’m going to go talk to the other guests over there.
Ellison is primarily known as a writer of speculative fiction as well as TV shows, including the original Star Trek and The Outer Limits. His name comes up often as the inspiration for other writers. He’s the writer that other writers respect for his intellect and craft. So, I wanted to try out some of his work.

Reading this book, I feel like I’m at a cocktail party, and I’ve gotten cornered by an opinionated blowhard who has to tell me in a loud voice everything he thinks is wrong with the current state of cinema. While his ideas are well-informed, he cannot help but blast me with his passionate venom. It doesn’t matter what I think because he has no interest in any other person’s opinion. If I disagree with him, I am moronically wrong. If I do agree with him, it doesn’t matter, because I will never, never, never comprehend the true artistic depth of pure cinema.
This is all to say that I can’t decide whether to finish the book. Which is the real point of this blogpost: Is a reader obligated to finish every book?
I have slogged my way through books that have been a waste of time. I have forced myself to get to the end because, as a writer, I respect the fact that the authors have poured themselves into the work. I’m also insatiably curious to find out what happens.
But do I have to? If it’s clear that I’m no longer enjoying a book – or that the frustration outweighs the enjoyment – do I keep going?
As I get older, I find that I have less time to spend on something that doesn’t give me pleasure. Still, the old habits hold on tight.
I’m halfway through Harlan Ellison’s Watching, and I’m still debating whether to go on. The fact that the pieces are becoming more palatable makes it more engaging to read, but I doubt that I will finish the book with anything other than a sense of relief that it’s over.
Why do I keep plugging away? Because I hope to discover some movie I’ve never heard of that will be worth the viewing. But given that Ellison has trashed certain movies that I enjoyed and praised others that did nothing for me, maybe I should just accept the fact that Ellison knows an awful lot about movies and probably has deeper sense of cinematic quality, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with him.
Excuse me, Ellison, I’m going to go talk to the other guests over there.
Published on January 30, 2015 09:34
January 21, 2015
Status Update: Reading Lots of Stuff
I haven't had a chance to post in a while but I've been busy. Still working on the first draft of Creepy White Man. Cleaning up some early chapters so I have a clearer launch pad for the end.
In other news, I'm busy reading, reading reading:
1) Still working on Dombey and Son, by Dickens. Almost finished. I'm not a fast reader, and I rarely can rush Dickens.
2) Harlan Ellison's Watching: a collection of his film essays and critiques. Ellison is my current cilantro. More on that later.
3) The Redbreast, by Jo Nesbo.
4) McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, ed. Michael Chabon: Just finished this one. A good read.
5) Shadow & Act, by Ralph Ellison
Such a great smorgasbord of fascinating writing, I'm having trouble sticking with one dish.
Plus I'm busy thinking lots and lots of about writing process, so hopefully soon I'll get some of those down.
Just didn't want anyone to think I'd dropped off the face of the planet.
In other news, I'm busy reading, reading reading:
1) Still working on Dombey and Son, by Dickens. Almost finished. I'm not a fast reader, and I rarely can rush Dickens.
2) Harlan Ellison's Watching: a collection of his film essays and critiques. Ellison is my current cilantro. More on that later.
3) The Redbreast, by Jo Nesbo.
4) McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, ed. Michael Chabon: Just finished this one. A good read.
5) Shadow & Act, by Ralph Ellison
Such a great smorgasbord of fascinating writing, I'm having trouble sticking with one dish.
Plus I'm busy thinking lots and lots of about writing process, so hopefully soon I'll get some of those down.
Just didn't want anyone to think I'd dropped off the face of the planet.
Published on January 21, 2015 15:37