Fresh Start

This is a new blog about my adventures in the world of books. I feel I ought to have insightful, pithy things to say like that affable radio personality in “Northern Exposure” did at the end of nearly every episode, but at the moment I haven’t got anything like that to share. I’m battling a rather horrendous cold just now. I’ll try to be pithy at least once every other post. That seems like a reasonable goal, but I promise nothing. Pith off.

I have had ambitions to do research and work on my Master’s thesis this summer but very little has yet materialized. This must change. My thesis is on Dracula and the conflict/symbiosis set up in that novel between oral storytelling and the technology of writing. I am gathering sources and really must plant myself in a chair and do research as soon as I stop coughing. Dracula is probably my favorite book. I’ve read it every October since I was 12 years old and every time I do I see something in it I haven’t seen before. I think it is one of the most brilliantly constructed.novels ever written. This made it a great candidate for a thesis paper since I am so intimately familiar with it. I am also relying heavily on Tony E. Jackson’s The Technology of the Novel. Fascinating book on the way writing as a technology shapes the stories we tell and the way we think about them.

I also write fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. I have been published in a few literary magazines and self published two books of poetry and one of short fiction (They’re available on Amazon if you were dying to read them). I am working on a novel (passively, at the moment, until the thesis is written) and I’m almost constantly writing poetry.

So, more to follow. I will try to be a faithful updater, though I tend to do these things in fits and spurts. I may use this blog as a bulletin board for research and information pertaining to my thesis and whatever else I’m writing. We’ll see.