Interim Babble

October 26

I wrote a longish entry last night, and planned to post it today, but the nature of the entry demanded that I also post and link to a piece of my writing—which I forgot to save to disk. The entry wouldn’t be incomprehensible on it’s own, but I hate to make constant references to a document without allowing you ardent readers the chance to read said document.

When I have a computer and an internet connection in my house, problems like this will go away. I won’t have to post from work anymore.

So, to tide you over, it’s another fun installment of Random Bits of Tim’s Mind.

I’ve been tandem-reading for the past several days— Jim Morrow’s The Continent of Lies, Charles de Lint’s Forests of the Heart, and Kim Newman’s The Quorum. I finished Quorum, and I heartily recommend it. Keep an eye out when you prowl the used bookstores; it’ll probably turn up. Newman is best known for his Dracula books (Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron, and Dracula Cha-Cha-Cha (or, as it was annoyingly known in the States, Judgement of Tears)), but he’s also written several strange and funky sort-of-horror novels. Of those I’ve read Bad Dreams (which is only so-so) and Quorum. Q is about making a Deal with the Devil—or a deal with something, anyway. It’s also about comic books, friendship, the banality of evil, media, and sacrifice (Have you noticed that I’m very bad at synopsizing plots? Perhaps you haven’t, since I seldom try to offer a synopsis. It’s even worse when I try to describe one of my own plots. I prefer listing elements and issues, I guess). It’s a very funny book, though sometimes I think it veers a little too close to absurdist slapstick, given its usual tone. It’s idiosyncratically written, and it took me a couple of chapters to really warm to it, but once I did, I didn’t want to put it down. The more I read of Kim Newman’s books, the more I like.

I’m finally cracking down on myself. I have four novels written, and I haven’t tried to submit any of them (except for sending off Genius of Deceit to the Warner contest, where it sank like a stone; not surprising, since it’s basically a rough draft, but I wanted to make the effort). Last night I pulled up the manuscript of my first novel, Shannon's God. It’s a lot better than I remember, and best of all, it’s fully revised—I haven’t worked on it in a long time, but when I did work on it, I worked hard. The prose is still a little sloppy, but another run-through should fix that. This was my first novel, and for a long time I’ve been very insecure about it; I mean, Hemingway threw his first book off a boat (or so the story goes), Faulkner’s first book is a shuddering pile of crap, and those two are recognized as great authors!

But I put a lot of work into this novel, and it means a lot to me (yes, before you ask, sometimes I do write stuff that doesn’t mean a lot to me. But I seldom talk about those works here). Unless some glaring problems jump at me during this last prose-cleaning run-through, I’m going to write a synopsis and put Shannon’s God in the mail. I’ll feel a lot better about trying to become a novelist if I’m actually sending a novel around. Then, as previously mentioned, I intend to whip through the changes needed on Infants and Tyrants and send it out. After that I want to grind through the daunting remainder of Raveling… and then there’s only Genius to fix.

Oh, is that all, Tim? You should be done by the weekend, then.

It’s not really that daunting, as long as I take it in bits and pieces. I revised about thirty pages of Shannon’s last night. There shouldn’t be any structural problems, I took care of those long ago. So that book could be done in a couple of weeks, if I work hard at it. And Infant, as I previously mentioned, needs about a month’s worth of work.

Raveling is the beast. But best not to dwell on that.

I guess that’s enough lopsided interim babbling. A more coherent and focused entry tomorrow, I promise.