Sunday, November 06, 2005
My life as a Neurotic
First, before I get to the meat of my psycho-analysis, I have finished
Absolom! Absolom! Wow. I wish I hadn't started all those years ago with The sound and the Fury, because I would probably have read more Faulkner. Wow. I'm on to
Call it Sleep by Henry Roth and am about 1/3 or so of the way through. Pretty good, but I'm wondering right now if McCourt's
Angela's Ashes doesn't give Roth a run for his money. Probably that's blasphemy and when I'm further along I'll have an apologia to make. But to me, there's a striking similarity in the immigrant story, despite Irish vs. Jewish, and that comparison speaks volumes for unity of experience, but then I've always believed that race/ethnicity is really not something that matters with respect to one's intrinsic worth, only with respect to one's experience.
Annyyyyway. Yesterday I ended up mostly working on the new proposal and I'm doing something a bit different that seems to be helping me. I'm working on the synopsis and chapter outline at the same time. What seems to be happening is that I write high-level in the synopsis and then jump to the outline and get some detail which helps to drive forward the story and thus the synopsis and then when I go back to the synopsis, I move things around a bit, restate and then go forward a bit and then back to the chapter outline and, so, OK. We'll see.
Then, I made the HUGE mistake of performing stupid web tricks again and found a so-so review of A Darker Crimson on Amazon and then, despite the other much longer reviews from readers who reacted positively and appreciated, so I like to think, the complexities of the story, there I was, suddenly feeling completely talentless and hopeless and why-do-I-even-bother-ish. And that got me thinking about why on earth The Spare didn't do much better than it did. It's a superior book, it's much better written than Lord Ruin. But then, Lord Ruin actually made it into stores for readers to buy and The Spare didn't and I was too stupid to know I should have been on the phone to my editor asking why every damn bookseller and reader in the world couldn't get my book for MONTHS after release. Seriously. Some booksellers told me they placed multiple orders for The Spare and it never arrived. Ever. And then I got to thinking how much better A Darker Crimson could have been if I'd had more time and things have been pretty much downhill since.
Sigh.
