Thanks, Margaret, for coming up with that keen replacement for Thursday.

Blogging earlier in my writing day is tough. I feel like I'm taking up time I could be using to do things that feel like writing but aren't -- like email and MySpace and now Facebook and, uh, blogging -- but lately I've been so tired that blogging at the end of my day just hasn't been happening. The previous day's writing is at this point pretty much immaterial since that was yesterday and this is today or, if you will, Friday's yesterday. Be that as it may, yesterday, I worked in the car while my son was at soccer practice and ended up resurrecting an old chapter which needed some pretty minimal work in order to fit in around its new home. Which meant I had 5,000 "new" words yesterday. But now it's today and yesterday doesn't matter. Except if I hadn't written anything, I would be panicking.

Last night I finished Blackburn by Bradley Denton. OK, look. This isn't a book for just everyone, so if you read it and hate it or can't get past the first few chapters, well, all right. But I have to say it's a damn good book. The protagonist (Blackburn) is completely real. It isn't a book I'll forget anytime soon. If you're interested in seeing how an author makes a protagonist consistent within that world, this is a good book to study.

Here's why I recommend this book: Yesterday at the Day Job cube-room there were HVAC guys all over because the HVAC in the server room is getting fixed so as to avoid another server meltdown. One of the guys, the boss, I believe, goes in the server room, shuts the door and proceeds to have a cell phone conversation with a co-worker. His end is all yelling so everyone outside the server room, which is all of Systems, can hear him quite clearly. Part of his yelling included the phrase (remember, he's yelling) You HAVE to OVERESTIMATE every job! and a bunch of other stuff related to why this particular job should have been overestimated. The moment, the very moment I heard that phrase, I thought If Blackburn were here, he'd kill that guy. And it would have been the right thing to do in a sick and demented kind of way.

So, that's why you should read Blackburn.

But if you're the squeamish type, don't (only, you know, maybe you should just try to get over that for this book). Bradley Denton has written SFF and Horror, it looks like, which probably accounts for why his literary novel is so good. Genre writing teaches you a lot about getting a story to hang together. You have to leave out all the self-indulgent MFA crap. I should know, right?

For the geekish, here's my twitter stream: http://twitter.com/cjewel I don't post to it all that often, but hey, if you're a writer or a reader, you can jump right in and we'll be the first authors/readers on twitter. Right now I think it's mostly geeks. Basically, it's kind of a way of shouting over the fence hey! I'm going to cook dinner, then write?.

Labels: reading, Scandal, writing