Chapter 9 of The Sleep of Reason is off to a good start. This one, as you’ll recall from my recent posts, was where I had left off last summer just before my hard drive crashed and I lost the two preceding chapters I had written. I’ve managed — finally — to get those lost [...]
Archive for November, 2008
Chapter 9 is off to a good start
November 28, 2008
but what kind of tragedy is it?
November 27, 2008
I don’t think I’m giving too much away by telling you that The Sleep of Reason is a tragedy. My protagonist meets his inescapable fate due to his actions. I know how the story will end, and I know how to get my character there. The plot has all of the structure of a tragedy.
The [...]
Hard-working adverbs
November 25, 2008
I came across the passage below in Ben Yagoda’s book The Sound on the Page. It discusses the old chestnut of how writers should eschew all adverbs, finding some agreement with it, but more to my taste, finding the proper and powerful use of adverbs to be desirable as well. The Hitchens he refers to [...]
Chapter 8 is finished
November 24, 2008
. . . and I give a heavy sigh of relief!
Finally I am finished with the rewrite of the lost material — lost due to my stupid, stupid negligence in making backups of my files. Ouch, that was a hard-learned lesson!
I think I have successfully re-created all of the plot points that needed to occur [...]
I write like a man, it seems
November 22, 2008
For one of my Finnegan novels, I intend to have Greg Finnegan solve the “mystery” by determining that a piece of writing attributed to a writer of one gender is actually the work of a writer of the other gender. This opens a series of revelations that lead to other conclusions in the story. (I [...]
Michael Kohlhaas
November 20, 2008
I read the novel Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist because it was the latest selection of the reading group I have been in for a number of years. (I posted about the benefits of being in a book discussion group for a writer in this post.)
This novel, published nearly 200 years ago, is based [...]
Harry, revised
November 17, 2008
This one novel by Mark Sarvas is, oddly, two novels. Or rather, it seems to be two different ways of telling two different parts of the same story.
Harry is a hapless widower with an eye for a young woman who works at the diner he frequents. In his effort to win her favor, he begins [...]
Chapter 8 lumbers along
November 13, 2008
I continue to make halting progress on Chapter 8 of The Sleep of Reason. As I noted in an earlier post, I’m haunted by the memory of the words as I put them down in the lost version of this chapter. How did I say it before, and was it better than this draft? That [...]
Fortunate obscurity?
November 11, 2008
A recent interview with Toni Morrison in the Times Online reveals a lot of about the writing life in general and that writer in particular. I was pleased to learn that she rises at 4:00 a.m. to write, a practice I happen to do as often as I can. I thought the interview also revealed [...]
Chapter 8 creeps forward; it’s haunted, I tell you!
November 8, 2008
Sometimes the words come with ease and alacrity, and other times I must squeeze them out of my brain one by one. Chapter 8 of The Sleep of Reason is creeping along. I’ve managed to put down 1,100 words in the last week. This is the last chapter I must re-create after the loss from [...]
