I guess I’ll have to read it again to be sure. But it sure feels done at the moment.
My favorite quote about finishing a story goes something like: “You know you’re done when you go through it and take commas out, and then you go through it again and put the commas back in.” Wish I could remember who said it.
Here’s a nice review someone just posted on Amazon for my novel The Portal:
The story is riveting from beginning to end. Two preteens far from home but in fact not far but in a parallel universe is a fascinating concept all by itself. Throw in the time travel, dangerous situations, an array of interesting characters to interact with, and the emotions evoked as they experience privations and loss, and this becomes a captivating story you don’t want to put down until the very end. Recommended for teens and adults.
I couldn’t have said it better myself! I’ll probably post more of these when I get closer to publishing its somewhat long-awaited sequel.
I have finished the third draft of my novel. It’s now five thousand words longer and considerably better. I think I’m pretty close to being done. Here is how this works, in my experience:
Here’s an example of the mess. I came across this sentence the other morning: “After a few hours we stopped to eat and feed the horses.” Wait, what? How can you feed the horses after you have eaten them? I guess maybe that wasn’t what I had in mind.
Was I asleep when I wrote that sentence? Drunk? No, I was just working through the action and not paying enough attention to the style. So that sentence is fixed.
Now I need to read through the whole thing again. You know, just in case.
I forgot to mention that my novel Senator is currently on sale for the criminally low price of $0.99. Like, at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. And even GooglePlay. I have no idea how long the sale will last, so act quickly!
As always, if you enjoy the book, a good review is much appreciated.
I’ve begun the third draft of my novel, which so far has mainly involved fiddling with the second draft. I love fiddling! This means that I’m pretty close to where I want to end up, and I just need to make everything better — add details, .
There’s just one problem: this novel is the sequel to my novel The Portal, and it presumes that there will be a Book 3. If there isn’t, people will find the ending pretty darn unsatisfying. But I haven’t exactly plotted out Book 3 yet. Hey, I’ve been busy! So I’m worried that the action and characters of this unwritten book will require even more fiddling with Book 2.
So it looks like I need to do some plotting before I finish my novel. Luckily, I like plotting almost as much as I like fiddling.
Well, that took a while, during which posting here was light to nonexistent. The second draft comes out at about 80,000 words, which is about where I expected it to end up.
Much has changed throughout the book, although the basic structure has stayed the same. I’m hoping the final revisions we’ll go fairly quickly.
And I’m closing in on a cover design . . .
Shut up. Really, just shut up.
The plan was to get the sequel to The Portal done in 2015, but 2016 finds me about three-quarters of the way through the second draft. This isn’t like a George R.R. Martin delay, and I don’t have editors and publishers and translators and millions of readers waiting on me. It’s just a personal thing. But still.
What I don’t want to do (and I’m sure Martin doesn’t want to do) is to publish the thing before it’s ready. I can feel the temptation to declare victory and move on. But the list of things I want to tweak in the next draft is growing….
So I’ll get there–maybe by March. Maybe before George R.R. Martin.
Highlights, anyway. Much of it listened to, rather than read. Listed more or less in order of enjoyment.
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. An English woman takes up hawking to get over the death of her father. She tells the story of training the hawk, interspersed with a psychobiography of T.E. White, the author of The Once and Future King. Well, that doesn’t sound promising, does it? But it’s glorious. I felt like I was entering deeply into a wondrous world I never knew existed. And Macdonald’s narration is also glorious.
Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. This book, about how we deal with the end of life, has gotten a lot of praise, and it deserves every bit of it.
The Iliad. Narrated by Dan Stevens. I talk about it here.
SPQR by Mary Beard. A history of ancient Rome up to the early 200’s. I love this kind of book.
Middlemarch by George Eliot. It still works.
Fore! The Best of Wodehouse on Golf. I don’t know a mashie from a niblick, but Wodehouse on anything is great. I was trying to read The Kreutzer Sonata by Tolstoy and kept switching back to this book so I could feel good about life.
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders. Weird, wonderful stories about weird, wonderful people. With a lovely afterword about how Saunders finally found his voice and his success.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. Finally got around to reading this. Lovely, illuminating stories.
Adverbs by Daniel Handler. A strange but enjoyable “novel” for adults by the author of the Lemony Snicket series.
Paris 1919 by Margaret MacMillan. Who doesn’t want to listen to 25 hours of narration about the peace conference after World War 1? I learned a lot.
Faith vs. Fact by Jerry Coyne. A good summary of why science works as an explanation of the world and religion doesn’t. Fairly familiar stuff to people who read Coyne’s web site, but worth getting down on paper. It probably won’t change many minds, alas.
Life’s Greatest Secret by Matthew Cobb. Tells the story of the scientific discoveries about DNA, RNA, and genetics, down to the present day. Great, although a bit too dense for someone listening to it at rush hour.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. Harari is a big, big picture kind of guy and has all kinds of provocative ideas, not all of which I agree with. But I was entertained and educated nevertheless.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. This is a novel about the world after a flu epidemic causes civilization to collapse, with lots of flashbacks to the final days of the world we knew. It’s been a big best-seller and was nominated for the National Book Award. I’m a big fan of dystopian novels — I’ve written a few myself! But this one, despite being very well written, left me a bit cold. Too many characters and too many plot strands insufficiently developed. And I really didn’t get the Station Eleven stuff.
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This book was showered with praise and awards, but it left me rather cold. I’ve enjoyed his shorter work more. Partly it was the author’s narration, which I thought was rushed. And I wished he pronounced the word “asked” rather than “axed”. But I also found it difficult to follow his argument sometimes (if there was an argument). The centerpiece of the book is the death of one of his college friends at the hands of an out-of-control police officer. This is a symptom of what’s wrong with America; fair enough. But the police officer was black, working for a black-controlled police department. I wanted Coates to connect the dots for me better than he did. Here’s a long review that says what I thought about the book better than I can.
The Six Wives of Henry VIII by Alison Weir. More than I wanted to know about them, I guess.
I notice that several of these books came my way via BookBub. And I notice that my Kindle is filling up with BookBub titles that I really want to read, all purchased for $1.99 or less. Is this the future? Do we like this future?
Jane Austen’s novel Emma was published on this day in 1815, although this article says that the title page of the first edition gives a publication date of 1816.
The recent BBC ranking of British novels by non-English critics puts Emma at at #19, 8 ranks lower than Pride and Prejudice. The Guardian puts it at #9 among all English-language novels. No other Austen novels are on the list. Huh? (This is a pretty idiosyncratic list, actually.)
Here’s a very entertaining discussion of Emma from the BBC’s In Our Time podcast.
Time to add it to the to-be-reread list.
The BBC polled a bunch of non-British book reviewers and literary scholars to come up with their list. Note that it’s British novels only — so no James Joyce.
I’m a sucker for articles like this. The first thing I want to know is how many of these books I haven’t read — or, in this case, writers haven’t even heard of. I count 13 writers who are completely new to me, most of them from the 1980s on. I haven’t been keeping up! There are probably another 20 or so that I’ve known about forever but never read — Doris Lessing, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Paul Scott, Anthony Trollope, George Gissing . . .
Some more thoughts:
I need to read more novels.
Richard Bowker 