Saturday, January 07, 2006

Saturday Morning Quickie

Started Laura Lippman's CHARM CITY night before last. It's my first novel by her, but won't be my last. I've heard so many good things about TO THE POWER OF THREE that I will get it next.

Still trying to slog, and I mean SLOG, through Jane Smiley's 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A NOVEL. *yawn* Will try to skim some TALE OF GENJI in the next few days, as that is the first of one hundred and one "novels" she read in her post-9/11 recovery period.

Have a couple more chapters to reread of Maass's WRITING THE BREAKOUT NOVEL. I'm revising the first half of my novel before continuing, and reminding myself of some ideas I had and didn't put into play during the first draft.

There has been some fun in the house: We watched four episodes of ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT last night. I nearly passed out from laughter-induced oxygen deprivation. At 12:30am we knew we had to go to bed, but we could've easily continued.

I pledge to update my template soon to revamp my links.

4 comments:

Christa M. Miller said...

K, my mind was totally in the gutter reading your title... ;)

I wanted to get to Borders today to spend part of my Christmas GC on Lippman books, but the husband is sick. What are you gonna do.

Never seen Arrested Development, but we've been delving into our Christmas box sets of SCTV and Kids in the Hall. Great, great stuff.

Happy weekend!

Mary Louisa said...

Welcome to the gutter, sister. Pull up a banana peel. Sorry you couldn't get out today. I'm going to try to go to Border's tomorrow, gods willing.

Tribe, I think the Maass book's value varies wildly from reader to reader. He distills the ingredients that recent "breakout" and bestsellers have in common, and tries to explain how the mid-list or unpublished novelist can incorporate them. For me, it's both a validator ("Yep, I'm doing that already") and a reminder ("Oh, right--I probably should make that meeting a little more high stakes"). It's a hard book to recommend across the board because writers vary so widely as to what they could use at any given time of the writing process. HTH.

Jeff said...

Good luck with your revision. :)

Confessions of a Starving Mystery Writer said...

As a guy, I'm sure you well know, our mind is always in the gutter. So it won't suprise use to find that I too was intrigued by your title.

As far as writing goes, I feel your pain. Good luck and nice blog.