NaNoWriMo Novel: The Redactor

Sunday 20 January 2013

The Superman and the Sea


I must be on a bit of a Hemmingway kickhe says wondering what a full-blown case of Hemmingway-itis would look like. Maybe…

(Around the breakfast table)
Me: Have you eaten enough?
Child #1: Lamentably no. My gastronomic rapacity knows no satiety.
Me: If I've told you once, I've told you twice, don't use ten-dollar words. There are older and simpler and better words.

Or perhaps just a desire to rub hair tonic into one's balding pate. (As reported of Hemmingway by Roald Dahl, who was wondering what was taking the old guy so long.)

Okay, I got off track there. This post was supposed to be a brag about the fish I caught in Denmark (the town, not the country), and a speculation about the reason for this marine feat.

First, the brag. Here's the fish. It's a whiting, but I'm not sure if its of the king george or yellow-fin variety (yes, I'm aware it has yellow fins). You can call me Ishmael.



Second, the speculation. A day before we travelled to Denmark I had a little-performed blood test that involved the drawing, irradiation, and re-injection of blood. I haven't received the results, but isn't it obvious? Blood plus radiation can have only one outcome: super powers. To wit, the fish. I have obtained some kind of fish mastery.

PS: The hand captured in the photo above belongs to a very tall native of Denmark (the country, not the town), who goes by the name of Ruprecht. He has a hand-span the size of a hubcap.

Saturday 5 January 2013

Free book, dude.

Dark Matter free today.

...working on a guest post for FreeBookDude.com, topic: what I like in a novel. What elements make a novel enjoyable for you?

Wednesday 2 January 2013

Is a first draft like a first bullet?

Just finished the first draft of a detective novel, tentatively titled Strawman Made Steel. Needless to say I feel a mixture of elation and exhaustion. (And hunger, but that could just be normal.)

Tonight's editing only involved patching up the odd hole, marked in the manuscript by the very descriptive ??. The last ?? I had to patch was a reference to George Orwell's description of what it was like to be shot.



I leave you with an excerpt, and a link to the full passage. It's fascinating.

There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all around me, and I felt a tremendous shock - no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shriveled up to nothing.
 Sounds a bit like finishing a first draft. You know the pain is coming... ;-)