Another tidbit from the playwriting phase I went through a couple of years ago. I had totally forgotten this existed until yesterday. After I read it over, I suddenly remembered plotting the whole thing out while I mowed the lawn. Two summers ago.
There’s a French pun near the very end. I can hardly believe that I invented a French pun, and in fact when I read it again after so long, I didn’t quite get it at first. I had to think about it. Strange, how the mind works.
The play is called–or rather would be called, if I ever finished it–Custody.
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A few weeks ago, when I posted a design for the cover of my novel-in-progress, I said it was way too soon to be thinking about such things, and sure enough, I’m thiiiiis close to changing the title. And even though I am, therefore (ergo and to wit), on the very verge of proving that it is, indeed, too soon to be considering cover designs, I’ve spent a little time today putting together this cover design:
I’ve had this new title rattling around in my head for a while. I first intended it for a different project, a play that I’ll probably never write. For a while it was attached to a different novel that I may or may not write. But–for the moment, at least–I think it belongs with the novel I’m writing now. At least three overlapping, interconnected story lines will incorporate events spanning some forty-odd years. The thing as a whole is shaping up to be about transition and transformation, about examining the past in order to find a way forward.
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Some progress on my 2010 reading list: I finished The Living.
I wrote a review over on Goodreads:
This book is beautifully written. The prose is as fine and as lovely as anything I’ve ever read. The book is majestic and magisterial, as formidable as the densely forested lands that the characters strive to master and tame.
And yet, well, put it this way: one character is said to have written a three-hundred page epic poem in which men battle polar bears and pack ice; although the poet is a rank amateur, I wish I could have read his no-doubt-inept poem rather than this finely wrought novel.
I was profoundly unmoved. I barely cared whether the characters lived or died. I had a glimmer of interest in a sort of antisocial, woodsy Nietzschean named Beal Obenchain, but for him as well as for the rest, I felt very little emotion.
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A while back, I posted something about The River In Winter
on a message board entitled “Shameless Self-Promotion.” I’d have to say I wasn’t so very shameless; I posted a link to the book’s Amazon page and a couple of links to my site.
Since then, I’ve been getting emails from other writers who’re shamelessly self-promoting their projects. Others are shamelessly shameless. Phrases such as “non-stop thrills” are employed. Iron-clad promises that readers will become “addicted.” Words are described as “jumping off the page.”
Actually, I envy some of these people their willingness to brag. When I was a kid, we used to say “when god was handing out brains, you thought he said trains and told him you’d catch the next one.” One might say that when god was handing out brag, I thought he said slag and told him that didn’t sound very nice.
In any case, I’m thinking I should probably try to get better at this. Here’s my first attempt:
The River in Winter is a book for the ages. With each syllable of each word of each sentence of each paragraph of each chapter, you will fall more deeply in love with its characters, until you find yourself wanting to move with them to California’s redwood forests to create a free-love hippie commune, where Spike will no doubt secure the medical marijuana license.
Huh? Huh? Whattaya think? Love, redwoods, pot. A little something for everyone, yes?
Wow. It’s been almost six months since I did one of these. The long hiatus may have something to do with the fact that during the fall my coffee consumption dropped dramatically. I stopped punctuating all of my errands with stops at either Starbucks or the B&N. Or maybe I’m just a slacker.
In any case, without further ado…
Let me begin with a favorite author, Anne Tyler.
Although I don’t really remember how I “discovered” Ian McEwan or Jane Smiley or Barbara Kingsolver or many of the authors I love the bestest, I remember very clearly running across a copy of Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
in a Kmart. I bought it because the title and cover art intrigued me.
Sad, then, that in recent years her book covers have come to look like this:
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Just today, I kid you not, I realized the purpose of the duct tape in all those NOH8 Campaign photos. It should be intuitively obvious, I suppose: we can be full members of society if we keep our mouths shut and pretend we’re something we’re not. But for some reason–perhaps it’s because straight people pose for those ads, too–I never made the connection till today.
(Sssshhh! Don’t tell anyone, but apparently I’m a little slow on the uptake.)
Earlier this week, I was chatting with some people, and the topic of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell came up. I’ve been fortunate to find a great group of progressive-minded people here in this corner of the Bible Belt, so it was no surprise that the tone of the conversation was one of humor and bemusement. Now that even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has said that DADT is just plain wrong, it’s fairly safe to treat the topic as a big, puzzling joke.
But then someone new joined us. With a troubled expression, he explained that he didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. If a gay person wants to serve in the military, this fellow said, that’s fine, right? As long as he keeps his mouth shut?
A bunch of us tried to explain how that’s right but also so very wrong. But I don’t think we really succeeded: his final pronouncement on the matter was that he didn’t know if repealing DADT was such a good idea.
(Sssshhhh! Don’t tell, but I was really pissed.)
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