Well, I've done it. I got through Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow," my sanity intact. The ending was crazy, very fast paced (but he still had time for allusions to Isaac and Abraham and the Tarot, as well as Kabbala) and it ended in a very similar way to how it started, with a screaming coming across the sky. I still haven't one-hundred percent cycled through my thoughts about it, but I am glad I read it and I'm glad to move on. In comparison to reading Pynchon, anything else is easy. Well, almost anything else. I'm reading "Pictures at a Revolution," which I'm getting through really quickly. Expect a post on that soon, but not too soon (December will be focused on holidays, I'm thinking).
In writing news: the onslaught that is November will be over soon. My big projects are coming to a close (both NaNoWriMo and real-world projects), and I'm looking forward to the clearing out that will occur on December 2nd. It feels strange to have so many things wrapping up at once--graduate school applications included--and it will be a very welcome break. What will I do with my time, besides returning to a sane daily pace and blogging before 6pm every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday? Well, like I mentioned earlier, Chanterelles will not be done, not in my opinion, by the end of the month, so I'll probably wrap up a draft of that. Everything has its trajectory set (I need to get out of rocket-thinking soon. I blame Pynchon.) and the ending will be interesting. But in a short amount of time, I've grown attached to these characters. I'll be sad to see this draft end. But it's never over, is it?
What else? Editing my previous manuscript, maybe returning to work on my Zeppelin story. I'm trying to decide on a title for that one. How about "To Be a Rock, and Not to Roll"? Or "Houses of the Holy"? I also got a very strange idea for a story--I don't know how I'd categorize it, because right now it's literally a sentence and a line of dialogue in my notebook, but maybe I'd call it a fable. Or it might be some kind of horror story. I really don't know. I won't reveal too much, but the idea is really calling out to me and I'm excited to see where it goes.
Well, I'll see you all on Wednesday. I think the post might be about the band Home, who I started listening to recently.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Fiction Mondays: Full-Circle
Monday, September 21, 2009
Fiction Mondays: Rainy September Check-In
There's a really interesting scene in these pages, toward the end of these pages, in which Pointsman, the Pavlovian doctor, worries that Roger Mexico, the statistician, and the rest of his generation will live outside of cause and effect after the war. This is severely terrifying to a Pavlovian, to whom cause and effect are essential:
"Will Postwar be nothing but "events," newly created one moment to the next?"
And the answer, according to the plot and structure of the novel, is yes. We jump from event to event, character to character, often with no link between. The mystery of Tyrone Slothrop (every place he has sex, a rocket hits) is picked apart by a group of pseudo-scientists and psychics trying to understand the reason, and the question they cannot answer is which is the cause and which is the effect. I really love how Pynchon mirrors this confusion in the structure of the book, for instance: Slothrop's extended hallucination (toward the end of these pages) is not explained until the next section. We are left flailing, hoping that the cause of this hallucination will be explained.
As far as the difficulty of this section, these pages were pretty tame. We had characters being developed, plots being set in motion. But the next one is not so easy. One section took my several days because the characters in it are so unsavory, and when it switches back to Pirate Prentice, it dives into what is (I think) another extended daydream he's looking into.
***End of Gravity's Rainbow section***
In other news, I have sent out my novel to my next readers. I was terrified to do it, but I'm excited to see what they say. I had no idea it would be so scary to send it out to people I know, but it makes sense--it's a lot easier to put the book in the hands of someone I have never met than to get feedback from people I know very well. But I think it's a strong draft. Not perfect, but strong. I think it's reached a point where I need other people to read it. I've spent so much time with it that I know it backwards and forward, and this familiarity can make me miss things.
