Here you'll find the rantings of a blogging fool and sometimes writer. My more personal posts, including progress reports on my various writing projects, are Friends Only. General posts on writing are Public. Please see my user profile for my other LJs and my friending policy, and browse through the sidebar for nifty goodies and useful info.

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Writing only leads to more writing. (Colette)

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Visitors from 1/30/05:

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From Publishers Weekly, October 10, 2005, the Deals column:

"In a preempt after 24 hours, Reagan Arthur at Little, Brown bought world rights to Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris from agent Julie Barer. Ferris is a recent grad of the MFA program at UC Irvine, where Geoffrey Wolff is already singing his praises. The novel, about a group of co-workers in a Chicago ad agency, is narrated in the first-person plural."

Yup, that's what it says. First-person plural. We here at Write Stuff are curious as all get out as to how good that will read and whether or not it would drive us, as readers, crazy after a while. No mention was made of the tense. We're assuming the pov is the narrator. Has anyone read a book like this before?

Stewart O'Nan proved to me with A Prayer for the Dying that second person present tense could be done well. Now I'm wondering if we'll be seeing a trend in offbeat narration.

From Publishers Weekly, September 26, 2005 (and yes, I'm a bit behind in my magazine reading): Gordon Dahlquist, a fairly unknown NY playright (and certainly unknown to me) sold a 1,300-page manuscript to Bantam. The "sprawling fantasy epic," called The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, is scheduled to be published in October 2006. The two-book deal is for $2 million. As before, I'm wishing they'd given the word count.

It's long been known that if you write a good book, length won't matter when selling it to a publisher, not if they think it's good enough that people will buy it. And certainly over the years, there have been a lot of long books, within SF/F and without. But Hunger's Brides by Paul Anderson, weighing in at 1,360 pages and nearly 5 pounds (no, I haven't seen a word count and I sure would love to know it — can you picture his word count meter?) must be a record for a first novel.

Now, I've heard about this book. From NY Times Online, which seems to not need a password, since I got on fine when I clicked a link on Blog of a Bookslut:

"After generally good reviews, the book won the top prize for literary fiction at the Alberta Book Awards. Random House Canada sold its entire first press run of 5,000 copies and has gone back to press.

Carroll & Graf has printed 10,000 copies, and the book received starred reviews in Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews and is on the September recommended list of BookSense, a trade group representing independent bookstores."

But what really got me was this:

"When Mr. Anderson - a Calgary, Alberta, resident, who worked on the book for 12 years - submitted his 1,000-page manuscript, Ms. Collins had one piece of advice for him: Make it longer.

"What was missing was something that I knew he already knew was missing," Ms. Collins explained - the leap into what, from her childhood or whenever, haunted Sor Juana and eventually forced her into her vow of silence. "I told him, 'You can't not go there.' And that's how it got longer."

Not only is my mind bloggling, it's reeling and rocking, too. And I'm not that energetic. I just wanted to see my mood alien bounce.