Tuesday, January 6, 2009

no news is not news

I'm a bad blogger. I know this. I can't find anything compelling about the painstaking revision of a big novel. The process simply doesn't make for the stuff of story, in my mind. I made a few really positive changes today, but how would anyone reading here know that without having seen the material both before and after, without having read the entire manuscript to see how smoothly (I think) the new material fits into the image systems and schema [i don't know what that means but I have a feeling about it, like a color] of the story, or how certain deletions juxtaposed material so intuitively and "organically" that I instantly recognized their value? See? You can't.

But we have to blog apparently. We have to give good platform.

And the drama of my "partial" has really stretched about as far as tension can go without thinning into the sleepy funk of vigil. I'm still waiting to hear back from an agent who contacted me. I still hope he wants to see the rest of the book. I'm working as if he will, taking advantage of the winter break to revise revise revise. My beta-readers have saved my bacon.

In a few weeks I start teaching four classes at the University of North Texas, one of which is a senior level literature class. Preparation for these courses will consume much of next week, so I have to get what I can out of the next five days. I'm a good multi-tasker, however, and my own writing has never been neglected.

In other news, I noticed Matt Drudge was all crazy that Ann Coulter got bumped from an NBC program. Good for NBC. I was thinking of her just the other day, after watching the German film "Downfall," which called my attention to how much like Joseph Goebbels Coulter is, both in her constant spewing of hate, and how that hate is not directed outward but inward toward other Americans, seventy million Americans, to be precise, who voted for Barack Obama. The hated liberals, about whom a whole coterie of half-assed political hacks have a made a career describing various means to loathe them. Goebbels hated Jews. He wrote about this extensively, articulated it in fine detail (he had a PhD in literature), offering a ready made "intellectual" basis for the most violent crimes of the most violent century. He didn't care if they were German or not. It didn't make any difference to him if they'd been decorated officers or upstanding citizens. In this way he was as anti-German as Coulter is anti-American, hating more Americans in terms of aggregate numbers than probably any leader in the world besides Osama Bin-Laden. Bin-Laden purportedly hates 303 million Americans; Coulter comes in with a respectable 70 million. Not bad!