Sunday, July 29, 2012

Hi, blog. I didn't win the Amazon contest, as you might have guessed, and then I retreated to a mountain cave for over a year to meditate on the poisonous influence of Amazon on literary art.

No, none of that.

I had started a new book even before last year's Amazon news and the slight stir of agent interest that followed. The new book is now a nearly-complete first draft, which sounds great--and it is--but it's also the equivalent of forging the granite block you intend to chisel into some appealing shape. Can't start without the block. Can't rush the chiseling. In other words, there's a very long way to go. I can't imagine this novel will be ready even for my loyal cat to peruse for another year.

I will recommit to small, almost Twitter like updates to this blog. I can post about the oddities of the novelizing habit and some sense of the story's context. I don't want to write about the story, though, not because I think you'll steal it, dear sleepy blog, but because I'm superstitious about how many times you can tell or write about a story that isn't finished or even fully imagined yet.

Long entries in this space are probably counterproductive since they might make think I've actually accomplished something at the keyboard.

The new novel is set in London between the summer of 1909 and late 1910, and also partially in Wahoo, Nebraska. The main characters are a young American couple who get caught up in an obsession that takes them far from home and even farther from who they thought their lives would make them.

The story has nothing to do with the weather, but metaphorically it is finally the "stormchasing novel" my friends have suggested for years that I should write.