Sights that would make Jesse Helms have a heart attack

Went into the bookstore last night so desperate for something different to read that I ended up buying Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. If nothing else, it's at least different.

Visited the manga section, doing my mental calculus of 'if it's worth reading at all, isn't it worth reading in Japanese?' and 'if I buy one book of Real Literature and one trashy manga, do they cancel each other out?' - and was charmed by the sight of three girls in head scarves sitting on the floor reading various shoujo manga, and one tall gawky boy reading Gravitation.

Oh brave new Bible Belt state, that has such people in't!

I have declared this to be my Day Off. Nevertheless, I have cleaned my bathroom and kitchen and will get started again shortly.

Three things I like about this novel.

(1) John Gardner said in one of this writing books that sometimes a novel needs the kind of strangeness that can only come from real life. And telling details are so important, and I have not yet learned to do them right. But writing realistic fiction is almost like having training wheels for telling details, because you can look back and slot in the details from your own life. I would not want to do this forever--I don't think I could stand to write another novel with this many details from my own life--but I do like the training wheels. Just for example: what can you bring someone to apologize? There's nothing more cliche than flowers, and I hope I'd have enough sense to avoid that, but I'd never have thought of sushi on my own. (Actually, someone does bring someone else flowers later on, but I think it works. I hope.)

(2) This is the first time I have written a novel in anything other than linear order with a few flashbacks. What's more, both of the parallel plotlines are picaresque enough that I have some room to rearrange the episodes. This lets me get away from the plodding tyranny of "X led to Y, Y led to Z" and hopefully make transitions from one scene to another based on symbols, or themes, or questions--not just What Happened Next.

(3) This is really the first novel I've written that I believe hangs together from beginning to end, in terms of plot and character and theme and motif, without any handwavy bits. Of course I think that, because I'm working on it. Maybe that's because it's so short? Maybe it's because I've actually gotten better as a writer. Then again, maybe it's because I've been writing so incredibly slowly, and that's laziness, but it also gives my backbrain time to fit things together and make sure everything makes sense.

More than that--I feel like some of the things that initially made me angry or frustrated, that broke The Rules or went against my initial plan, actually are there for a reason, albeit reasons I didn't understand while I was writing my first draft or my 1.5 draft.