Quickie Fiction Updates for People Who’d Care

So my fiction rewrites have now begun in earnest (sorry, but I wanted a summer break), and there’s proving to be much less and much more of it than I thought. For those who don’t know, from Jan ’08 to Jun ’09, budhy was nice enough to let me blog a “novel” here, and a few people were nice enough to comment and make suggestions/edits/whatever. Probably only those people will be interested in this, so my non-update updates are below the fold.  

Anyway, I started with the entries for this guy, which on full re-read had a serious lack of energy in the first half. Not to mention a lack of surrealism. I mean, this is the guy who’s supposed to be the insane gonzoid one, and things read a bit too normal from his point of view, if you know what I mean. The idea was to have him start weird and go normal, with the opposite happening to the other guy. An inversion as it were.

So in an attempt to rectify this problem, I consumed much caffeine this weekend trying to integrate this cutting-room-floor bit with this part, therefore affecting this part in the narrative. (Note: the links are to the old versions, so you’ll just have to imagine it. Fiction!) It might work, but there’s still some paring down to do. The only other work I foresee in this character’s future is tightening up his resolution, which on re-read flies by much too quickly.

And really, all the chapters need some tinkering in one way or another–mostly to give each character some uniformity in tone (blogging the thing over 18 months will warp a narrator–not always a bad thing, but not always helpful either) and to generally spice things up. With any luck I’ll be able to deal with all those things as Fall envelops the hemisphere and pretty things begin to die.

Does that make sense? Hell, I dunno–I just dreamed I woke up like 3 times before I actually woke up, so maybe I’m dreaming as I type this. Talk about life imitating art imitating life (again, for those that don’t know, the story is about nightmares and surrealism…sort of).

All updates, by the way, will (eventually) be cross-posted at the book’s official blog. Thanks to my three loyal readers for indulging my nostalgic impulses. I’ll be editing and rewriting the thing in the coming months and will likely self-publish, since I have absolutely no interest right now in fighting the never-ending War to Make People Care. That’s all for now.