I haven’t done well with updating the blog about the book club a friend and I started since the first meeting.

A brief survey of what we’ve read since: Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (we loved it), Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels (excellent), Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Summer Tree (well liked, but I felt it over-rated), Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake (I loved it, but this had our lowest attendance), E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View (not universally loved), Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (adored and it made for great discussion).

These summaries are necessarily brief, but we’ll see about doing more complete write-ups of what we’re reading. ⁽¹⁾

Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness: Stories was our latest book club pick. I’d not read anything by her before, but since reading this I’ve picked up more. I love her style, perhaps because she scares me.

As advertised, she’s an amazing writer who, with but a few sentences, can capture the essence of an entire relationship. Witness this scene from “Deep-Holes”: Continue reading »

Footnotes:

1. For the nerds interested in what I’ve been reading, I keep a list here. [↩]

I’m at work on a short story I first started about six months ago. After a few initial re-writes around that time it’s been sitting abandoned in a folder, though not forgotten.

Today was the first time I’d re-read it in full since that time. It’s better than I remember it, though not as good as I know it sounded in my head when I first began drafting the idea. They never comes out as well as I want it to on the page. I understand this is common, but it’s still frustrating.

More tinkering today, but the last five pages need a complete re-write. I probably ought to scrap them all together, but it would mean re-writing or completely re-designing some 500-800 words. It’s for the best, but it still hurts.

I’m hoping to have it finished by the end of the week, but we’ll see how it goes.

I’m really enjoying working on these stories again, and just being in this world. So many ideas to play with.

Back to work!

I mailed out another submission this afternoon; a short story to a Canadian magazine I recently discovered and enjoy.

I wrote the first draft of the story a few months ago and have been tinkering with it incessantly for the past few weeks. It’s been driving me mad, but I think it’s ok. I hope so, anyway.

It’s very short, less than 2000 words. It’s set in an alterante Toronto and features a thoroughly dispicable narrator (though I rather like him). Many of the characters and situations relate to two other (longer) short stories I’d written earlier set in the same world.⁽¹⁾

Time to get to work on the next one. So far it’s already 3600+ words.

Wish me luck.

Footnotes:

1. There’s also a novel, but it’s not very good (yet, hopefully). I really like the idea, but it needs a lot of work. [↩]