Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

Well, Nanowrimo ended on Friday night, and alas, my number count came up wanting. Instead of the required 50,000 words, I could only muster around 29,000. Still, after a month, I've got a good start on my next novel. Many events contributed to my shortfall, but my lack of concentration was by far the biggest. Case in point: Thursday night I planned to jam out at least 4,000 to 5,000 words. Then at 4:00 PM my boss came and asked me if I could put together a bunch of stats on something I oversee, for a 7:00 AM meeting on Friday. I finally emailed a spreadsheet of crunched numbers around midnight. My next goal is to see how much progress I can make by year's end.

One of the side effects of having children in high school is they end up buying a lot of paperback editions of books for their required reading lists. Since these are often books I read in high school, I've occasionally rescued them after they are no longer needed and re-read them. Today I finished Ray Bradbury's novel , Something Wicked This Way Comes , which I'd first read when I was a teenager. I confess, it took me a long while to get through it, which is surprising, since it is a relatively short novel (the Bantam paperback edition was a mere 215 pages). The poetic narrative voice, often singled out for praise, dragged the story down much of the time. The writing became opaque: I found it hard to loose myself in the story because the prose-poem style got in the way. This stylistic approach also had the effect (for me, anyway) of flattening out some character development, since emotional depth was sometimes sacrificed (or at least compressed) on the altar of the well-tu...