The Accidental Novel
We made it through Tropical Storm Imelda unscathed, although the same cannot be said for many in the vicinity. We received somewhere between five and seven inches of rain, most of it on Friday, which isn’t all that unusual for us, but some communities less than an hour away received over 42″ of rain in a couple of days.
The Canadian in me remembers that an inch of rain corresponds to roughly a foot of snow. Imagine 42 feet of snow coming down in two days! 42″ of snow would be bad enough. There was some street flooding in our community, but I didn’t hear of any permanent damage nearby. Places in Houston and to our east and northeast saw damage at least as extensive as we had after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. There’s still high water in some places nearly a week later. Two of the most destructive storms that have happened since I moved here 30 years ago haven’t been hurricanes–they were slow-moving tropical systems that popped up just offshore and brought a ton of rain with them.
We saw the Downton Abbey movie on Sunday afternoon. We were going to go on Saturday but the only seats available on that day (the theaters near us all have reserved seating) were in the front rows and we had no desire to stare up Carson’s nostrils for two hours. If you liked the TV series, you’ll like this film. Everyone’s back, and there is mild drama and humor without much risk involved to anyone. I enjoyed the downstairs drama more than the goings on upstairs, but it was all good fun.
I seem to have tricked myself into writing a novel. Well, rewriting, in a sense. I was contacted recently to see if I had a novel excerpt for a collection, and my interlocutor suggested a book I wrote many years ago. I hadn’t given that manuscript much thought, and I was frankly surprised to be reminded that I had showed it to him!
So, I went back to it, peeling out a group of chapters to give him for this project. However, as I went along I realized I quite liked what I was reading. So I looked up the notes my agent had provided on it, and discovered that he liked a lot of it, too. Not all, however, which is probably why my work on it ground to a halt. We were involved with other projects by then and I guess I decided to let it lie fallow instead of digging in and doing the work needed to whip it into shape.
Well, I’m doing it now. It’s a complicated job because I am removing chapters written from the viewpoints of all but two characters. That means that all of the important information in those other chapters has to be conveyed by different means. I also plan to completely redo the last quarter of the book, as the original version was a little too Scooby-Doo for my liking.
Still, I’ve been trying to get to work on a novel for most of 2019 and it looks like by the end of the year–perhaps even by the end of November–I’ll have something that my agent and I can work on again. Fingers crossed.
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