I’m reading The Girl Who Played With Fire by Steig Larsson. The book focuses much more on Elizabeth Salander than on Mikael. I’m about 1/4 of the way into it, and I don’t like it nearly as much as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It could have done with much stronger editing. Do we really need that detailed a description of Salander’s IKEA trip — every single item she purchased? Also, there are more undisguised political/social diatribes that come across as terribly preachy. I’m sticking with it, but I hope that something interesting happens soon. The Grenada section was good, but so far it seems unaffiliated with the rest of the book. Salander is an intriguing character (I didn’t realize she was so short), but it’s a little hard to accept that someone with her resources and skills can continue be declared unfit to look after herself at the age of 25. Not that it seems to interfere with her life in any way.
I’ve always liked this picture, ever since I first saw it on the cover of a book about error analysis. I made a post on Facebook this morning about the fact that I was 3/4 of the way through the first draft of a short story that I didn’t plan to begin until Saturday and the first response to the update was “Whoops!” It wasn’t exactly accidental writing, but almost. I was going to start it last weekend, but I didn’t know where to begin. I had a concept and a title, but no situation or characters. So I decided to ruminate on it for a while. Then, yesterday I awoke with the situation and a rough idea of the two characters and wrote 750 words with one character as the viewpoint character. This morning I realized it could be much more effective the other way around, so I shifted the camera, so to speak, and wrote another thousand words. This new character perspective took over and led the story. I would say “led it in a direction I didn’t expect,” except I had no expectations. I had no idea where the story was going. People often compare the act of writing to excavation, and I think that is often the case. There’s a story there, but it takes some work to uncover it, and what is revealed is as much of a surprise to the writer as (hopefully) to the audience. I know how I want the story to end, but it’s on something of a predictable trajectory given the theme of the market it is intended for, so I’m playing with ways of skewing that expectation just enough to make it surprising. I think I have a handle on it, and I have only about 800 words more to pull it off.
Last night I wrote and posted a review of How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely. I liked it quite a bit, though I ended up skimming most of the “excerpts” from other (made-up) books that started many chapters. I know they were supposed to impress readers or make a point, but for the most part I found them irrelevant to the book. What I liked most about it was that the main character succeeded (obviously, based on the title) but the way he got there was unexpected and unpredictable. The author apparently writes for David Letterman after having edited or written for the Harvard Lampoon.
Tonight: Big Brother, the aftermath. We get to see the new status quo in the house after the surprising events of earlier in the week. I suspect that there will have been more wheeling and dealing at that the plot will thicken once again. Getting rid of Russell, for example, might be a power play. That would leave Jordan, Jeff and Michelle pitted against Lydia, Natalie and Kevin, and I think Kevin could be lured over to the other side to shift the balance.
