sneaky
johnstanton again. Reading some of the stuff johnstanton is posting is getting me all nostalgic about Seattle. It's especially meaningful because, except for johnstanton, I've lost track of all my friends from back there in college. Maybe
johnstanton will have more luck getting in touch with them than I've had. I don't have the time for it. Did I mention the giant time suck that is the novel that I've been secretly posting up somewhere to the Web? ;)In other news, I think the smartest decision I've made this month has been to entrust the story to an unreliable, unpolished, and not particularly introspective narrator. This way, I can point to the parts where I've deliberately written like crap for effect, and imply that all of the *other* crappy-looking writing surrounding it is entirely intentional, and it will be a very plausible suggestion because everyone who's likely to read my novel already knows how well I can write when I'm trying for it. Sneaky is I!
As an illustration of this, consider: As of my current stopping point, the story starts with a narrator unused to writing who is fumbling around for words; it ends with a narrator who's only barely on the legible side of incoherent. But at least it makes sense given the background and the narrative. (And it gets better in the middle, I promise!) It may not be the sort of stuff one would expect to see collected into manuscript form, but it's been a pretty interesting experiment so far.