Well, I recently finished the first draft of my latest novel. I am currently in the middle of The Great Slog, aka revisions. Here's the thing, sometimes when I finish a first draft and I go back to do revisions, I am greatly disturbed at the low quality of the prose. I mean, it's never as good when you go back and read it for the first time as you thought it was when you were writing it. However, Fading Man turns out to be better than I expected. At least in terms of the prose.
We'll see how the story plays out. I'm a little concerned at the bleakness of it. Yes, the man who wrote Children of the Mechanism, where kids are being dragged down refuse holes by dead-eyed robots, is concerned about the bleakness of his latest novel. But here's the thing, I always want to give some amount of hope in anything I write. We'll see if I managed it this time around.
What is Fading Man about, you ask? It is the story of a guy named Joe Mund and his troubled wife, Eleanor. Joe has memories of a place he's never been, a city called Verum. He has spent years trying to find this place, and his journey has finally taken him into a plague-ridden wasteland called Tockland, where the water is poisonous and scadglings roam the ruins.
That's not the official blurb of the book. It's more like the set-up. Now, as I mentioned in a previous blog entry, this novel is based on a short story I wrote when I was 20 years old. It is interesting to see how the 40 year old version of me approaches the same story. In the short story, the theme was all about trying to find yourself and figure out who you are. In the novel, it's more about the long-term damage caused by an obsession with self discovery. Perspectives change as we get more decrepit, I guess.
Anyway, I should have a free sample in a few weeks.
No comments:
Post a Comment