Saturday, May 9, 2009

Writing on

Posting here may become a little bit sporadic in the near future as I not only have a bunch of work to do on my house, but I am also trying to get back to work on Urban Legends, my convenience store novel. It's the first novel I started to write, during National Novel Writing Month in 2006. So, not knowing anything about what I was doing, I started right in on a complicated multi-plot novel. I have often said Urban Legends is what might have resulted if George Eliot had written a Naiad novel. Except, George Eliot  was really good at writing complicated multi-plot novels, and I am not--at least not yet. (If you're not familiar with Naiad Press, you could check out their Wikipedia entry. If you aren't into following links and doing research today, your average Naiad novel was a sort of Harlequin romance for lesbians.)

Anyway, I've been floundering around a bit, wondering what I am going to do with Urban Legends. It's a mess.  I tell myself that we learn by making messes. Maybe I should give it up as a writing exercise that has taken me as far as it can. But the truth is, I'm kind of in love with the characters, and I'm kind of in love with the idea of a novel about lesbians who hand out in a convenience store in downtown Oklahoma City. So I've been re-reading George Eliot's Middlemarch and Dusty's Queen of Hearts Diner by Lee Lynch, trying to figure out some stuff about how to re-build this novel.

Wish me luck.

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