Ever try and write a one sentence synopsis of a novel?  Your novel?  It’s painful, daunting.  Necessary.  I don’t have an obvious hook.  My character isn’t an Iranian woman, a former male prostitute, a galavanting criminal, a serious-minded Indian teenager making her way in American suburbia. Here are my drafts so far:

A double-threaded bildungsroman spanning from 1960s rural
America to the 1990s, Ties of Blood, Sin, and Ink follows two cousins through their search for meaning within themselves and the world around them, a world rich in the pain and grace of love, relationships, and existence.

Ties of Blood, Sin, and Ink guides the reader through the blurry line between childhood and adulthood, a line cousins Barb and Debbie struggle to understand and define for themselves.

ETA: Lame! Back to the drawing board.

Heh. This is something to think about while working on my novel, I guess.  Lest I add to Euan Ferguson’s self-inflicted workload by not accounting for time and continuity on the page.  White space–that’s the answer, right?  Because I’ve been using strategically placed page breaks to avoid mentioning “crochet, narwhals and flensing knives.”

The momentum of my novel writing has slowed.  Despite the numerous exterior circumstances eating into my writing time and turning my routine upside down, I’m pretty sure this is an issue caused by my own interior circumstances, my own mind.  I’m writing the last chapter.  The last one.  After writing this I will still have earlier chapters to revise, a ton of revision work to do, regardless.  But this is the last one–it comes at the very end of the book.  How do you write the end of a book?  Who knows.  I have decided what will happen (roughly), and I just need to execute, which is what I was doing one minute ago before I decided to blog instead.  Instead of doing, I will analyze my urge not to do, to stall…And this is where a self-inflicted, masochistic restriction to Internet access comes in handy.  Perhaps I should buy a typewriter and lock myself in a closet.  Or a tree house.  Or a cabin.  Or a tent on a deserted island.  But with air conditioning.  And coffee.  And chocolate. 

Alice Munro’s twelfth book is coming out in November: The View from Castle Rock.  You can read an interview with her at the Virginia Quarterly Review.  I love Alice Munro.

Joyce Carol Oates is ridiculously prolific. I can’t even go into it here, hence I send you to the great Wikipedia. I want to get a copy of her new book, High Lonesome: Stories 1966-2006.  I’ve been meaning to read more of her work, and this looks like the perfect thing–four decades of work plus some new pieces.

My husband read me a paragraph about Danielle Steel from the Weekend section of the Wall Street Journal yesterday.  Her 67th novel, Coming Out, is in stores next week. 67th! The secret?  She writes 20 hours a day when working on a first draft. “I end up with swollen hands and bruised fingers from typing for that long.”  Hearing this alone was enough for me to fall on the floor and fake death.  And then my husband says, “58-year old mother of nine,” which was almost enough to prompt real cardiac arrest.  Nine? We burst out laughing.  We laughed at ourselves, at the enormity of it, in the numbers of books and children. Whether you would read Steel is beside the point–she is a successful and appreciated writer, and a mother of nine.  She has sold over more than 550 million books, according to the Wall Street Journal, according to her publisher.  Some people must just need less sleep, and have better coping mechanisms.  We only have one child, and that’s tough enough.  I’ve gotten a decent amount of writing done over the past two weeks, but I’ve been slacking elsewhere.  My house looks like a tornado came through, I have mountains of filing piling up, and Friday I went out and came home to realize my shoes didn’t match.  They were both black flip-flops, but still, one was Old Navy and one was Mossimo.  And the only reason I realized this is because I stepped on an olive, because that is what we do around here, we don’t match our shoes and we harbor food on the floors.

Poor Kaavya Viswanathan.  Plagiarism, plagiarism everywhere and not a lawyer in sight.

If you haven't heard, Kaavya is the Harvard undergrad who signed a sweet two-book deal with Little, Brown and Company, and now she is caught in a legal / PR shitstorm after being accused of plagiarism in her first book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life. You can look at sample passages from her book and two books by Megan McCafferty–there is definitely theft there.  The Wikipedia article on Kaavya examines several other accusations of plagiariasm, from four additional books, including Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and Megan Cabot's The Princess Diaries.  That's a total of six books she would have plagiarised from.

That sounds like a lot of work.  I can't imagine going through all the trouble to lift text from so many different sources.  It all seems very weird to me.  Did Saavya plagiarize? Yes. Are all of the alleged passages plagiarism? Probably not.  In some instances language is obviously lifted, entire sentences.  But at some point I start to wonder how prevalent the tropes in chick-lit and YA girls' books are, and at what point a snatch of pre-teen dialogue becomes a trope, a convention, and not someone's original creation.