Les W00ts

What’s up, blog readers?! I am happier than a man has any right to be at 6:04 on a Monday morning. Here are five good reasons why:

1. I entered Janet Reid’s short story writing contest a while back (and when I say short, I mean a 100-word limit, so we’re talking blink-and-you’ll-miss-it stories here). Didn’t get first place, but I finished in the top four out of over a hundred contestants, so I call that a pretty good day! (Ctrl+F “buckley” on either of those pages to see my entry.) By the way, does anyone else think that judging writing quality has to be just about as hard as writing the damn stuff in the first place? I would make a terrible agent!

2. Reached 70% on Counterfeit Emperor revision. You may have heard that novel-writing is largely an exercise in sadism; that is, you make your readers fall in love with something, then you roundhouse kick that something in the jaw and stomp it while it’s down. Well, Step 2 of that process is ramping up lately, and the surprising amount it seems to hurt makes me optimistic that Step 1 is working now.

3. Finally, finally finished reading China Mieville’s Kraken. Mieville is clearly a pretty smart dude, and the book has lots of good stuff in it, but neither of those facts ever turned it into an actual good book. Postmortem tomorrow. Started on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which seems like it might be good if she could take a break from her endless descriptions of architecture and scenery and conversations and get to the point already, and a line break once in a while wouldn’t hurt either. Next up after Woolf: not sure yet. Thinking about Ivanhoe.

4. Bought two new books: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (which I’m pretty excited about despite the fact that its subtitle, The Evening Redness in the West, is – as the Spanish say – estupido) and a collection of short stories by Katherine Mansfield (who I’d never even heard of, but apparently these are classics and the book was 50 cents, so we’re batting a hundred so far). Ms. Mansfield wrote these alleged masterpieces at the age of twenty-three, twenty-three, which I consider unsportsmanlike and totally uncalled-for.

5. My daily run is up to a mile and a half now. Running is surprisingly similar to writing, psychologically: the id going “Don’t wanna” while the superego beats it with a stout club and tosses it some endorphins at the end. Satisfying, that.

But enough about me – what news, blog readers? You never call, you never write. (Don’t call.) Anything w00t-worthy or otherwise going down in your life? Share in the comments!