Part of the World

read Robert Lopez's 'Part of the World' last week in a couple hours straight. another book i just couldn't put down. the voice had me from the very first page. i love books where nothing much happens and it is just the way it is told to you that keeps you reading. they are rare, but robert has completed killed it in this one. everyone should go to the calamari press website and pick this up immediately.



yet another in the list of books i've read recently that i need to write reviews for. falling behind in that category. i've been finding it hard also to keep working on the novel i've been trucking on for the past 6 months or so. there's a whole subplot that needs a facelift and i can't quite bring myself to pick it up. so i'll wait for that motivation. in the meantime i've been having a blast working on a series of shorts set before/during/after some form of apocalypse event. i can foresee them eventually running together and becoming a larger text but right now i just like working on each alone and finding tiny threads that interweave.

i can't seem to bring myself to write stories longer than 2000 words. its either less than 2000 or greater than 60,000. i don't have much that fall in between. i think that comes from the fact that i have trouble reading short fiction of a longer length, because i like, once i really get into something, for it to keep going and wrap me up. usually when reading pieces that are 4000-7000 words i'm just getting amped up by the time it ends. of course there are a billion exceptions to that trend, but i'm just a lot more picky about it.

plus it seems just a lot easier to place shorter pieces in publications. if something takes up a lot of space, it better earn it. maybe i'm lazy. maybe i have ADD. i dunno.

reminded today of how great brian evenson's story 'The Intricacies of Post-Shooting Etiquette' is. i think that's the story i've been trying to write since i started.