I examined my supplies. They were sufficient.
I began to shuttle them to the front, without alerting the enemy.
Like Thermopylae, fighting was soon confined to a narrow pass, easier to defend.
At last, victory was in sight.
I fought my way to my assigned seat and placed my carry-on bag in the last available overhead bin.
I sat. I buckled. I conquered.
I want different things from fiction than the market currently provides, at least in any great abundance.
For example, I don’t enjoy atmospherics. I especially dislike long passages describing a place everyone is already vaguely familiar with (even more so when the process is used by the author solely to demonstrate verbal wizardry.)
Though it is not recent, take this passage from Brideshead Revisited:
“Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days—such as that day—when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft vapours of a thousand years of learning.”
— Evelyn Waugh
That is beautiful, highly evocative writing. It is much better than anything I can produce.
But it bores me when books go on and on that way.
(Also, please note that I’m passing up an easy ‘soft vapours’ joke about Waugh’s Brideshead prose in an effort to appear mature. This is a moment of personal growth.)
What about emotional depth and backstory?
Continue reading “What I Want From Fiction”His name is Dennard Dayle.
Some of you may already know him.
He’s a Jamaican American who is just releasing his second novel with the fantastic title, “How To Dodge A Cannonball”.
I found him because his new book is in the same LibraryThing Early Reviewer batch as mine.
I can’t comment on his book as it is unreleased and I haven’t seen any samples. But I looked at the reviews he’s managed to accumulate from advance readers, then headed over to his website.
It is full of well written satire.
I’m a fan.
Continue reading “I found an interesting writer”
The Fenwick Press™
April 10
For Circulation as Required
We are advised that Stanton Fenwick’s forthcoming novella, The Perils Of Making Progress, has been nominated for a Fenwick Award. The nomination was extended late Wednesday, following a review of the manuscript’s publicly available chapters and a collection of the author’s hastily scribbled notes.
This marks Mr. Fenwick’s fourth nomination overall and first for a work still under revision. The committee noted Stanton’s growth as an author, citing “early evidence of a plot” and “an almost human display of talent.”
Mr. Fenwick has acknowledged the nomination but has issued no statement.
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The Fenwick Press™ is not a real publishing house, though it tries very hard to behave like one. All names, institutions, and positions on this site are part of a satirical author persona. No affiliation with any actual entity, whether past, present, or even regrettably imagined, is intended.
The Fenwick Press™ was founded in 1843 by accident and continues to publish pretty much “whatever.”
Stanton Fenwick 