Pacific Street, Rockaway Beach, Oregon
What news? Pending my annual, five-day writing retreat at Rockaway Beach, I wanted to update my blog in grand Internet fashion: using a lot of words to say, basically, nothing much. Reseach on Book 2 continues at a loping pace thanks to Matt Beynon Rees, the prolific former Jerusalem bureau chief for TIME, whose information-dense Website and Palestinian mystery novels are giving me a lot of reading to do.
The weeklong retreat is meant as a turbo-outlining session, which means I ought to know what the novel is actually about in ten days or fewer. However, an agent promised to send revision notes on THE IDIOT’S TALE, and if those show up before I shut down my e-mail for a week, I will instead be knitting loose seams in the novel’s final third — all the while burning palm leaves, chanting quietly, Dear God please let it be good enough.
What other news? I finished my longest bike ever, at 80 miles. I turned the heat on in my office for the first time. E and I made killer fajitas, grilled corn, and mulled cider. Hello, autumn.
* We continue with our nascent endeavor to title every post using narrative cliches.
Tags: agents, idiot's tale, submissions, travel, work in progress
Good luck with that agent and have a restful, rejuvenating week away.