Reading & Writing Journal

I finished the Barth blurted about below (Every Third Thought). Now that it's over with, I didn't like it as much as I was liking (most of) it while I was reading it. It felt like Barth ran out of gas, or interest, about 90% of the way through, and he bailed out with a cheap trick. Don't get me wrong, as ever with John Barth, the writing is superb, finestkind, none better. He is one of the masters at stringing words together; but that - I am discovering - is only part of novelizing, (or fictioning, fictionalizing/ficting???) (And it might be the easy part) (and someone like Barth can probably do it in his sleep). But there's more to the text than the words, of course, and no one knows that better than a pre-eminent Postmodernist like JB. It feels to me ("it" being ETT) as if he has sucked me in by using the (obvious and explicit but probably untrustworthy) association of his narrator/protagonist with the author, led me up to a cliff that he makes me think he's going to jump off, and then sort of trips me at the brink, only to grasp me before I plummet; and then he doesn't (quite) pull me back to safety. (This is all analogy of course, there's no literal cliff at the end of Every Third Thought.) I'm sure that's more or less what he intended, but there's no resolution here, and I'm not enough of a Postmodernist (yet) to think that's satisfactory to the reader (at least not this reader). I'm annoyed with him, he's way better than that.

My own novel is in a phase a bit like buried kimchi. It's put aside temporarily to "rest" like bread dough, or ferment, whatever.  I hear Barkis and Mortie and Evangeline nagging my ass raw, but they know I haven't abandoned them, and I haven't. They know that in the first place I couldn't - I've never abandoned anything, however fragmentary (or stupid) that I've written; sooner or later pieces get picked up & added to or incorporated into something else.

This is a "percolating" time for Barkis. I've read that some writers need to put a piece aside for a while after completing a first draft (or most of a first draft) - taking a break so to speak, letting it ferment.

The key for me is not to get frustrated by it - I know it's not abandoned, and I know it'll get finished (this is something I did NOT know prior to participating in the fiction writing group). The most important thing for me right now is to be writing, not WHAT I'm working on, so I've got new stories cranking up - small ones, shorts, probably 3000 - 5000 words, to fill in and keep the juices flowing; "stringing the words together" is what keeps it alive for me - I'll get back to Barkis, both the one I've got well underway and a couple others that I have the outlines or notes for.

I've joined another fiction writing group as well - we're trying to figure out how to either merge them or at least get some cross-pollination going, but it's tough since almost everyone from my group (which has dwindled to three of us) can't possible do Wednesday nights two towns over, and almost everyone from the new group can't possibly do Saturday mornings. I have a feeling there's a great deal of inertial resistance behind those "can'ts" - the security & safety of a known group is something that lulls one, and makes it really tough to want to barge into another setting with a whole new bunch of dragons.