Wednesday, October 24, 2007

The Narrator, Neglected

Eeek! It's been a hideous Proustian dry spell, with no reading of Lost Time and not even any progress in Madame Proust.

Odette broke her foot and her ankle (major bummer) and has been taking a novel plotting course and an HTML class, and getting ready for a writer's conference and stuff like that. Reading Ridley Pearson instead of Proust, can you believe it?

Now if I wrote like Proust, I wouldn't need a plotting course, because I could use my life as a plot, except that taking HTML courses and reading Ridley Pearson don't sound as though they would provide any kind of plot at all. Not literary, certainly not genre, not even mainstream fiction, whatever that is. Does it exist anymore? Seems like there's thriller and paranormal and fantasy and romance and a few actual mainstream books like The Kite Runner, but not many of those. What is mainstream fiction anyhow? Anxious minds want to know.

I also began a new novel, not crime fiction, titled, Such Stuff As Dreams. Sort of a historical mainstream romance, but not a gloppy romance, a kind of tough romance. Well, we'll see what kind it is. I do have a plot, though, and turning points, and archetypes and all that jazz.

So Odette has not been dawdling, except her poor injured foot has turned all sorts of interesting colors and refuses to fit into anykind of shoe except a big klunky sneaker. No stillettos, no pumps, no cut little ballet shoes, no boots. Nada. Shapeless houseshoes, mostly. Madame Swann would be appalled. So am I.

Au revoir!

Odette

1 comment:

Michael Leddy said...

Sorry to read about your foot, Odette. I hope you're mending well and back in the shoes of your choice soon.