Update: Huffington Post, Rain Taxi, Novel Progress, Books Received

In case you missed it, here's the link to my latest Huffington Post column. I wish I'd written it after this past week of disgusting hate-incitement by the McCain campaign as I would have added some commentary about that. I watched the McCain/Palin crapola unfold with a sense of impending doom and sadness (like witnessing the needless sacking of the Shire after you think the good guys have won). And then to see McCain finally have to rein it back in because even he could see he was just giving racist lunatics legitimate cover...the whole spectacle was depressing and sickening.In lighter news, I received contributor copies of these two beauties (story in the former, comics summation in the latter):I also got a package from Eric Lorberer at Rain Taxi of their last few issues. Rain Taxi is one of the best review publications out there, covering all kinds of fiction and nonfiction. You really ought to subscribe--it's very cheap.You'll recall I've posted before about what a novel looks like for me at the beginning of the process, and part way through. This is what it looks like now, with about 60k of finished draft (and by that I mean, it's been kneaded into shape through about five or six drafts)--you'll note the tabs; the novel takes place over a week, and in this phase I've structured it accordingly, although I don't know if I'll do that for the finished book--and then pages of pure old longhand draft, waiting to be converted over and shaped up. In the longhand phase I am just trying to get the essence of the scenes right--trying to get essential characterization, description, and dialogue down. Then I go back and add in, revise, etc. This past week I wrote 20k longhand, one of my best weeks in the last couple of years. And good stuff, in that as I wrote it was coming alive in the sense of unexpected things happening and being surprised myself by the twists and turns the plots and characters were taking. Some revelations that I'd seen the edges of but that came into focus in unusual and exciting ways. It was great to be dealing with the mystery of Ambergris and be shocked myself at times...At this point, it does in fact look like I will meet my December 1st deadline. Please note that I go right into finishing up my next project, Booklife (and from that into another book), and thus, unless you're paying extremely well and it sounds amazing, I'm not writing any introductions, afterwords, or prefaces to anything for many months. Nor am I doing any story or book critiquing or blurbing. If you want to get my attention, send me an ARC or finished book, as I will still be doing reviews/features for various venues, including Amazon.Meanwhile, I've been reading these novels (below), which are sufficiently different from what I'm doing, while sharing a couple of similarities, that I can enjoy them, pick up some interesting things technique-wise, but not have the author's voice in my head while I'm writing. It doesn't hurt that Le Carre writes in his second novel: "Mendel was in his garden wearing the most extraordinary hat Smiley had ever seen...its enormous brim hung low all the way round so that he resembled nothing so much as a very tall mushroom."I've also been thinking about internet book promotion a bit, when my brain's too tired to think about more complicated stuff. I'm seeing more and more writers kind of flail around with it--I think because they don't understand the difference between tactics and a strategy. If you do something as a tactic that doesn't support a specific strategy, um, it's pointless to do unless you're getting some direct creative benefit from it. Then your strategy is to improve your skill set or experiment with something fun. But as more and more writers try their hand at using the "intertubes," there's more and more a clutter and white noise of disassociated tactics. It's like seeing a spaceship jettison an escape pod and watch it float into space...for no other reason than to watch it drift...More on this in a lengthier post soon.And, finally, here's a selection of the books received in the last couple of weeks. I have no comment on the Men and Boys book except that I really do hope it's helpful for comics artists looking to add realism to their work. To me, it looked kind of silly.Also, the Arthur Nersesian novels are alternate histories of a contemporary-ish New York City!