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February 5, 2007
camus' toe
after years of strategic planning and procrastination i have finally seated myself at the old mahogony desk – a family heirloom purchased from big lots to begin composing my first and only novel. so far i’ve only managed to expel the first line which might not seem like much but i’m here to tell you that the opening line of a novel is perhaps the most important one in the entire manuscript – the author’s b.e.s.t and only chance to capture the reader’s imagination. so i’m pretty proud of my accomplishment really. even though i have no idea what the novel will become.
it could be just about anything – a tragic tale of unrequeited love or true crime (both the same thing in my book), a daring adventure involving ninja throwing stars concluding with a happenstance fall over an impossible waterfall...i’ll stop there. because i don’t want to give anything away – nor do i want to paint myself into a corner. but i can promise that there will be plenty of dirty dirty sex disguised as elegaic prose that will serve no purpose within the novel itself – but you better believe it will be smoldering.
my current plight reminds me of a character by the name of grand in albert camus’ excellent novel the plague like me, grand is working on the opening line to his novel when a bubonic plague epidemic strikes the algerian town of oran – throughout the course of the novel he is continually revising to get the right verbiage and phrasing and it all seems so abusrd in the face of certain death – but hey, it’s a novel by camus and being absurd was always sort of his thing. and really i can totally empathize. because if the words are not pitch perfect all could be lost. of course all could be lost with an outbreak of bubonic plague – but i think i’m relatively safe from such a disease here in the tennessee valley.
but then again i could fall prey to some other pandemic – and really you will just have to pick one because unfortunately today’s global viruses (viri?) have the shelf life of a hip-hop song (s.a.r.s? ...anyone?). in fact the only sustainable threat to our existence as a human race would have to be those killer bees that have been on their way to us via the african continent since i was in 2nd grade. and i’m thinking they’ve got to be getting pretty old by now – probably nothing more than a small pile of dried up husks. correction. killer husks – nothing a broom and dust pan cannot conquer.
so i’m fairly confident that with a fair amount of diligence and divine inspiration i will be able to complete my novel within the next 3-5 years and it will be praised and lauded throughout the land and it will be discussed seriously amongst serious novels and everyone will understand that when they pick up a copy from the fiction & literature section at barnes & noble my novel will definitely be more identifiable as the latter. it will be so good in fact that when people sit down to read it with their favorite latte they will throw said latte away because upon reading just the opening line they will come to the irreversible conclusion that starbucks coffee isn’t even good and they will have the sudden realization that scarlett johansson cannot act – at which point rush home and immediately burn all of their pleated pants and they’ll write a letter of apology to mr. leonard cohen for ever intimating to a friend at a party that they actually preferred jeff buckley’s version of hallelujah. and what is it – what could i possibly say that would inspire such a sea change for all of human kind...well it goes something like this:
they say his love is like a windowless van – no woman could ever imagine such harsh implements of torture until she was hopelessly trapped within... oh. snap.
| By young_christopher | 1:05 PM
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Comments
Posted by: heidi at February 6, 2007 2:34 PM
Posted by: Nick at March 2, 2007 6:00 PM
Posted by: young_christopher at March 5, 2007 3:30 PM