I’ve just about got the collection of pieces I call Stones Gathered Together ready for
publishing as an ebook. Look for it in January. I stopped bothering about there
being sixty items, as that was an idea from way back that doesn’t seem relevant
any more, so I could drop a few pieces that really weren’t good enough to
include—judgment about this is totally subjective of course.
Where would I be without my early readers? They
include my writing group, my partner Prue and sundry others and make my writing
better. Here’s the cover. Making one’s own cover is easier for an ebook than
for a print book because you need only the front.
The new novel, which so far exists only in my
head and a folder of articles and stuff I call research, is truly on the agenda
now. For the time being at least it’s called Alice Green, which is the name of the protagonist.
I’ve just finished reading another David Foster
Wallace. This is a further posthumously published book, called Both Flesh
and Not and is a collection of essay-type pieces, most of them previously
unpublished. In between each is a double page of words and meanings—DFW was a
word collector, and was part of a panel working on an American dictionary. I’ll
confine myself to just one quote:
What if we choose to
accept the act that every few years, despite everyone’s best efforts, some
hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of terrible suicidal attack
that a democratic republic cannot 100 percent protect itself from without
subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?
My summer reading will include some classics
from the library—W G Sebald and Kafka—the new James Meek, The Heart Broke In, and some others, yet to be chosen, from the
“waiting” pile. I’ll keep you posted.
