Monday, March 16, 2009

working on my novel

It's disruptive to my reading to work on this novel I am embroiled in, called The Floods of New York.

The critical eye I'm squinting through at my own pages jaundices my view of others' work.

When I encounter a passage that doesn't strike my fancy, I feel too acutely disappointed, both in my writing and that of just about any novel I'm reading.

Given the difficulty I have reading entire books, I'm inordinately happy about having finished Moby-Dick this summer. But anything short of that is hard going now. Ridiculous, I know, but a fact.

The novel I'm reading now, Johnny One-Eye by Jerome Charyn, is terrific. So I'm having less of this problem with it than with some others I've labored with recently. But my condition is still a suboptimal way to live, you know?

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