Frame

Just today I decided to write my May 1968 novel around a frame. It wasn't something I'd thought about doing before, but it just came to me today and I think it makes sense. Frames work well when what you're writing about is sweeping, large, when it covers vast amounts of time and I think that would benifit this novel. I have stopped, for the time being, wanting to write about the everyday. That's what novels are now. It started with Joyce and Woolf and has moved from modernism to post modernism and while I never minded the every day, in fact I have written about the every day, I'm a little sick of it. I want to write about something bigger, grander, more sweeping. History. I want to explore the price of and the effects of history without venturing into historical fiction per say. Having said that I think the frame works well for this story which will center around a couple, a young American girl come to Paris to study and an older Romanian gentleman who works as a waiter at a popular cafe. I want to start the novel a couple of years ago, at the thirtieth anniversary of the May 1968 riots in Paris where both characters meet again after many years. He'll be old, in his seventies and she'll be around fifty-something, much younger even now. I'll weave what's going on now in history with what went on them as the story goes back and forth. Perhaps there will be larger bits of one story and then another, but then again, maybe it would be nice to keep it all even.

Editing Cynthia Marie Richardson

Someone I know mentioned the other day that the average person only reads trash novels, if they read novels at all. This I was pretty aware of before. It's obvious by the sales of literary fiction just how many people like to think when they read. And this someone said just that, people want to escape their lives, not be hit over the head with more of life. And I can understand that, I can admire that in some instances. That's why I write. I write to escape, to have complete control, to build a world and be in it. I just don't think that being hit over the head with life, being "deep" to put it in the simplest terms, is necessarily a bad or boring or hard thing. And then I started to think about this novel I wrote last year that I haven't even gone back and edited yet, called The Ponderously Peculiar Expedition of Cynthia Marie Richardson. It's actually written a lot like this novel that my agent is currently attempted to sell (ah, poor literary fiction), a literary retelling of Alice in Wonderland called Alice Down the Basement Window. It has that kind of playful, British, hoity toity, but in a nice way, voice. And it's all about escaping. The main character is trying to escape her illness (she has brain cancer) while the sister she is trying to find is attempting she escape the law (she aided in a robbery many years ago) and the main character's boyfriend, a sweater vest wearing Buddy Holly glasses donning British (with a great accent) economist working at Columbia, is attempting to escape, well, being a sweater vest wearing, Buddy Holly glasses donning British economist at Columbia. The story takes place in Paris, Rome, Tuscany and the Amalfi Coast. The Amalfi freaking Coast. It's about a woman with brain cancer and her hot boyfriend, it's about running from the law and searching over countries for a person. You can't get more escapist than that. And yet this story, this novel, is not a trash novel. It is literary, if I may be so bold. Sometimes I wish to God it were a trash novel, then maybe I could sell it. But there is something about it, something about the essence of life, that is inherently at the heart of this story and so it is literary. Maybe it's my Orlando, not quite as literary as something else I've written, like my thesis, but it's not a trash novel. I don't know whether this is a good or bad thing, or what good or bad means in the grand scheme of this, but ah...sighs....

But I have decided to start editing this book finally. I pushed it aside for a year right after I finished writing it. I edited it a little as I went along. I always do that, but it's time this book get the attention it deserves. And I've decided not to start working on something long again until July, so I have the time to work on Cynthia now. I don't know what this will get me, but I've never known what this will get me.