bow wow wow

Hey dudes. I’m jumping on here finally, I kind of held off initially just so people could post their thoughts without feeling weird that I was gonna comment on everything and so on. But now it seems like most people have read it (at least among those who have registered on here) so maybe we can talk a little bit more in-depth about what worked and what didn’t. I mean that’s the only way I’m gonna learn, right… oh and by the way there will probably be some SPOILERS in case you haven’t read it all.

Re: Ed’s comment about Art Hellman’s development throughout the book, or lack thereof. When I was writing I had some characters in mind from the start (Jenny, Dawson, Burgle, Hellman) but others (Bob Brad, Bale, Bullweather, Francisco, photographer) kind of just came along and ended up being major characters as opposed to some of the other people who were in and out in one chapter, more or less. But even the characters I had in mind from the beginning, I didn’t feel like I really “knew” them until well into writing the book, or even toward the end. (By “knowing” I mean having an idea of what they’d do in any given situation.)

So one of the hard parts was revealing a character’s way of thinking as I went along, to keep things moving even when there might not be action, but also trying to show some kind of “development” or growth by the end of the story. some of the characters (Dawson especially) didn’t really learn anything or do any growing as people, and that’s fine. Others I tried to have change a little bit, but nothing that went against their nature or whatever—Jenny kind of coming out of his surly shell, Burgle making an effort to do the right thing for his father/family and growing to tolerate bob brad, Bale getting in touch with her emotional side toward the end, etc. With Art Hellman I kind of tried to demonstrate him overcoming his fear toward the water/ocean and putting those demons behind him, so to speak. I think it works if you look at it a certain way, but from other perspectives it probably doesn’t look like he came very far as a character. But that’s okay, I don’t think every character needs to have their own personal revelation, and besides a few people have told me there are a lot of characters in the book anyway—I never really thought there were THAT many, but then again I wrote it, so I have a different perspective on it.

Something Fran mentioned to me, which I kind of struggled with, was the “parts” the book is divided into. Most of them, it made sense to have some kind of separation between one and the other, but then there’s that one that’s like 150 pages and another one that’s 110 or so, I think, while most of the others are around 50. Did anybody notice this? Did it bother anybody? Most of the sectioning was done as I went along, without really paying attention to that stuff, but going over it again after I was finished writing and revising it kind of irritated me, but by that point I just wanted to wrap the damn thing up and couldn’t be arsed to rehash all the parts and besides, they still kind of made sense where they were.

Anyhow, replay away plz