my brain is full of words

Some updates in the world of what I am reading and how my manuscript is going:

Sirens of Titan ended up not blowing my mind the way I was hoping it would. It got about as brilliant as it was going to get by two-thirds of the way through. After that it was just about getting to the ending. Still a really good but, but I was left feeling like it became obvious as it unfolded.

Now rereading Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series. I first read them freshman or sophomore year of high school and they changed my world a little. But I haven't read them in well over a decade. And two things jump out at me as I read from a more writerly perspective:

1. The sparsity of language is awe inspiring. Yes, I know that pictures tell a thousand words and this is a graphic novel. But no, that is not enough. It is a rare cell that captures a facial expression or scene in such a way as to maximize those thousand words. Neil Gaiman can simply flip a story on its head or renegotiate the rules of a world in a few words. It is breathtaking. The reader is never left confused or feeling lost or disbelieving.

2. And this is tied dramatically to #1... the underlying structure to the story is a work of art in itself. The books are like a two-dimensional glimpse of the sculpture beneath.

Now, I wish I could write like Neil Gaiman. Of course I wish I could write like Neil Gaiman. But I am not him. And that is ok. But any decent writer could learn much from studying the structure in Sandman.

So good. Oh, and you should follow him on Twitter.

Onto the writing front: 30 pages left of word-level nitpicking before I hand the manuscript back over to J and plummet back into the evil land of synopses, queries, and pitches. Ugh.