I've been working on a series of poems about this woman I call the PARIAH. Pariah's in all caps because she's appropriated the label but it still plays hell with her psyche. She wrestles with it daily. Anyway, I've got a PARIAH poem that I've entitled "The PARIAH fights the years, the suburbs, the nepotism, the networking and all the other crap of existence," which is a hell of a clunky mouthful and may be too telling to boot, but I just can't think of any other title...
(Today's word must be hell - in a Satrtrean sense, of course. Perhaps. How can I be so certain?)
I'm also working on my new novel; thanks to nanowrimo.
I've been carrying the idea for this novel around with me for months, but I haven't had the time to write it. That's what I've kept telling myself, although I think the bigger problem is this deeply ingrained fear of commitment I have. Plus, writing a novel is kind of like how I live my life sometimes, slogging through everyday minutiae and mundaneness to get to the sexy, exciting parts. I just want to write the sexy, exciting scenes; I hate backstory, I hate moving my character through time and space sometimes, I dislike linearity and having to be aware that everything has to make some kind of sense, which may be why I lean towards absurdism in my writing.
(I could illustrate this here by suddenly turning into a parrot, frothing and shouting Qui est la? But you'd have to have just read Wide Sargasso Sea & what does Rhys have to do with any of this, anyway?)
I may have set myself a difficult task as this new novel, because of its fantastical elements, does require some kind of linearity. Kind of like some of Murakami's novels (not Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World), set in "every day reality" but then there's a strange quirk, a slight tweaking of "reality," where what seemed to make sense is revealed as making no sense at all. My new novel's about the South and it's about what's going on in politics today (Glenn Beck and his rabid parrots, teabaggers (ha ha!), corporate takeover of the U.S. (see police response to G20 protestors vs. police response to teabaggers)), so maybe it's actually the opposite of Murakami - I begin with double strangeness and surreality to achieve some sense of reality. Maybe.
My tentative title for my novel in progress, though...it may be terrible and it may be too telling. It may be both.
(The other word of the day could be parrot. But there won't be any parrots in my new novel. Possibly. Maybe.)
Ry
P.S. I know parrots don't froth...
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