The ninth and final draft is in,

and the release is approaching. Look for Lady in White this spring.

Today, I spent eight hours

writing a three-page literature review.

Hoowah.

If there’s time remaining tonight, I’ll continue editing the Lady in White proofs. It’s the time of the semester when big projects begin to compound, so personal pursuits have, of necessity, taken second priority. However, I’m eager to see Lady in White reach its long-awaited release. Since the signing of its publishing contract, the novel’s production has languished under setbacks, distractions, bigger plans, and postponements.

No matter. Lady in White will be released soon enough.

I love this new theme.

Not only is it visually pleasing, but it jives with the overall tone and purpose of this site. Obrigado, Wordpress.

In other news, I’ve reached chapter X in Lady in White–twenty more chapters to go. The novel’s a fast read, however, and my goal is to mail it back to the publisher on Saturday. If all goes well, Lady in White will be ready for the Christmas season.

Reading through the novel again has been a nostalgic experience. Most of the text was penned six years ago, and consequently, the style overpowers the semantics at times. One sentence, for example, contains four consecutive subordinate clauses. Yet, as I a slash through with my critical pencil, I’m reminded that Lady in White is more than an epic story. It’s a journey of feelings. Those who read from feeling to feeling, rather than from sentence to sentence, will have the richest experience.

Since Lady in White, my writing has matured considerably. Most of my freelance jobs come from websites, and website editors ever tweak for concision and clarity. As I’ve striven to apply their feedback, my overall writing has improved. The sequel to Lady in White, consequently, is more refined and controlled.

If you’d like a sneak peek, click on the “Demon of Night” button at the top of this page.

Cover art!

Earlier today, our graphic artist submitted her final cover art, and it is gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. After the physical proofs are reviewed, Lady in White should hit shelves (and e-shelves) within a week or two.

Breaking the Cycle

Lately, this blog has welcomed a steady plateau of daily readers. However, I wonder how many of these readers are repelled by the absence of personal voice. Too often, perhaps, quotations dominate my new posts, and if readers were seeking quotations, they’d likely look elsewhere. I haven’t written a personal post in some time, so today, I break the cycle:

Nothing frustrates me more than writing.

Something about writing bores me, bedevils me, and utterly exhausts me. Yet, for whatever reason, I just can’t stop putting words to paper. Some people have an obsessive penchant for composition, outputting thousands of words each day. But I’m not like that.

My love abides in the sound of language and the ideas behind a written word, rather than in composition itself. Currently, I’m toiling over a one-act play, two short stories, the sequel to Lady in White, and a small slew of poetry. I need variety to help soften the dolors of literary creation — a quasi-deistic, ex-nihilo act of spiritual suffering. But when a work finally reaches completion, the dolors endured become an almost narcotic satisfaction.

Poetry has provided a nice balance to fiction. When I was younger, particularly when I was composing Lady in White, my word choice was based more on feeling than on meaning. Struggling to capture the right emotional resonance, I at times fell into the trap of purple prose. Now, with a poetic outlet, I have a mushrooming collection of unpublished verse, and my fiction has become tighter, crisper, decidedly less purple. In many of my poems, however, the meaning still eludes me. Perhaps Garcia Lorca was right to call poetry anti-intellectual.

Nothing frustrates me more than writing.

I met with my publisher earlier today.

Every time I meet with her, I’m awed by how much her business has expanded. What began as a small labor-of-love has become a thriving enterprise. My novel, she said, will hit the shelves this summer.

Lady in White has been an ongoing adventure. Its first chapters were penned during my junior year in high school, a full manuscript appeared by my senior year, and the following few years were devoted to editing. My last edit shaved off a full 30,000 words, so I hope the manuscript is, finally, airtight.

The story itself centers around a fantasized interpretation of “The Wasteland” by T.S. Eliot. This passage from Eliot’s masterpiece, in particular, resonates throughout Lady in White:

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock

Those words have always impressed me. I think that anyone born during the past fifty years can, sadly, empathize with the poet’s depiction of spiritual dryness. Although a degree of secularism, in any poly-cultural society, is essential for government stability, I think that, too often, we overlook the fact that humans are inherently spiritual. Something deep within the human soul points ever-skyward.

In our individual wastelands, we thirst for spirituality.