Go east, young MS

I forced myself to stop revising Missing Persons on Saturday and sent it out to my agent yesterday. It’s back in his hands after about six months of overhaul. He was very enthusiastic about the first draft; hopefully he’s equally so or even more enthusiastic about this version, which I’m calling the “second draft” but which really represents one continuous process of multiple rounds of revisions over that six-month period. In the old days of typing and hand-editing, it would probably be at least the fifth draft, if not more.

I treated myself to some reading time this weekend. I read Nick Mason’s Inside Out, his Pink Floyd memoir. Mason, the drummer, is the only band member to have been with Pink Floyd since its inception. Syd Barrett left in the 60s to be replaced by David Gilmour. Roger Waters left in the 80s after firing Rick Wright during The Wall era. Wright “re-joined” PF after Waters left, but his exit document forbade him from becoming an official member of PF ever again, so he could only be hired as a band musician.

Though I’ve been listening to Pink Floyd since 1980 (even then coming to them relatively late in their evolution), I knew moderately little about the group’s genesis. I knew there was something about Barrett and drugs or insanity (Shine On, You Crazy Diamond), but not the way they got together and became a group almost by dint of willpower. None of the original four had any musical background to build on, and they just happened to catch the wave of psychedelia in London in the 1960s. Mason’s book is very entertaining, written with a dry British sense of humor that had me giggling at times. He doesn’t dish much dirt–he’s still friends with all the principles except Barrett, who he hasn’t seen since the recording sessions for Wish You Were Here, when Barrett showed up at the studio out of the blue one day. Mason rarely points fingers or assesses blame for some of their problems, and when he does he makes sure there’s enough to spread around equally. I found the book fascinating, and it is chock full of great pictures throughout their history.

I also read Lawrence Block’s new Matt Scudder novel All the Flowers Are Dying and read the galley of Mike Arnzen’s new novel Play Dead,, which I will be reviewing for Cemetery Dance magazine.

With the novel off my desk for a few weeks at least, maybe longer if my agent thinks its ready to start sending around, it’s time for me to think about what to do next. I have some ideas, but I don’t want to leap into anything too quickly. Time, I think to work on a couple of short stories and cleanse my pallet, so to speak.