Ghost Inn

This morning I put the finishing touches on the final chapter of the first draft of a novel I call Ghost Inn. The book came in at around 94,000 words. I started it two years ago after NECON in response to a call for proposals issued there, but when that proposal didn’t come to fruition, I let the sixty or seventy pages I had written linger. Every now and then I brought the document up and tinkered with it, and had it all the way to 19,000 words by the end of October. I decided to kick start the project during NECON and got it up to the mid-70s by the end of November and to the end now.

Writing “The End” was a little anti-climactic because I’d written the ending in my head over a week ago and was only now putting it down on the page. I have to spend the next couple of writing sessions (see my Storytellers Unplugged essay Writing On a Budget, posted yesterday) finishing a column for Cemetery Dance magazine. Once I have that out of the way, I’m going to go back to the beginning and do a thorough grammar and continuity edit before sending the revised first draft to my agent for his thoughts.

Watched the 1983 classic A Christmas Story for the first time yesterday. It’s a made-for-TV movie with swearing! Though I’ve seen snippets of it before (the tongue-on-the-flagpole bit, the leg lamp), I’d never seen the whole movie before. Parts of it are campy and dated, parts of it are laugh-out-loud hilarious. Got a big kick out of Darrin McGavin in the basement swearing up a storm at the furnace, his choice words substituted with a stream of nonsense. I think I heard the word platypus at least once.

Also watched the big Survivor finale last night. I was disappointed for Ozzie, but glad that he at least got the car. Jonathan’s question, though, was fairly astute—what would we be doing by giving a 25-year-old a million dollars. Of course, Yul is only a half-dozen years older than that, but a ton of money could be the ruination of someone so young. Ozzie looked like he was flourishing in post-island life. He was almost unrecognizable during the reunion show. The three-person finale was a non-starter, a suitable parallel for the tie-breaker at the final council. 90 minutes to start a fire…with matches? Sheesh. Kudos to Ozzie, though, for being fair to the end by not causing the Aitu foursome to go at each other’s throats, and to Becky for turning down the immunity idol. Next season looks interesting.

[Addendum] I read Hannibal Rising this weekend. I picked it up with some trepidation, because I didn’t like Hannibal at all. I lambasted it in a print review, criticizing both the story and the writing. The secondary things that irked me so much in Hannibal no longer bother me—the switches of tense in mid-scene and paragraph, the journalistic non-sentence scene-setting lines at the beginning of each scene—which leads me to believe that I was just pissed off about the story.

I read the whole thing in two days and enjoyed it immensely. It’s a tale of revenge that reminded me at times of The Count of Monte Cristo. When I read Hannibal, I argued that explaining Lecter made him less interesting, that he was far more enigmatic as a cannibalistic killer who simply is, but now that Harris has begun the journey into Lecter’s back story, I find myself wondering more about the evolution between the final pages of Hannibal Rising and Lecter’s next chronological appearance in Red Dragon.