Floating Foam

Today I finished the last chapter of Part One, bringing me officially to the 1/3 way mark.

The last chapter is something of an anomaly, and I will no doubt have to go back and provide some balance to the others. It weighed in at more than 5,000 words, which puts it 1,000-2,000 more than any other chapter. Even then I felt at times like I was “going too fast.”

One of my goals with this book is to write for the current generation of readers, namely, me. These days, 90% of my reading is of blogs. News blogs, game blogs, personal blogs, etc. I feel like the next generation of readers isn’t going to lean on IM glyphs, but they are going to expect a heightened level of conciseness and connectivity.

When I mentioned this goal to another writer, he wondered how it would be possible to engage an audience in this manner. It’s possible that I can’t or won’t. And it’s possible that this will be a failing of my prose rather than the idea (Lord knows I rely way more on idea than prose). I’m not looking to write poetry, although I hope my conceits are well met. What I’m hoping to do is provide conciseness and good pacing in a long narrative. Thus the concern over the latest chapter.

Even this blog entry is three paragraphs too long. However, I’ll end with a snippet from the latest entry into Flesh Pets.

This is the longest chapter of my life, a time when the visions receded and the principles of fate staged a coup on determinism. My choices, my very voice, served as little more than a defensive gesture to the cancer that consumed Jeff.

The cancer would destroy him, effectively kill itself, and leave me a carrier of two dead creatures. I never asked questions about cancer, never wondered why or how it came to be. Those around Jeff asked, over and over, to themselves, to each other, the why and the how. I learned to nod or shake my head depending on the tone of the inquiry. Perhaps my indifference was merely a signal to the coming change, or a regression on my part, back to a state of innocence, back to what I knew before I met him.

A month after the accident, Jeff was released from the hospital, his clutter of casts and bandages receding to a simple set of two modest splints and a rib-guard, the once-stitched wounds on his head now simple scabs glossy with antiseptics. I drove Jeff and his mother home in her car, both of them looking out opposite windows in the back seat.

Jeff possessed a queer smile, something between happiness and surrender. I said nothing of it.

I said nothing at all.