On Using My Copy of Bel Canto to Kill a Spider
Getting some feedback from agents on my current manuscript. One was very kind, another distraught. Third was one of those postcards…wish you were here. Michael Blowhard wrote, noting my apparent disgust with all things related to books. It’s a love-hate thing, Michael. I love books, writing, writers, but love is not blind. Writing queries is one of the chores required of anyone who wants to have a book published. It becomes a state of mind, one that requires some attention to the psyche. Anyway it was a shock to realize that your correspondent has fallen prey to negative thinking, anticipating the worse, like a cohort in turtle formation, blind as a bat. I’ve started work on a new novel, interpreting that as a good thing.
There was a spider in the bathtub this morning, not one of the itsy-bitsy guys of song, but a big one. I looked at him, he looked at me with beady eyes that said, “bring it on.” Okay. On the nightstand are plenty of weapons, books, something spiders are genetically incapable of being threatened by. “He’s got a book. Big deal.”
Grabbed a Mark Bellingham. No, that’s a library book. How about Denise Mina’s Field of Blood? Rather apt, no? Let’s find an American author. Check the tub, maybe the spider hopped a Greyhound. No, he’s there. I don’t want Diane to come along and see this bruiser basking on the porcelain. I picked up the paperback edition of Bel Canto after a brief interlude with The Historian. That would be overkill. Now I’m reading the blurbs…focus!
Yeah, I used Bel Canto, one of the finest novels of the past several years, to send Mr. Big Stuff down the drain. Sorry, Anne. As a parting thought, try killing a spider with an e-book.
November 30th, 2005 at 1:42 pm
I was so stoked thinking that someone finally had found that book’s true calling in life. But you did it with woe. You liked the book, but did it anyway.