Books!

A Fresh Ink client, J. Thomas Kelly, recently published his novel Makato's Mother. I really enjoyed working on this book, which has heavy spiritual themes. I also enjoyed some of its insights into Native Americans. It's a deep book, and I often think back to it. There's a lot about suffering.

I'm reviving this blog. We'll see how it goes. Keeping up a blog meant to be SEO-optimized was training, but I think I could handle just writing my thoughts about books and manuscripts. I also really don't like seeing a blog that's not updated that much on websites so I want potential clients to know that I'm here and working.

I read a great book this week, In Love by Alfred Hayes. It was short, a novella. Whenever I read novellas, I am struck by how much I like them. Novels can take over your mind and become almost too immersive, replacing the real world. But a novella can kind of slither in and merge with your reality. I'll read short stories and enjoy them, but I almost never reach for them. They sometimes feel like puzzles to me.

In Love is about a New York love affair, so I was very engaged. The writing was amazing, clear as a bell. After the break-up of the couple, though, I got less interested. There is a great sequence where the man drives the woman to Atlantic City, and he thinks the love affair is going to get revived, but instead it just is well, if not the last, one of the last nails in the coffin. His and her reflections on the ocean are extraordinary. Unfortunately, I returned the book, but there's a whole passage about how the narrator feels looking at the ocean always like he understands everything and finally gets it, but then the understanding slips away when he comes back to the real world.

I had some great work I was doing today, helping out with a historical manuscript. These are always challenging My favorite contemporary historical writer is Emma Donoghue, who is now more famous for her novel, Room. Bringing history to life is no easy feat. When depicting the past, there is such a temptation to just name a lot of things. To make everything an accumulation of details. The life gets choked out of the book. Personal stories get submerged.

In Love was written in 1954, but not only were the themes timeless, the setting also did was not distractingly different. So much was just in the interior of the characters' heads. The world was boiled down to only those items they felt significant, like a fur, a necklace, the ocean, fly paper. Everything else was gauzy. I could relate, for sure.