Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Novel news

So the news on my November novel is that...there is no November novel. I crapped out of that about a week ago and haven't written anything since. I made a poor showing this month, that's for sure. As for what I wrote, it needs more than a little work, and I'd probably just as soon work on something else. I'm going to finish a short story I've had waiting around for a while, then see what happens.

I've finished all my reading for the semester, so I read a story out of my Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction. "Preview of Murder" by Robert Leslie Bellem. It was published in 1949 and it's full of all this wonderful period slang. Guns are "roscoes", "rods", "cannons", or my favorite, "gats". Women are dames, guys are bozos, eyes are peepers. Nick Ransom never sees someone, he lamps them or tabs them. The story is peppered with these things; it's brilliant. It's hard to find those choice quotes that almost made me laugh out loud, but here're two just to give you an idea:

"I dredged out a gasper, set fire to it. The smoke burned my gullet like acid..."

"As it was, I had a lump on top of my conk the size of second base and I was lying on the floor, sniffing the dust of the thin carpet and looking into a pair of cold-cod-fish glims belonging to sombody sprawled a couple of feet ferninst me. I didn't mind the character being so close, but that steady mackerel focus gave me the fantods."

God this is great stuff.

1 Comments:

At 2:56 PM, Blogger Trouble said...

aren't you rather overdue to actually write something here?

 

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