No Friday Snippet

I guess that's not coming as a surprise. I said in my update to last week's snippet that I didn't paste in until Wednesday (sigh) night that if I hadn't squeezed another half a K out by Friday night I was going to skip the snippet this week. I can't be having that hanging over me for the Read-a-thon tomorrow. And Sunday? Well, do I have to spell it out?

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I was starting to work on the snippet this afternoon. But then my niece came over. The one I've mention here so often. She is fourteen now. She loves story as much as I do. She is spending the weekend here at her grandparents and is going to join me in the Read-a-thon. So we knew we would have to get all our visiting in today.

I'm afraid I'll have to duct tape my mouth tomorrow. I keep thinking of things I want to share with her. She had a heavy school year so we hadn't had a good long visit since October the week before the last Read-a-thon.

You'll who enjoy my snippets have her to thank for it. She read my story, Rag Doll Babies and Million Dollar Maybes, two years ago when she was twelve and her reaction blew me away. She said, "Joy, you have to publish this. I can't believe I know the person who wrote this." At that point I'd not written any fiction or poetry for close to five years due to the trauma of loosing my files (both paper and electronic) and my computer in our 2001 move.

About a year before she read that story, I'd finished typing into my in-laws computer the 100 pages or so of manuscript that had been in the portfolio I'd brought on the bus when we fled the Silicon Valley in the wake of the Tech Bubble popping. We never got to go back down after the stuff we left in storage.

I've not finished the novel I have been reading this week as I'd hoped so I guess I'll be starting off with it tomorrow. It isn't one of the short, easy reads that I collected over the last two weeks for the event. I'm hoping I can finish it in under six hours. I'm tempted to set it aside but then remember what happened when I did that with The Historian last year.

So this is what I'll be reading for the first several hours. Andrei Codrescu is also a poet and his prose reads much like a dense poem. The story is dense with metaphor and reference to myth and other stories from around the world. Storytelling itself is practically a character in the story. It takes place in New Orleans and Jerusalem in the year 1999 at the height of the millennium fever. End of the world cults and so forth. I can't do it justice in a short thing like this needs to be. So I'll leave you with the link to Messi@h's page on Codrescu's site. The first chapter is posted there so you can see what I mean about his prose reading like poetry.

I must get to sleep! As it is, I won't have a full eight hour sleep before heading into this 24 hour marathon reading session.