Procrastination and The Historian

Procrastination, thy name is mine. I’ve been intending to post a blog every blessed day since I got back to town on last Sunday night, and you see just how many posts I’ve done. I’m a genius at procrastination. But there are so many of us in the club.

But I am here now! And I have about five minutes to bore you all with something before I have to run put on my shoes (I write so I don’t have to wear them) and pick up some friends to go to the Mexican Pile-on down at the school cafeteria (there’s only one school in town) before the Homecoming Game. Seems like Homecoming comes earlier and earlier every year. But I suppose they think the local boys can beat up on whoever we’re playing this year, so… When the school is so small you only have 35 kids in each grade (I almost said class, but we’re talking the entire grade), it’s hard to have a powerhouse football team.

Anyway, I’ve put off blogging because I’ve been busy writing. It’s time. I basically have four months to finish, polish and send in this third book in the Rose trilogy. And the writing has been going well. I’ve been pleased with my progress.

I also have put it off because I’ve been trying to get the old website updated. I got the cover for The Barbed Rose this week. And it’s beautiful. But you’re going to have to follow this link to my website to see it. Because, apparently, the blogsite isn’t going to let me put the image here. There’s also an excerpt that you can reach from that page. It’s good.

It’s difficult to know what to blog about when one’s life is so very dull. What else have I done? Besides writing a very traumatic scene for The Eternal Rose, I’ve been reading The Historian, the hot new-ish novel by Elizabeth Kostova.

I picked it up because I want to write a “straight” historical novel, one that doesn’t fit the expectations of the romance novel, so I thought it would probably behoove ($45 word there, at least) me to read a bit of what is out there. Besides, this concept intrigued me. I bought the book on Monday, and I finished it today. This is a long time for me to take in reading a book. Usually, I finish a book in a day–except sometimes when I’m writing really hard. But I like to finish books all in one gulp, preferably. I liked The Historian, but I didn’t love it.

First off, it is a mainstream book, but its ancestry is rooted in horror novels. Most mainstream novels grow out of one genre or another, according to my friend, mainstream author Britta Coleman, (Potter Springs). Some are Westerns at heart, some are romances, some are mysteries. Many of them are a bit of a mish-mash. So, The Historian is part mystery, part travelogue, mostly horror. And horror is emphatically not a preferred genre of mine. I do like mystery. I like travelogues. So that part I enjoyed. The descriptions of the various landscapes and the people were lovely, but…

I sort of felt that she deliberately set the reader at a distance from her characters. She glossed over the ickier elements of the story–the horror was “told” rather than “shown.” And the pace of the story was more leisurely than I prefer. It seemed almost like an intellectual exercise, which was interesting, but it wasn’t riveting. I want to be riveted. (Gee, that sounds painful.)

Which makes me more determined to rivet my readers through the heart when they read my things. I hope I succeed.