A Dirty Job / Man of My Dreams

Two great books I've just read: A Dirty Job and the unbelievably-horribly-titled The Man of My Dreams.

Ahhhhhhh..... Christopher Moore is my hero! A Dirty Job was fucking fantastic - and I mean fantastic in every sense of the word! A true fantasy novel set in reality. Great, great, GREAT! I loved it to pieces, every last morsel of it.

I loved Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld's debut novel, but The Man of My Dreams was even better. Much tighter writing, stronger characters. If only the title didn't suck so much. I had almost decided not to buy the book, period, because of the title, but I'm really, really happy I did. I read the whole thing yesterday because I couldn't put it down. What real and engaging characters!

Though I really must say ~ there is nothing more painful *and* inspiring as reading a book that you wish you wrote. Geek Love, Memoirs of a Survivor, and The California Book of the Dead ~ you are all on that list, too!

It makes me both incredibly driven to finish & polish up this final draft of my novel, at the same time that it makes me want to hide under the covers and go to sleep for the next twenty years because I will never be able to write a novel that good.

Now, tell me, dear readers: is that bullshit thinking or what?? Good grief, I can write! I can write a killer fucking novel! I have written one and it's on its way to being even better. I am just so much of a romantic and a melancholic, besides having a truly screwed-up sense of my own writing, that I think everyone else in the world (well, not everyone else, but certainly writers like Christopher Moore and Curtis Sittenfeld) writes "better" than me. And so what if they do?? All the more pleasure for me to read, then! And all the more inspiration and drive for me to push myself to polish what exists!

I am lucky, I guess, that I can be so affected by the written word, without feeling the need to hyper-critique its form or its art. I just love reading good books and I wanna write them, too!

Heh. I guess it's good, then, that I can do both :-)