n the advice of my friend Squatch, who has contributed here a time or two, I have decided to go with writing in the “first person” on my novel. I have to admit, I was a little hesitant for a variety of reasons. For one, most of the crew who is currently writing successfully in the genre that I’m writing in is also writing in the first person (Jim Butcher, Charlaine Harris, and Laurell K. Hamilton), and I didn’t want to be a big old copycat. For another, it means re-writing a handful of basic plots, and that we only ever get to see the other characters through one person’s eyes. Which, considering the narrator, means that I’m going to have to do a lot of fancy footwork to get all of the story told without having it come across as too contrived. It does pose the interesting problem of showing things that my narrator — Alice — isn’t going to notice or realize right away, which means that she’s going to be blowing a lot of things off that I have to show the reader, and hope they catch.
     I hope it works out. The story in my head is really good. I don’t want to fuck it up in the process of getting it out on paper.
     Another thing about the first person/third person issue that occurred to me the other day — I had been plunking away in third person, and it was just kind of dry and not going anywhere. Then I switched to first person, and suddenly there was a little life to the story. I was pleased, but then I began to wonder how much of the regular blogging and writing I do here had to do with my inability to write decently in third person? I mean, I used to churn out some decent third person prose, and this stuff was just kind of blah. Was I out of practice? Did the story really want that badly to be in first person? (A story is, in fact, a sentient being, as far as I’m concerned, with its own wants and needs, and it’ll do what it’ll do without consulting with me at all, sometimes.) Or was it because I’d been blogging in the first person for the last, I dunno, nearly ten years?
     Which, of course, caused me to wonder how much blogging is going to change the world of writing. Already there are authors out there blogging their little books out into the Internet in the hopes that someone comes along and enjoys them. For example: Thirteen Bullets, the first seven chapters of which have been quite good, or The Hole, which I’ve only scanned, but also looks good. (The writer of Thirteen Bullets actually has several books published, which were published because the Internet following was so strong. Pay attention here, because if I don’t have any success getting published for real, I’m going to try that route.) There are others out there, too, I’m sure, turning excellent works of fiction into serial novels on their websites. If you find any, point me to ‘em.
     All of this blathering on finally leads me to the topic of Tall Tale Tuesday, the semi-regular feature here at Coffee House Poetry, where I was promoting fun tall tales, and then pimping the Carnival. I had always intended for Tall Tale Tuesday to be the day when I would post some fiction, or a short story, or whatnot, but I never seemed to have the time or the inclination to write anything.
     Well, now I do. And better yet, I have actual plots for short stories. So keep your eyes open — there may be fiction showing up here soon on a regular basis.
     Finally, before I take off to get on with enjoying my vacation, two things: First, a hopeful story about Muslims and the extremist version of their religion is here at Unscrewing the Inscrutable. Second, I found this marvelous post about “sundown towns” at Orcinus. Third, and best of all, there’s a new Dresden novel coming in April. Right on!

Playing the Popularity Game:

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