Double shot

That's right, two posts in one night. Can you handle it? Good.

I recently finished re-reading Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters which, along with Franny & Zooey, are my favorite works of his. Salinger, of course, caught the literary world's attention with A Catcher in the Rye, a book that had an edge. These other two works, though, don't. There is some rising action in F&Z and there is certainly some tension in Carpenters, but nothing like the edge of Catcher.

While this blog primarily exists to shame myself into writing, it is also a place where I consider the practice of writing. To this end, I highly respect Salinger in F&Z and Carpenters especially, because he writes with a handicap. He refuses to play to the readers' baser desires. Sex. Violence. Explosions. Aliens/Vampires. Not here. If there's a cop, it's because a character needs to know how much longer a parade is going to hold up traffic. Amen.

By today's standards, I doubt he could have started his career with anything but Catcher. It grabbed peoples' attention and built him a following. After that, he slyly worked Eastern philosophy and detachment into Western literature, moving away from Holden Caulfield to Seymour Glass.

Neither of my first two books eschew edge. I'm not at the point where I can do that. I do, though, look forward to that book.

Going Global & The BFL

I don't know how long this trend will last, but I've noticed that my first two novels are both global in scope. While the first takes place in Dearborn, Michigan, it reaches around the state, the country and then off to the Arab Middle East among other places. The novel I'm working on now takes place in China, between a native and a New Yorker and it too will have people putting their equivalent of two cents in through global governing bodies, international corporations, various media outlets and beer houses and halls the world over.

I like this. I like showing how there are repercussions (globally) to our actions. These actions range from judgments passed on blogs and in pubs to violence incited over cartoons or a lack of good beer.

While I did not explore this much in the first book, this time I will have more opportunities for the protagonists to see and react to the waves of responses they stoke.

Lastly, my new working title for the book is, The Beer Flower Limited (BFL). I have Brittany Morford to thank for this. Thank you, Brittany.