One Day of Love, Then Back to Reality
It's just some workshop props, nothing else. But hey, for just one moment, I'm gonna enjoy it. I'll fucking take the encouragement wherever I can get it, to fight the armies of cost-benefit analysis.
After I got home from workshop, I finally read Tom's critique of my manuscript of "Girls: A Four-Part Symphony by the Beastie Boys," a self-contained chapter from my second novel, The Ninjas of My Greater Self.
Here's an abridged version of TC Boyle's critique, verbatim:
Jackson:
Astonishing stuff. The language sings + the sensual details, of sex, + beauty + food + all the rest, make this very rich indeed. I have no qualms whatever--this is finished work.
There are perhaps a couple of places where the language calls attention to itself + perhaps the narrator protects his hipness a little too strenuously, but who cares? This is rich + nuanced, + the smart, funny, hyperactive voice carries it all the way.
Yeah, for a couple of seconds, it felt really good to read that.
But now (a day later), it's time to get back to reality: I'm still the same person I was yesterday, just another talented, aspiring fiction writer with just a few great publications. I still have a lot to prove to myself, to my critics + to all the people that won't give BLANK a chance in an industry filled to the sky with smooth, polished writing that has no soul, no vision + makes no attempt to create original, important, socially conscious, powerful, beautiful + ambitious art.
Carry on.
After I got home from workshop, I finally read Tom's critique of my manuscript of "Girls: A Four-Part Symphony by the Beastie Boys," a self-contained chapter from my second novel, The Ninjas of My Greater Self.
Here's an abridged version of TC Boyle's critique, verbatim:
Jackson:
Astonishing stuff. The language sings + the sensual details, of sex, + beauty + food + all the rest, make this very rich indeed. I have no qualms whatever--this is finished work.
There are perhaps a couple of places where the language calls attention to itself + perhaps the narrator protects his hipness a little too strenuously, but who cares? This is rich + nuanced, + the smart, funny, hyperactive voice carries it all the way.
Yeah, for a couple of seconds, it felt really good to read that.
But now (a day later), it's time to get back to reality: I'm still the same person I was yesterday, just another talented, aspiring fiction writer with just a few great publications. I still have a lot to prove to myself, to my critics + to all the people that won't give BLANK a chance in an industry filled to the sky with smooth, polished writing that has no soul, no vision + makes no attempt to create original, important, socially conscious, powerful, beautiful + ambitious art.
Carry on.