Usually when I create an illo...even a purely photoshopped one like this, I have a use for it in mind. But this one just grabbed me around the throat, told me what it wanted to be and instructed me to get cracking.
I recently read some reviews on Goodreads saying that Neuromancer is badly dated, has thin characters and is written in an unreadable style. I think what grates on me the most is that - to an extent, they are right. When you write near future science fiction, it will, by its nature, date quickly. Style preferences have changed considerably since the early 80s. But none of their observations struck me as particularly fair. They might react quite differently when the future he is addressing is more immediate. As in Agency .
I am not a particularly fast reader, but I did spend an unprecedented amount of time immersed in C.J. Lavigne’s debut novel, In Veritas . It is a story ostensibly about communication in which the major character, named Verity, is pretty much unable to communicate in the usual manner. The crossed-wires in her brain give her a severe case of synesthesia which lock her into her own somewhat non-sensical world and contributed strongly to making her an outcast from a very young age. – with the added complication that people have an impossible time lying in her presence. She escapes from incarceration in a mental health facility with Jacob, a wealthy young man who seems to be somewhere in the autistic spectrum. Having been cheated out of control of his family fortune, he does pretty well on the stipend he receives. Jacob and Verity live together in an affectionate - although emotionally distant and seemingly platonic - relationship where he switches career paths every five minutes ...
I’ve never called myself a Chuck Palahniuk fan. I’ve been aware of him only since the Fight Club movie and have read only Invisible Monsters and Fight Club . I’ve never been to one of his readings, though they seem to be pretty amazing and I’ll probably catch one if I get a chance. While looking him up online, I came upon a piece of his writing advice on Litreactor about avoiding the use of thought verbs. It was genius. It spoke directly to me and my worst tendencies as a writer like no teacher or article has before – and it came to me at exactly the right time. IE: while I’m on the fourth draft of the novel and that level of editing is at its easiest (which is a bit like saying it’s easiest jumping the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle when the sun isn’t directly in your eyes). When I discovered that Palahniuk had written an entire book on writing, it seemed like a good investment, even if all I was doing by buying it was paying him properly for the though...
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