Writing and Publishing Fiction

This is the impossible (because it’s not true) and redemptive story of Bob, a man who struggled for six years in isolation, secretly spent on his laptop with online writing and self-indulgence. It started when an older neighbor boy showed him online writing for the first time. It was fiction published in online journals and magazines. “I wish I could say it had no impact and went no farther,” Bob recounts, “but I can't. Like so many others, I was immediately hooked on online writing.”

I decided to try a novel approach to a book reviews, and write a review of the reviews of the book before I have completed reading the book. Why would I do that? Do a Google search on "book reviews [novel title]," and you will find many reviews by Amazon.com reviewers and other bloggers. You could consider it a collaborative review of sorts, where different opinions build on each other, rather than another rambling, unrelenting, self-involved soliliquy. By sticking to the first 3/5 of the book, I can reduce the chance that I will spoil the novel for others that might wish to read it—although The Unconsoled is not a novel that I would expect to end with a lot of clarity. As the title of this post states, I am going to give the 3/5 review of reviews treatment to The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro. (Hopefully, I have done more justice to his name than I did for poor Nabakov Nabokov. Since most of the reviews are lengthy, I will simply take snippets with links to the larger articles. (Unfortunately, I accessed several of the articles through a free trial with highbeam.com, so it is a bit of work to get at the full articles.

In a previous post, I referred to a short story that I had written, apparently suffering from a case of cryptomnesia. I have now posted the short story to unpublishedguy.com as an open source fiction story. Any web site visitor can rewrite the story as they see fit or simply add comments for other more enterprising writers to follow.

I will usually finish a book I have started, even if I am having a difficult time with it. As I mentioned in my previous post, Five Unreadable Novels that I Have Read, I took three years to read the Tunnel. Although I believe I have an iron constitution for reading material, like most people I have those books I could not finish reading. Here are five books that I could not finish.

Some novels are rumored to be too dense, arcane, or pretentious to be read in their entirety. Those sorts of novels are my specialty, and I have been emboldened to complete five such novels from beginning to end: 100 Years of Solitude, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Foucault's Pendulum, Moby Dick, The Tunnel.

One of the most important things, as any unpublished writer knows, is what font to select as their default font while they write their fiction. Some writers don’t even use a word processor. They use a text editor, so they aren’t distracted from their writing with such trivial decisions as font selection. I say, “Nonsense. If you are going to invest all the time and effort into writing a short story, shouldn’t it be typeset in a font worthy of your creative genius.” Before I begin writing a short story, I spend one to two hours vacillating between various exciting font possibilities.