Writing and Publishing Fiction

This month the Unpublished Guy Fiction Panel discusses Becoming Coyote by Wayne Ude,
who happened to be my Creative Writing instructor at Old Dominion University.

Unpublished Guy Fiction Panel (left to right): William Blake, Dr. Zaius, Mrs. Butterworth

William Blake: Kafka, Kafka. burning bright. In the fiction of the night; What existential void. Could dissemble thy inexplicable asymmetry?

Novel Critique: Apes with Bald Kneecaps

Let's hear what the Unpublished Guy fiction panel, including Dr. Zaius, 18th century poet and engraver William Blake, and Mrs. Butterworth, has to say about the novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was developed while the movie was being filmed.

Dr. Zaius Rates the Literary Journal, Paris Review

Unpublished Guy: Dr. Zaius, what literary publication will you share today with the readers of this blog?

Dr. Zaius: This month, I would like to discuss the Paris Review. Specifically, I would like to discuss issue 110, which published the story "The Ape Lady in Retirement"

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka speaks personally to me. On some levels, I can relate to Gregor Samsa. First, Gregor Samsa is a fictional character, and I am a fictional character. We were both human and then we changed. In Gregor's case, the change was a monstrous verminous bug that fits the description of a cockroach. I am now a mouse.

Gerald Freund, fictional character in mouse form

Gregor Samsa, fictional character
in verminous bug form

I suppose that between the two, you might think I got the better deal. That is only natural. At first glance, many would rather be a cute white and brown mouse rather than a giant cockroach. Keep in mind, however, that cockroaches can do some amazing things like run around without a head and survive a nuclear holocaust. How well do you think you or I would survive a beheading or a nuclear winter? Not well at all.

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.

The Italo Calvino novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler, opened me up to a completely different type of story-telling. First, the story is written in the second person point of view. You know the second person, that point of view you are warned not even to try, because it is nearly impossible to make it work, but every writer at some point tries anyway. Well, Calvino pulls it off. How?

The knock against second person is that the writer doesn’t know anything about the reader, so how can the writer pretend to know how the reader would think or feel any of things that the writer assigns to the second person character. In this case the bridge is made by identifying with the reader as a reader and nothing else, simply someone who is beginning to read a Italo Calvino’s book, If on a winter’s night a traveler.