If you signed up for snail mail, get excited — I’ve been going through my postcard collection and am preparing a mailing in August. Ten lucky folks will receive a gorgeous Split Lip 10th anniversary oversized postcard, all of which are nice enough to frame.
This week in reading
I finished Emma Cline’s The Guest and loved every second of it. It’s about a twenty-two-year-old woman who, after being kicked out of her much older lover’s house in the Hamptons, believes that she will be reunited with him, if only she can hang around this community where she is definitely an outsider for the full five days until his Labor Day party.
This book was suspenseful, and it got me thinking about ticking clocks in stories and how useful they are to keep the reader, well, reading. I don’t necessarily mean ticking time bombs, although some of them in this book were, but also just plain old countdowns. Each day the protagonist had to figure out seemed like an insurmountable challenge, and the fact that her phone kept dying and flashing back to life (with messages from the guy who was after her back in the city) served as a constant reminder of the passage of time and the stakes if she failed.
This week in writing
I’ve been thinking about how to build more of these ticking clocks into the pond novel. Our novel also has an element of time passing, as it takes place between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Reading The Guest made me think that the plot would benefit from something that may or may not happen on Labor Day — some threat or some promise that will be effected by the events of the novel.
Another idea I had — one of our three main characters is in a floundering relationship. What if his long-distance girlfriend issues a clear ultimatum: move in by the end of the summer or we’re done? It would add more stakes to his waffling about her and their future.
I left Anna a meandering mid-week voicemail — a key part of our process — with these and other ideas. And then I kept writing. I’m aiming for 300 words a day right now, which is not enough to hit my 10 pages a week but is fine if I can make up the remainder on the weekend.
Off to try to do that now!