Well yes, I guess the last full novel I read was “The Namesake” back in April 2011. And yes, shortly thereafter I started Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of The World but in truth, I’d only made it 200 pages in by the end of the year.
Well of course I’ve been reading! Short flash pieces of my friends’ work. Poetry, art (yes, you can read art just as you can paint a story), too much current event news coverage, and my own pieces as I flash-edit (a new term I’ve just made up to indicate the fast nature of flash fiction writing). That’s what I spent most of last year doing: writing. Every day, a story a day. Now I need to organize them all in Tinderbox (as I did the previous year’s 100 Days Project), tag them with style or theme if not genre, clean them up, and plan to put a book or two together out of them and make some attempt to publish.
I’m also getting (or planning on getting) more active with my reading and reviewing here at Spinning. I suspect that my couple of years of reading and writing flash fiction may have tuned my mind into short spurts of attention, and I may have to slowly expand it into novel length not only to read, but to write.
See, I’m also planning on writing a hypertext narrative of novel length.
But first, I’ve just gone through fifty more pages of Murakami today and once I go back and refresh my memory with what I read in the beginning of the book, I’ll post the first review. Not my usual style, where I’d post almost daily as I read, but it’s a start!
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
I have a Murakami book that I intend to finish…1Q84. I like it, too. About that Tinderbox: using it now to clean up/edit my Gizella novel—and do you know if there will be another 100 day project? Because I want to write more flashes for Gizella and that would give me a push…
I’m not nuts about Murakami but it could be that I’m not geared for novel-reading after a couple years of reading and writing nothing but flash. I believe it may have shortened my attention span.
There most likely will be a 2012 100 Days Project tho I couldn’t say for sure. It usually starts at the end of May, when the teachers have a summer vacation.
Ah, thanks. I have experienced a similar thing but I didn’t relate it to flash. In fact I’ve lately read plenty of novels but then I’m writing novels now, not flash. My “vacation” which never feels like that, begins in July, alas.
I strongly doubt I’ll have time this summer to participate in the Project either. I really really want to write a hypertext novel and I’ve so much to do with my flash pieces of last year yet. Summer is gardening time and I’m slowly redecorating the house room by room as well–much painting, wallpapering, curtains and sofa recovering to sew. But if I did participate, it would still be flash, but of the horror genre I think.