It hit me today in the shower, I think I need to start off this book I'm writing with more of a bang. The way it reads now, it starts off with culture and background, and then gets more political and dangerous the further on you get. Thing is, I'm not sure how many people will bother hanging on through the slow bits at the beginning.
So I have an idea now of what I can do, but it will change the whole feeling of the first part I've written so far, and I think it might make irrelevant some of the things I want to do. I want my character to get involved in a cultural and only marginally political underground in Crimea when he arrives. There's a bunch of stuff on obsolete Soviet-era electronic music devices I want to put in (Theremin himself was a Soviet, originally). I'm not sure that stuff will still work, if I start off with panic and horror.
Now I just need time to work on it.
I'm listening to a bunch of ten year old Bill Laswell "Material" stuff... Can't sleep again and am slightly loaded from some really nice Merlot Cecilie fed me before going to bed.
Material recorded a lot of William Burroughs spoken word tracts... the best stuff before he died. A bit from Road to the Western Lands which I haven't heard for a long time.
"Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape. Don't intend to be there when this shithouse goes up. Nothing here now but the recordings. Shut them off, they are as radioactive as an old joke."
Posted by case at February 7, 2005 11:27 PM