It's just some workshop props, nothing else. But hey, for just one moment, I'm gonna enjoy it. I'll fucking take the encouragement wherever I can get it, to fight the armies of cost-benefit analysis.
After I got home from workshop, I finally read Tom's critique of my manuscript of "Girls: A Four-Part Symphony by the Beastie Boys," a self-contained chapter from my second novel, The Ninjas of My Greater Self.
Here's an abridged version of TC Boyle's critique, verbatim:
Jackson:
Astonishing stuff. The language sings + the sensual details, of sex, + beauty + food + all the rest, make this very rich indeed. I have no qualms whatever--this is finished work.
There are perhaps a couple of places where the language calls attention to itself + perhaps the narrator protects his hipness a little too strenuously, but who cares? This is rich + nuanced, + the smart, funny, hyperactive voice carries it all the way.
Yeah, for a couple of seconds, it felt really good to read that.
But now (a day later), it's time to get back to reality: I'm still the same person I was yesterday, just another talented, aspiring fiction writer with just a few great publications. I still have a lot to prove to myself, to my critics + to all the people that won't give BLANK a chance in an industry filled to the sky with smooth, polished writing that has no soul, no vision + makes no attempt to create original, important, socially conscious, powerful, beautiful + ambitious art.
Carry on.
After I got home from workshop, I finally read Tom's critique of my manuscript of "Girls: A Four-Part Symphony by the Beastie Boys," a self-contained chapter from my second novel, The Ninjas of My Greater Self.
Here's an abridged version of TC Boyle's critique, verbatim:
Jackson:
Astonishing stuff. The language sings + the sensual details, of sex, + beauty + food + all the rest, make this very rich indeed. I have no qualms whatever--this is finished work.
There are perhaps a couple of places where the language calls attention to itself + perhaps the narrator protects his hipness a little too strenuously, but who cares? This is rich + nuanced, + the smart, funny, hyperactive voice carries it all the way.
Yeah, for a couple of seconds, it felt really good to read that.
But now (a day later), it's time to get back to reality: I'm still the same person I was yesterday, just another talented, aspiring fiction writer with just a few great publications. I still have a lot to prove to myself, to my critics + to all the people that won't give BLANK a chance in an industry filled to the sky with smooth, polished writing that has no soul, no vision + makes no attempt to create original, important, socially conscious, powerful, beautiful + ambitious art.
Carry on.