I began reading "Man in the Dark" by Paul Auster a few days ago... my 31 day pre-NaNoWriMo prep underway... and this is what I find in the first few pages of Auster's book...
"Concentration can be a problem, however, and more often than not my mind eventually drifts away from the story I'm trying to tell to the things I don't want to think about. There's nothing to be done. I fail again and again, fail more often than I succeed, but that doesn't mean I don't give it my best effort."
I took this as a sign by the current Master of the Literary Fiction genre, seemingly encouraging all of us at NaNoWriMo to do our best. :-)
I finished last year and I am self-publishing using "Booksurge.com" I hope to have good luck this year, despite the fact that my schedule is a ridiculous obstacle.
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www.frequencyofsilence.blogspot.com
5,398 / 50,000
Oct 5, 2008 - 15 52
I think everyone doing literary fiction should read Auster's Oracle Night before beginning their novel. So much in there about how fiction and writing permeates our everyday lives.
37,008 / 50,000
Oct 6, 2008 - 18 36
I'm a big fan of Auster. If you haven't seen Smoke, a movie he wrote about a Brooklyn tobacco shop, I really recommend it. One of my favorites.
22,731 / 50,000
Oct 10, 2008 - 09 43
I like Auster very much -- but my choice for greatest literary writer today would be Roberto Bolano. He died in 2005 but his translated works are still coming out. I came across his stories in the New Yorker and then bought a copy of Savage Detectives.