Reading
I’m about halfway through The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, a novel about violent “eco-raiders” who bomb and sabotage land development, power, and resource extraction projects in the American Southwest. This is a re-read for me, but one thing that didn’t really stick out to me the first time around was the writing style. It’s sharp, clipped, but also contains a lot of run-on sentences and sentence fragments. It’s got a cadence to it, and there are some good sentences, but also a lot of shifting tenses and some first person narration where the subject isn’t always made clear. It’s a seat-of-your-pants style. I’m guessing Abbey’s manuscript only saw a cursory edit.
I’m enjoying this re-read, though I am more aware of the parts of this novel that are dated. There are hints of racism against Vietnamese people and Indigenous Americans, and some outdated comments on women, but my take is that Abbey is trying to show who his characters are, and that they come with their own set of hypocrisies, no matter the righteous intentions of their actions. In some instances, however, it feels that Abbey is expressing his personal frustrations through his characters. It’s something to be aware of if you decide to pick this book up.
I listened to The Horse and His Boy by CS Lewis, the fifth book in publication order of The Chronicles of Narnia. It has an okay story, with your standard quest to save Narnia. I like that it has new characters, even though some of the Lion, Witch & Wardrobe characters make an appearance. There is an orientalist bent to this one, as it looks like the kingdom of Calormen is a stand-in for the Ottoman Empire. Everyone is dark-skinned, bearded, wears a turban, and uses scimitar. They are also all assholes that love slavery. Lewis was writing in the 1950s, and from what I understand, he wasn’t a chest-thumping empire lover. These kinds of depictions were just culturally okay back then.
Writing
I’ve had a story accepted! “A Walk Out of Doors,” a flash fiction piece, will be published on Horror Tree’s Trembling With Fear online fiction publication. It will be free to read. I’ll make a post once it’s live on their page. This marks my first short fiction acceptance of 2025. Since 2021, I’ve averaged only a single short fiction publication a year, so I hope this doesn’t become my only acceptance of 2025. That’s a trend I’d like to break.
Since I’ve been confronted with limited time to write lately, I’ve resorted to writing sprints. These are just timed speed writing sessions, where the importance is getting words on the page as fast as possible (and making sure those words aren’t complete nonsense) in a predetermined amount of time. Kind of like high intensity interval training. I’ve been doing 3-minute writing sprints followed by 5 minutes or so of rest. I can get a little more than 100 words down on average per session, so I just need ten of these sessions to hit 1,000 words. With my rest periods in between, this can take anywhere between 1.5-2 hours. I think that’s pretty good.
This new (for me) method has allowed me count words written instead of marking a percentage of a manuscript with an arbitrary word count. I wrote 2,707 words this past week, one of my highest in recent memory.
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What have you been reading and/or writing this week? Let me know in the comments below.
The Night Bulletin 