Something Novel About My Novel
For months I have been promising announcement of my seventh book, a novel entitled EVENT. It was hoped for a Spring birth but it isn’t going to make it– well, perhaps but not likely. A final read by my final reader resulted in a two hour phone call explaining my failures: lack of clarity of time line, lack of identify of some characters when they reappear later in the narrative, and one very interesting (to me) observation: in the portion of the novel where the US military is involved (this is an international spy thriller), I may have gotten the details of the different services and their home bases correct, but I was insensitive to how folks in the military actually address each other, and the requisite formality of that process.
Back to rewrite!
That is what you get when your reader turns out to be a woman who was actually in the Air Force. Dammit!
Of course discipline in a long piece such as a novel is different than in a poem or short story; you do not have to worry about your reader losing their way in a short effort. When you get into a few hundred pages, it’s different.
About The Author
Stephen Honig
Stephen Honig has been writing fiction and poetry all his life. The sources of his writings are of course his life experiences: growing up in ethnic New York City; attendance at two alleged bastions of Ivy League erudition; a long career in the law with its attendant exposures to people, business and technology; reading everything eclectic along with alleged classics of the Western canon; wide travel including a gig in the USSR in the ‘70s to bring legal briefs to refuseniks; teaching at three colleges and at a law school in Russia; raising two families in very different generations. Now, Honig has completed his first novel, Event, a thriller combining the international espionage style of John Le Carre with the gripping pace of novels by James Patterson. If you’d like to sign up to automatically receive my blog posts, please go to the Contact page and submit the form. Thank you!