I’m feeling a bit better about the waiting game. Still sitting on ten sent queries with no reply, but none of them have been out longer than ten days; some significantly less. I’ll just pretend to be patient for a while, in the hope that it’ll actually make me patient. This is how it works. I won’t send any more out for at least another week. I have a good list of the next people I want to contact, but they’re not going anywhere. Fake it till you make it, buddy.

To ease the waiting, I’m revisitingpoplife. I’ve just begun re-reading it from start to finish for the first time in several years. I took it off of dansolomon.com when I did the new design, but I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with it except a rewrite. I figured it out today, though. I still like the book, but it doesn’t quite work the way that I want it to. I’ve decided to re-draft it as a young adult novel now, kicking all of the characters down a few years in age and cutting to the core of the story. Because the book is really about the way music and first-love and even politics are just tools we use to find happiness, and all of that stuff is as relevant to an eighteen year old protagonist as one in his mid-twenties. Re-reading the book now, the fact that the entire core of the book can be left intact while so much changes leads me to believe that maybe it was a young adult novel all along, I just didn’t know it because I wanted to be a grown up about it.

It’s a good book. But it’s the book I wrote when I was twenty-three, and I think it’ll speak more to people who are younger than its author, than people older. Young adult fiction is pretty sophisticated these days, and I think poplife could be an especially fine novel for that audience, while I’ve always been a little insecure regarding its place as grown-up literature.

If you’re interested, I’ll be work-blogging the re-write process on sexy josef stalin. If you’ve read poplife and remember it well, I’d be interested in your thoughts as I go. If you haven’t, you’re still invited. There’ll be punch and pie.

This should work out better than my previous time-passing measure, which was reading high-concept novels back to back. I finished mystic river by Dennis Lehane, as well as not a star and slam by Nick Hornby. I think slam must have played a part in my decision to re-write poplife, because it’s a young adult novel that doesn’t condescend a bit to its audience. In fact, there’s really no difference between slam and any of Hornby’s other books, in terms of style or tone, and it’s really only young adult because the main character is a teenager. It’s about a sixteen year old who gets his girlfriend pregnant, and I finished it the day I started it. I stayed up until three-thirty in the morning to do it.

mystic river was crappy. Most of the time, when I try to overcome my snobbery about genre fiction, I end up reading something like mystic river and feeling validated. It was fine, I guess, in that I wanted to know what was happening next on every page, and I guess I can see why it made a good movie, but the writing is really tedious. All of the characters are stock cliches, except for Dave Boyle. It’s the story of three men- Dave Boyle, Sean Devine, and Jimmy Marcus, and what happens after Jimmy’s nineteen year old daughter is killed. All of the men knew one another as children. Sean is boilerplate homicide detective, Jimmy is standard-issue tough-guy-gone-family-man. Dave is interesting, so of course he gets the least time on the page- he’s the survivor of a kidnapping and sexual abuse and it leaves him warped. You spend many hundred pages following the mystery and then, in the end, you learn that the true killer was… rap music and video games. Oh, yeah- it’s one of those. The characters occasionally just become mouthpieces for Lehane’s views on something that pisses him off, and the things they do to make themselves more interesting are totally arbitrary. I would believe that there was a good movie in that book, but as a book it was not much to talk about.

not a star is a slim volume published in Ireland as part of a series for people who don’t read many books. It was about forty pages in a big typeface, and it’s about a guy whose parents learn that he’s the lead actor in a porn film. It’s cute and takes about half an hour to read, if you find a copy. There’s nothing wrong with it at all, is probably the strongest endorsement I could give it.

And so much for that. It’s gonna be a long summer, maybe, of waiting for those letters to come back. Hopefully poplife will pass the time more compellingly than mystic river.