앗싸 가오리! (God I hope I spelled that right.)
Well, there’s good news and then there’s more workbut hey, no bad news.
I’ve finished the first draft of my foreigner-in-Korea ghost story novel, which currently had no proper title though the working title is “Dead Abroad.” (I know, it sucks… I need to find a title for this thing.) I don’t want to get into more detail about it for now. Partly, I’m just tired of typing. It’s 270-some pages, about 80 or 90 of which I’ve written in the last 5 or 6 very productive and inspired nights. Whew!
Of course, there’s a lot of work to go…
For one thing, I need to go back and change the grammar of significant hunks of the thing. I only realized late in the game why the character who’s telling the story is doing so, and how he’s relating it, as well as to whom it’s addressed. There will be significant revisions of sections where “she” becomes “you”, with all the contextual and tone changes that go along with that.
Secondly, there are some things which I think can be worked in which would enrich the novel, as atmosphere-inducing background material… I have included some interesting moments from Korean history, some interesting facets of things I’ve come across in my readings, but there are others I took note of, and left out, but which I’d like to work in. (Tomorrow afternoon I shall make a list of them and puzzle out where to work them in.)
Finally, I shall have to retire a few CDs from my listening for a while: I relied on them for mood a great deal, and now I cannot stand to listen to them:
- several CDs of traditional Korean music
- Jang Young-Gyu’s soundtrack to the Korean horror film 4인용 삭탁, which was a big mood-aid for the spookier bits
- a couple of Aphex Twin CDs for when I was writing the really harsh part set in North Korea
- I blush to include it, but it helped me a lot, track 13 from Tori Amos’ Boys For Pele CD, and
- Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, which is perfect for any gloomy writing you ever need to do.
That’s not an exhaustive list of what I listened to, for that changed daily, but it’s a list of what I’ll need to take out of circulation for a while, for sanity’s sake.
Oh, of bloggish pertinence, I was working up my list of thank-yous (still to be expanded by those kind souls who give me criticisms of my work when I start sending it to close friends next week or so), and I figured it would only be fair to include The Marmot in the list. His observations on Korean history have proved useful to me in my quest for more knowledge, as well as interesting Korean things to throw into this story.
And now, to bed.