Back from my travels. Bit exhausted. Doing this quiz that was ganked from Jade Park, then grocery shopping, then diving back into the rewrite of the story I’m resubmitting this week: 1. Spell my name as it sounds: Goard Seller. 2. Am I a worrier? Yeah, but I’m trying to cut back on it. 3. What’s my favorite CD? John Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard. But that’s a box set complete, and I’m calling it a CD because it comes in one package and if you don’t like it, well, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. 4. …
Month: February 2008
The Horror of Arirang, and on Ao Nang
A few nights ago, when I started writing this, I was in my room in Vientiane, wondering whether I should go to the North-Korean restaurant Pyongyang for dinner. It was rather far off, and I’d already wandered around a fair bit that day, but curiosity, oh but it niggled. I didn’t end up going, though. Probably a good thing: after all the Korean practice I got in Luang Prabang — the town was FULL of Koreans — I would have slipped into the language without thinking and would later have been kidnapped from my room and shipped up to Pyongyang …
Winter Wheat Out…
Whew. That was like birthing a… well, I don’t know about birthing, to be honest, but “Winter Wheat” is the biggest piece of writing I’ve ever sent out, and it took me ages to get it ready. Every time I looked at it, there was something screaming to be added, squirming to be adjusted, wriggling to be fiddled with. I think I know now what whoever it was meant when he or she said, “Novels don’t get finished, they get abandoned.” But if it gets rejected, I’ll give it another look — I always do that with everything — but …