309 Days Remaining ... This post reports my recent progress on Housebreaking the Muse and describes some major reworking to the novel's opening section. Several weeks ago, I began to realize the opening section of the novel was just too disjointed. Because of the many narrative entities and the multiple universal planes at work in…
There are deadlines, and there are deadlines. All of us face an ultimate deadline we (sadly or happily, depending on your point of view) cannot foretell. If you stick around long enough, this deadline begins to weigh heavily on your conscience. Wags call this the "mid-life crisis," and I suppose there is a crisis involved.…
Simone Kahn was the first wife of André Breton, founder of Mouvement Dada in Paris and more famously known as the lifelong "pope of Surrealism." But before she knew Breton, Kahn, a young student at the Sorbonne, was the close friend of Jacques Rigaut, the dadaist poet, gigolo, drug addict, and suicide who haunts the…
More than 200 pages into my novel Housebreaking the Muse, I’m starting to look for clues concerning the work it’s trying to accomplish. You see, I try not to force themes, but rather discover them as the work unfolds, then refine my ideas through the revision process. I know the notion is likely not much…
Another glimpse into the first draft as it emerges: .... Could it be that I, poor ghost of a thousand fragments clustered in the suspect ectoplasm of the vaporized artilleryman, the failed shade imprisoned in the sliver universe, a misty specimen trapped as if between glass slides of infinitesimal thickness, pliant panes that allow only…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 