Heart of Purpleness

A second Star Wars novel bites the dust. Much better, though still written for a target demographic that finds depth in a shallow puddle.

Although it was better written it was also annoyingly written, full of paragraphs with separate, single-sentence payoffs

Like this.

It's written how Jeremy Clarkson speaks.

It's based on, or at least takes as its point of departure Conrad's Heart of Darkness but the author isn't Conrad. That's OK, very few people are Conrad, but it undermines the intended impact of the book I think. Most obviously, I wasn't convinced that the internal monologue and travails of the protagonist were those of a Jedi Master. It's essentially an episode when it could have been more than that. On the other hand, firstly I don't think the publisher was wanting anything more and, second, I suspect the writer was trying to slip things in that would otherwise have bypassed the target audience, which is admirable.

Second Draft

My novel A Dream of Magic is now in second draft. No doubt it will change further but right now my brain hurts.

Getting it to this stage has been an interesting process, including plenty of marked-up changes on two full prints plus a further read through on a Kindle that was really helpful for picking things up I'd missed. The net result is only a couple of hundred words longer but a lot more readable and coherent.

The process also threw up sufficient notes and queries to create a second novel, I think (possibly a third but I'm allergic to trilogies).

*

I've had a vague notion for a Star Wars story floating around for a while and, on a whim, I downloaded three of the best reviewed of the existing novels to get an idea for structure, tone, quality etc. I'm not impressed; I mean, I wasn't expecting Pynchon but I was surprised by how functional and basic the first has been so far. It's straight surface narrative with no depth, each (short) chapter a scene, and by a writer from whom I expected better. It reads like the novelisation of an outline of a rejected screenplay.