Writing Update: 04-07-25

Change: 7,261

Year-to-date: 127, 123

A good week for writing! I hadn't anticipated on finishing chapter 8 this week, but the writing went well and I hope you've enjoyed it. I've already started on 9 and hopefully that one will be ready by next week, too.

I'm often influenced by whatever I'm reading at the moment. Some of the more recent chapters were written under the shadow of Sally Rooney's Intermezzo, for instance, which remains my top read of 2025 (so far).

Last week, on a friend's recommendation I picked up Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. Way back when first starting Constant, I imagined giving it a sort of noir-flavour. This was somewhat presumptuous of me, having read little-to-no actual hard-boiled crime fiction or even seen much noir cinema. I've remedied the cinema side a little, but not the reading, and so starting The Big Sleep has been a bit of a revelation. It's really good! The prose is terse and tight, pacing fast, but there's also this wonderful sense of humour running through it all that I hadn't expected. And it's remarkable how many written scenes feel intimately familiar, having been copied, reinterpreted or recycled in novels and films that came after.

The Big Sleep's been around long enough to be freely available at project Gutenberg. I copy-and-pasted it into a .doc to get an idea of its length, and that was a revelation, too: a very tight 68k words, with chapters averaging a short two thousand. That kind of thing always makes me take a hard look at my own writing. Obviously, I'm writing something very different, in a very different style. For all the vividness of Chandler's prose, characterisation tends to be paper thin; there isn't a lot of interiority to these people, including the narrative voice. And there's a remarkable lack of slow, elaborately described smut as well! Absolute shocker. But still. It's another reminder that I need to come to grips with tightening my own prose, and saying more with less.

I tried that, a little, at the end of the most recent chapter.

Anyway. Coming up:

Chapter nine, in which Cindy and the girls enjoy a night in, triggering a violent response.

... and then, I might take a short break from Constant for a week or two to work on something else a little shorter, we'll see.