Excerpt from THE DIRTY MILKMAN to be published

 

Commuterlit.com will be publishing the first chapter of The Dirty Milkman in the next two weeks. They've also published the first chapters of The Goon and A Place of Pretty Flowers. It's good exposure for me so I'm grateful to them for it. You can find it here: http://commuterlit.com/tag/jerrod/

You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless -- there is only one thing to do to a novel and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.

--Ernest Hemingway in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1929

This how I'm feeling these days...I'm nearing the end of my rewrite for The Moon is Real and it's been a while -- more than a year now -- so the next six months will be putting my head down and just getting it done. 

THE CORRECTIONS by Jonathan Franzen

While I was reading Freedom a friend of mine told me The Corrections was even better. So I put it on my list. Unfortunately, after reading it I don't hold the same view as my friend. At all. Where Freedom took you through the lives of three people -- from their childhoods to their senior years, The Corrections feels somewhat fragmented; it just doesn't seem to go anywhere. 568 pages and the story never quite gets off the ground -- certainly not in the way Freedom does. Now I'm never going to bash any writer's work in any quick review I give on my blog (and who the hell am I to criticize Jonathan Franzen?), but I will say that it was a disappointing read for me. Sure, there are moments of greatness, as Franzen showed from start to finish in Freedom, but if I'd read The Corrections first, I doubt I would have ever given Freedom a shot.

I did, however, pick up signed First Editions of each book, and of these two, The Corrections is my favorite...Ironically enough, the first run needed corrections -- it had a printing error -- pages 430 and 431 are in the wrong order. The publisher included an insert stating the error and I was lucky enough to find a copy with it, complete with Franzen's quick-to-do signature.