I'm really a crappy writer, and this book is proving it to me. I work and rework and re-rework the sentences I write in order just to get them to make sense and be in the order they should be, and still find they aren't quite right, yet. It's as if I'm peeling an onion layer by layer but never getting to the center of it. I just slop crap together and think it's fine...till I look at it later and think, How the fuck could I have written that?
And the ideas I jammed in to give the story detail and interest? They's silly. Affectatious. For example, I had it where Brendan's father never told his kids the stories he tells in pubs to cadge drinks from the patrons. His bar mates come to his wake and wax eloquently about his stories being so amazing and true, and when Brendan tells them Da never told them, they say he's being silly. The whole concept is silly.
Instead, changing it to his father telling the stories to the kids when he's drunk and close to incoherent, and use an example about harpies living in the Cliffs of Moher and how it came about. Bouncing back and forth in the tale so it's hard to follow. Makes a lot more sense, that way.
In Book Three, when Brendan's twenty-five, he hears a taped recording of his father telling that same story before he'd had his second drink...and it is beautifully told. Almost like poetry, his voice melodious and sure, and it builds anger in his that the man would share his best voice with his friends and those who'd support his alcoholism but not with his family.
Took me six fucking years to figure out how much better that would be.
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