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Why Rewriting a Novel Is a Bad Idea

September 29, 2018

creativity, editing, fiction, literature, rewriting, writing

Inspiration for this post came after I read about someone almost bragging about having just finished the 26th rewrite of their novel. Editing your book is an essential key to success. Tweaking things here and there or changing your mind and rewriting, say, the ending, can be useful. But there is no benefit in rewriting a novel. I am rarely so absolute in my declarations when it comes to literature, but I’m doing it now.

Rewriting a novel is about as useful as trying to please your audience, and twice as pointless. If a novel needs rewriting as opposed to editing then you are much better off scrapping the whole thing and writing a new story. Let’s see why.

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House Arrest by Francis Mont

September 25, 2018

Literature

author, book, Francis Mont, review

A slightly different article for today. It’s not a review and it’s not an author interview. Yet in some deeper, symbolic way it is both, and it is neither; like the double-slit experiment of quantum mechanics – a simile that would perhaps make Francis Mont, a physicist, smile.

We’re not here to talk about physics however, but about literature. House Arrest, by Francis Mont, is a science-fiction novel taking place in a post-nuclear-war America in 2098. Let’s take a look at the description, as it’s given on Amazon:

The country is in ruin. Three cities in the Sacramento Valley, with relatively intact infrastructure, are trying to survive in drastically different ways. One is organized by its AI quantum computer and its sophisticated robots. It automates everything for maximum efficiency and human beings are left with no role in their city’s welfare. That leads to problems – without jobs to keep them occupied, people get bored, restless and destructive. Omega 1500, their computer, has to temporarily lock them up to protect them from each other. Once their problems are solved, they’ll have to deal with the other two cities. The big question is whether they learned from the past and understand what human happiness depends on.

As it becomes apparent, there are a lot of interesting elements here. Let’s take a closer look.

Francis Mont, House Arrest — Not all post-apocalyptic novels are the same

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Religion in Dracula: Christian, Pagan, and Jewish Narratives

September 19, 2018

Criticism

academia, criticism, Dracula, Gothic, literature, religion

Note: the following article on religion in Dracula is a modified excerpt (pp. 115-117) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see the relevant page on the main site.

You can also find an article about religion in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Religion in Dracula is a matter of oppositions. Bram Stoker’s Dracula presents the narrative as a whole and the Count in particular as an opposition to Christianity. Jacques Coulardeau argues that “Dracula [is] the heir of an older tradition than Christianity, that is to say paganism … Older religions are centered on a cult to nature: the night and the day, as well as the earth, the sun, and the moon” (2007, 130).

At the same time, Norma Rowen adds that the inverted Christian imagery in Dracula essentially renders the Count an antichrist, with Renfield’s phrase “the blood is the life” a parody of the Eucharist (1997, 241).

Furthermore, by calling Mina his “bountiful wine-press” (D 306), Dracula introduces a metaphor often argued to carry religious connotations. The reason is due to the fact that wine is part of the Eucharist (Kreitzer 1999, 125), but also because of the allusion to Genesis, with Mina’s vampiric baptism becoming a parody of the creation of Eve (Loughlin 2004, 204).

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