Culture is neutral

Michael March interviews Aleksander Hemon. There's something about Hemon's use of language that I really love--you don't often read an interview where the language itself has such great diction--I remember reading and being very impressed with a few stories of his, I must get some more....

In happy news, I finished the novel revisions and sent them out. I didn't quite cut a hundred pages in the end (ninety-something, though: more than thirty thousand words!), but I'm very pleased with the improvements in pace and story-telling. It was liberating, too, thinking of it as a young-adult novel: I'm a very fast reader myself, which is part of why I write long & copious in the first place, but I like what happens when you strip out all the extraneous stuff. I do not admire Dan Brown, the only book of his I've read is Digital Fortress and it seemed to me fairly laughably thin in many respects, but I was reading it with the greatest admiration for his pacing and story-telling skills--John Grisham has that also--in fact I think that I read that book during a previous revision of Dynamite No. 1 and it led me to break it into much, much shorter chapters. So this is a good example of the edifying effects of even the most otherwise uninspiring popular fiction.