Work, etc.

The thing about work is that it sucks. Having to spend eight hours a day (plus one hour for lunch, one to two hours for commute) is a huge time drain, and typically only leaves me four-five hours of "free" time outside of work. This is a problem, a problem that is exacerbated by the fact that I have so much to prepare for in anticipation of moving and getting ready for grad school. That's my long-winded excuse for not tending to this blog more often in the past couple weeks. On the bright side, I'm quitting the old job in less than a month, and will have much more time to write interesting posts on storytelling in video games and the like. Boy do I know my audience.

Right now I'm reading I, the Divine by Rabih Alameddine for my upcoming craft class. The unique thing about this book is that it is a kind of aborted memoir written entirely in first chapters by the protagonist, Sarah Nour El-Din. About 50 pages in, I can immediately see the advantages to this technique. Since opening sections of novels typically rely more on summary and swaths of "telling" prose, Alameddine is able to convey a huge amount of information in relatively short amount of space. He also manages to cheat in actual scenes of dialogue and action by setting them up with very short, yet grand sweeping paragraphs of summary and general statements of fact. The character begins one chapter: "I realized when it came to men, I did not pick the beautiful or the correct. I picked the wrong one. I chose David," which then transitions wonderfully into a very specific scene. What I am curious about is how tension and pacing will be handled through 300 pages of this style. It is more akin to reading a collection of closely linked short stories than a linear book. Will the constant temporal jumping from random scene to random scene get old by page 250 without sufficient build up? I hope not. Right now it's a very good read, and I'm interested in how Alameddine will handle these problems later on.