{"id":336,"date":"2009-08-10T08:01:23","date_gmt":"2009-08-10T12:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/?p=336"},"modified":"2011-07-05T23:56:26","modified_gmt":"2011-07-06T03:56:26","slug":"the-golden-mystery-and-other-topics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/?p=336","title":{"rendered":"the golden mystery and other topics"},"content":{"rendered":"

More of The Golden Mystery<\/A> is posted, starting here<\/A>.<\/p>\n

Two more weeks for this story, I estimate. After that, I think I will take a break.<\/p>\n

I was planning to do that back in March (as I wrote about here<\/A>), but then I got the idea for The Family Murder Case<\/A> (mostly because I knew I had to do something with Claudia and Erika), and then I got the idea for The Golden Mystery<\/A> (which came to me, the whole thing, in about 24 hours).<\/p>\n

But now I do intend to take that break. There are at least two more mystery stories that I plan to write at some point (one short one, and at one or two longer ones). I may restructure the utownwriting.com<\/A> blog as well, since the part-by-part posting is great when the stories are in progress, but they may not be the ideal format when the stories are complete.<\/p>\n

So, the updates here may be on a more relaxed schedule. And I may write a bit about some other things.<\/p>\n

I've been thinking about writing something about Frank McCourt (who I still think of as \"Mr. McCourt\"). He was one of my favorite teachers, but I feel bad writing about him if I don't also write about Thomas Dolan, Maurice Baudin, and M. L. Rosenthal. They had just as much effect on me, they just never wrote best-selling memoirs. So, I would want to write about them all, if I was going to write about any of them.<\/p>\n

Oh, and I just bought Inherent Vice<\/I> by Thomas Pynchon. I bought it Wednesday (it came out on Tuesday, but I was delayed by a colonoscopy). I remember buying Against the Day<\/I> on the first day it was available, too, but I never finished it. But Inherent Vice<\/I> is shorter and (according to initial reports) funnier, so that should make a difference. Maybe I'll specialize in Pynchon's shorter novels from here on.<\/p>\n

I knew it was a bad sign when I was reading Against the Day<\/I> (I made it to around page 200) that the biggest pleasure I got out of the whole thing was finding a typo.<\/p>\n

Speaking of which, did you ever notice that all of \"the short ones\" (The Crying of Lot 9<\/I>, Vineland<\/I>, and Inherent Vice<\/I>) are set in California, and none of the long ones are? I'll bet that's<\/I> significant...<\/p>\n

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More of The Golden Mystery is posted, starting here. Two more weeks for this story, I estimate. After that, I think I will take a break. I was planning to do that back in March (as I wrote about here), but then I got the idea for The Family Murder Case (mostly because I knew […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,15,16,9],"tags":[111],"class_list":["post-336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-news","category-new-writing-now","category-inherent-vice","category-writing","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=336"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2494,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336\/revisions\/2494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}