Worth the read! From @ColmHerron and @SeeThomasHowl on writing, books, and life.
A SLOW STRIPTEASE
on writing *The Wake*
@SeeThomasHowl:
Can you talk about the process of writing The Wake? What has it demanded of you?
@ColmHerron:
The kind of novel writing I do is a bit like taking off all my clothes in public. For example, the first draft of the first novel I wrote, For I Have Sinned, was - rather appropriately - like a public confession. By the time I'd completed the fourth and final draft I'd modified the thing a fair amount but after it was published I still shied away from asking people what they thought of it. That would, I feared, have been inviting derision from them. Likely put-downs such as “You mean to tell me that when you were sixteen you thought it was sinful to want to go to bed with a girl!” sprang to my fevered mind but never happened because I made sure to keep a very low profile.
I have moved on a fair amount since then and am now a little bit of a veteran, if having written four novels makes one a veteran! But I still cringe a little when I go back and read some of the things I wrote in that first novel. The only saving grace was that I knew my words were describing not only me but the majority of boys and girls that grew up in Catholic Ireland in the Sixties and Seventies. A place and time where murder was a sin but not as sinful as sins of the flesh.
The Wake (And What Jeremiah Did Next) is different. This one is a slow striptease. (I hasten to reassure anyone of nervous disposition that I'm speaking metaphorically here!) No, this novel is different from anything I have done before. Here I am writing about the twenty-seven-year-old Colm Herron, except that I disguised myself as a young Irishman called Jeremiah Coffey who considered himself quite modern but was in fact a right-wing Christian with some very unchristian attitudes. Yep, that was me.
Brand new edition of The Wake:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B017CCHRNG