Yay! Get it before Christmas.
Peter Bialobrzeski's 7th photobook,
Wuhan Diary by The Velvet Cell (TVC).
Camino Island by John Grisham is definitely a bookish thriller.
I was somewhat surprised because the story is a departure from Grisham's usual legal thrillers. The plot is that priceless manuscripts by F. Scott Fitzgerald were stolen from one of Princeton's libraries, and the hunt is on to catch the thieves and retrieve the papers.
It starts off with a thrill on how the gang of thieves go about the heist.
After the Fitzgerald manuscripts are stolen, the police and FBI work the case pretty fast, but when the trail goes cold and the manuscripts still missing, private investigators decide to send in someone undercover.
Enter Mercer, an aspiring novelist who is tasked with infiltrating the social world of Bruce Cable, a bookseller in Camino Island, who is suspected of having the stolen manuscripts. Thus Mercer meets Bruce and some other writers in the area .....
There are a lot of intriguing literary discussions between writers and the bookseller.
Some of My Favourite Quotes
"Writers are generally split into two camps: those who carefully outline their stories and know the ending before they begin, and those who refuse to do so upon the theory that once a character is created he or she will do something interesting."
"Why do writers suffer so much? / ... It's because the writing life is so undisciplined. There's no boss, no supervisor, no time clock to punch or hours to keep. Write in the morning, write at night. Drink when you want to."
"Cable's Rules For Writing Fiction, a brilliant how-to guide put together by an expert who's read over four thousand books ... I hate prologues. I just finished a novel by a guy who's touring and will stop by next week. He always starts every book with the typical prologue, something dramatic like a killer stalking a woman or a dead body, then will leave the reader hanging, go to chapter 1, which, of course, has nothing to do with the prologue, then go to chapter 2, which, of course, has nothing to do with either chapter 1 or the prologue, then after about thirty pages slam the reader back to the action in the prologue, which by then has been forgotten ... Another rookie mistake is to introduce twenty characters in the first chapter. Five's enough and won't confuse your reader. Next, if you feel the need to go to the thesaurus, look for a word with three syllables or fewer. I have a nice vocabulary and nothing ticks me off more than a writer showing off with big words I've never seen before. Next, please use quotation marks with dialogue; otherwise it's bewildering. Rule Number Five: Most writers say too much, so always look for things to cut, like throwaway sentences and unnecessary scenes."
"There should be a rule in publishing that debut novels are limited to three hundred pages, don't you think?"
