Keel Scraping
My novel has run aground at an obscene length. The draft is not finished in the sense of being readble by anyone but me, but it does go through to the end. It will have to remain in this state for a little while, in cold storage; I can't look at it any more.
As a lot of you already know, most of it is set in Guatemala and its central events are loosely based around actual massacres that happened in early 1982, during the country’s civil war, wiping out a village whose presence impeded the construction of a hydroelectric dam. A few days ago I discovered through the news archives that last September several hundred massacre survivors and otherwise displaced people, including several people I met, took over the dam and threatened to shut off power completely unless their demands for compensation were addressed. (PDF article, including photos: scroll down.) After twenty-four hours the government agreed to negotations; it has since pressed charges of crimes against national secutity. Meanwhile I was complaining about bad textual criticism on Emily Dickinson.
