wildcat

At some point, Tedford's story started to kick into gear and at another point his mother got really creepy. I like her because she has a hint of all this other stuff going on in her life that Tedford wouldn't be privy too, and the wildly neurotic flair to her behaviour makes me smile because it's so off. I like that, I think, even though the story's so imperfect that it hurts; but this is the point of mindless revisions, you squeeze the story and rework things until the shit drips out and the good stuff is left and filled out.

I like working with a retrospective narrator. I think the voice needs to be perfected more, I need to emphasize - perhaps - more of an idea about where the narrator is now, even if there's only bits and pieces to indicate it. In Short Fiction Techniques we looked at Richard Ford's "Calling," which does something similar - we get a sense that Ford's narrator is a lawyer in the present, there's a certain set to his language that implies this without it being overtly stated (from what I can recall).

So Tedford is developing and so is his mother. Alexei and June need to develop more, and I could do more with the schoolteacher (perhaps).