 Well, here it is, the first draft of my third novel, completed today at 1:47 p.m. When I spanked its newborn ass, it had come in at 466 pages and approximately 116,500 words.
But the real work has just begun, as now I get to dive into it red pen first and start sculpting this thing into something that can compete in the market. Admittedly, this second step in the process is my favorite, and this will be the first time that I've written a draft from start to finish without obsessively going back and re-working every page before moving forward. The idea here is that now I should be able to edit the book objectively and take the ride almost as if for the first time, finding out what works and what doesn't, what characters need to be flushed out, and most importantly, if I've been successful in saying what it is that I wanted to say. Not a bad way to end the week!  I'd first heard about Tom Six's "The Human Centipede (First Sequence)" via Internet buzz, with post after post about how this was the movie that dared the viewer to watch it. With a premise that's simple enough -- a retired Siamese twin surgeon decides to stitch three young people together mouth to anus joined by a common digestive tract -- I think that this movie would have made a much better first-person narrative novel. Perhaps it was the watered-down Wal-Mart version that we were able to get our hands on (it's not the easiest thing to find a video store where I now live in the country), but I still hold the same opinion of the movie that I held before I'd even watched it. I'm sure there's an unrated version out there, but I doubt it would've changed my mind.
If I were to walk up to you and pitch this gruesome idea, wouldn't the image that I've stained onto your mind already be enough? What more would there be to show on screen? And after watching the movie, I kept my resolve on this conclusion. I'm thinking that what would have made this story much more frightening in a psychological horror kind of way would have been to maybe get it from the perspective of "B" -- as she was referred to in the movie -- the middle section of the centipede and according to the demented surgeon (played with unsettling method skill by German actor Dieter Laser), the absolute worse part of the gig. But I don't think we needed him to tell us that. However, it's still a good-looking piece of work, especially the almost performance-art way in which we see the centipede crawling around the grounds of the post-modern house, joined together like a living sculpture.  Welcome to my new literary home on the Internet, TedTorres.com!
Here you will find everything you need to know about me and about my work, including information on my books, personal essays, media reviews, and for all of my fellow writers out there, updates on the completion of my new third novel manuscript. So be sure to check back regularly as I continue to update this site, and thanks again for stopping by! |