Got two chapters revised today when I thought I’d only, at most, get one.

But somehow, after I finished putting this chapter into the eyes of the other character, I still had some stamina left, and I got started in on the next.

It wasn’t that hard. Just really changing tenses, first person present into third person point of view. It made the world of difference.

I may have mentioned this in an earlier post, but it always reminds me of what that Joe Pesci character, Vinny, in My Cousin Vinny says. He holds up a card and he’s talking about how the prosecutor will make it look like it’s solid like a brick, with four sides and everything, but he won’t show you that it’s thin as paper, and the case is weak.

Well stories are like that too. Each story has the perfect character and format it should be told from.

When you get it right, when you get the angle just right, the story will flow. It won’t require an effort to write it (well at least not that much of an effort).  After a lot of wrestling, a lot of false starts, it seems to be finally happening.

I finished reading Rebecca too, and once again, it took my breath away. It is SO good, even after so many years and so many reads. I was walking on my treadmill and finished it and even though I knew how it would end I still dreaded the ending and I turned right back to the beginning to start all over again. Some books are like that. They’re like mind candy, comfort food.

Her sentences have such a nice cadence to them. And the storytelling voice has such authority.

I saw the movie once. It was directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It was flawless, so similar to what I had imagined and yet they changed a crucial part. I won’t give it away, in case someone wants to read the book, but the book is much much better.

It’s funny about spoilers. I never seem to mind them. I like knowing the ending before I read a book. First of all if I know where it’s headed, I know whether I want to bother reading it.

Reading a book is such an investment of time. There’s been so many times where I’ve picked up a book after a rave recommendation and felt absolutely cheated by the end of it.

Apparently Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca won best picture oscar in 1940, the year after Gone with th Wind. The book itself was published in 1938.

I was leafing through the beginning and it seems Daphne Du Maurier died in 1989.

I went on to read her other books as well. The Parasites was a very cynical look at high society. Frenchman’s Creek was her attempt at a pirate story I suppose.

I never did read My Cousin Rachel. Somehow the title turned me off, and it sounded too close to Rebecca. I remember starting it, and something about the crossroads just creeped me out. Maybe that was her point, but still…

I’ll always remember a scene in one of the books, funny but I can’t remember if it was Jamaica Inn or Frenchman’s Creek that had a scene of the protagonist coming across a letter written by a preacher whom they had thought was such a saint and it described his contempt for his congregation.

I wonder if it wasn’t scandalous and a bit exciting for her to portray religious people in such a negative way.

It’s a common thread through so much of literature isn’t it? This lampooning of the religious as self-righteous busybodies.

And yet societal pressure is not always such a bad thing.

There was a statistic recently that more than half of all children are born out of wedlock. I still find that scandalous.

It’s like people think that love will keep them together. That sentiment makes for a good title of a love song, but in reality, it isn’t enough. And women seem to suffer the most for it.

The men go off and find other mates, more than willing, and usually a little or a lot younger. It’s the women who’ve lost the best years of their lives in the process.

But I’m rambling.

The point of what I’m trying, so awkwardly to say, is I wonder if books like Rebecca, even though they’re so exquisitely written, I wonder if they don’t or didn’t, actually sabotage those societal pressures that keep people, who might otherwise be tempted to do the incorrect thing, on the straight and narrow.

We seem to be living at a time when anything goes. Nobody dares have any standards at all for fear of being judgmental. 

And so, when a man runs off on his wife and refuses to pay child support, there are still those among his friends who will invite him and the new woman to dinner. They are not social outcasts. Maybe their friends have read a novel where the protagonist, a sympathetic fellow, reminds them of their friend. In fact it seems like the woman is more the outcast, she is pitiable and the victim.

It’s not good.

I wish they at least did suffer some pangs of shame. I think it would be better for them.