The passage of my life is measured out in shirts

Complaining about a new seven-hour production / reading of The Great Gatsby, Time theater reviewer Joan Marcus mentions in passing that the novel is 49,000 words long. I knew there was a reason I liked it. I first read Gatsby when my brother was doing his first year of English lit at Auckland Uni. His secondhand paperback edition was a tie-in with the 1974 movie version with Robert Redford on the cover so I picked it up because I liked Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid*. (My brother is seven years older than me, so I must have been around 12.) Anyway: in; out - bang. And that's the book. Whether or not it dates from that experience, I have always associated the form of the novel with concision. This puts me at odds with almost everyone nowadays but when I look back on my book collection (i.e. visualise it in its Kane / Raiders style storage warehouse) my favourite - or rather my most enjoyed - reads are the shorter ones. Why fuck around? You focus, You get in there, you get out. Travel light, etc.

I'm closing in on the final draft of The New Thing ™ and cutting left and right. Last draft was 90,000; this one is peeking under 75,000. I keep what's been cut in a dump file and review it afterwards; no matter how good it is, it's never good enough.

* Actually I liked Alias Smith & Jones on TV but knew it was a rip-off. Not a bad one, though. I remember watching M*A*S*H* on TV and thinking, 'This would make a really good movie...'