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In a bit or irony, I've finished red-lining GOODHALO. Sort of fitting on Valentine's Day, eh? You know with the red and the zombies and the...

Nevermind.

Anyway. It's a big step toward being closer to getting this puppy ready for 'prime time.' As quick as I am with other parts of this process, technical editing is always (for me) the most TEDIOUS part of the whole process. I'd much rather write 18 more books than have to tech-edit one.

But...that's the way it's done...at least in my funky little world.

Here's a small sample of what a part of one page of GOODHALO looks like, red-lined and all.

Man...doesn't that look like FUN? Actually, this is what just about EVERY page of my manuscript looks like. I mean, it's not the same words or anything like that, but it's chock-full of red. Again, this is my process. I tend to draft it fast to keep my short attention span in check and then it's a bit more fun to transcribe the changes, punch it up a bit, give it another scrutinizing read-through and then incorporate needed changes and suggestions from my fabulous critique partners.

Oh, how I'd love this thing to be ready by Spring. That's what I'm shooting for. The second installment is pounding on the door like you wouldn't believe.

All right. My work is done here. Hope you had a decent V-Day, y'all.

I went into Tony D'Souza's first novel, Whiteman, with bunches of biases: We had taken a marvelous story of his for Best American Fantasy, I have been following pretty closely his dispatches from Nicaragua about the Eric Volz case, and his editor is Tina Pohlman, for whom I have tremendous respect. The one negative bias I had toward the book is that (for various, complicated, contradictory reasons) I judge stories of middle-class white people in "exotic" settings more harshly than I do other sorts of stories. (And yet at the same time I am fascinated by such stories.)

For me, then, Whiteman accomplished a lot -- soon enough, I was so thoroughly drawn in by its narrative voice and particular details that it became, in many ways, just another book for me, one on which none of my biases had any effect while reading.

Whiteman is an episodic novel with a first-person narrator named Jack Diaz, who works for a relief agency called Potable Water International and lives for three years in a village in Ivory Coast. Each chapter is a pretty much self-contained short story, but the stories build off of each other, with many common characters and references to events in other chapters. The structure is basically linear, but not entirely, and the play of event and memory throughout the narrative gives the whole a rich texture.

What a reader makes of the novel depends very much on what they make of Jack Diaz. He's certainly no saint, and many of the story's events (good and bad) stem from his lust, recklessness, or both. He seems to have arrived in Ivory Coast hoping to be some sort of savior, but his time in the village quickly disabuses him of this fantasy, and he becomes obsessed with the seemingly unbridgeable gulfs of culture and expectation between himself and his friends and neighbors. At times, he is infuriatingly self-absorbed; at others, remarkably insightful. He ends up feeling that most of his efforts were futile, that though he certainly changed, he wasn't able to effect much change beyond himself. And yet it's clear that he did have an effect on his village and a few villagers in particular, though these effects were hardly predictable or scripted, and resulted as much from the fact of contact as from his individual personality.

There is often an egomania to do-gooder characters -- they want to have an individual, particular effect on some group they perceive as downtrodden or oppressed, and if they have such an effect then they feel powerful and saintly, and if they don't have the desired effect, or everything goes wrong, then it's still all about them. One of D'Souza's real accomplishments is to write a story from the perspective of a white American living outside his own culture who neither saves nor ruins the culture with which he has contact. There is contact, and change certainly results from it, but it is the ragged, complex change of real life.

The prose style of Whiteman is notable in that it is mostly straightforward, but sometimes takes on the tone of a folktale. Sometimes this effect feels awkward and even forced, bu