I finished the fourth-or-fifth draft of Sharp Things. I hoped that would be the last draft before letting a reader look at it, but such a thing is not meant to be. I have to run through the book again. The good news is drafts go pretty fast now, so I can probably get through that draft yet this month. Then it is going to a reader for sure. Everything is there. I just need to pull it tight.

I haven’t mentioned word count for a while. Sharp Things is currently right around 66,000 words. I was shooting for 65,000, so it came in pretty close to the mark.

I also continue to read Jim Thompson. I read The Killer Inside Me. It is maybe Thompson’s most well-known work. Stanley Kubrick said it was probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered…

The Killer Inside Me has been made into a movie a couple of times. Stacy Keach was in a version in 1976, and Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson and Jessica Alba made one in 2010.

The Killer Inside Me is one of those books where the main character is a morally-corrupt person, and the drive of the story comes from how long they can keep worming their way out of a comeuppance. In that way, The Killer Inside Me is kind of similar to the Ripley books by Patricia Highsmith. I also wondered if the The Killer Inside Me perhaps inspired the Dexter books by Jeff Lindsey to some degree. I noticed the main character referenced a father who tried to help him control his Sickness the way Dexter had a father who helped him control his Dark Passenger.

Anyway, I enjoyed the twist of The Killer Inside Me because it was simple, effective and I did not see it coming at all. I am hesitant to even call it a twist because it fit so well into the story that it was more or less a natural development of the events portrayed. In the end, the main character wasn’t so far ahead of the game as he thought, and the rug got pulled out from under him.

Reading Thompson was definitely educational. The way Thompson dashed books off on a typewriter showed me that I can get too bogged down trying to make things work at times. Thompson’s writing and story-telling had some ragged edges, but, as a reader, I didn’t care, because Thompson’s voice was compelling enough to keep my brain moving along rather than stopping to nitpick.

I’m sure Thompson would laugh at me and my five-or-six drafts, and all I could do is laugh along with him. I am what I am at the end of the day. I can only speed the process up so much. Back to Sharp Things…