Catwaxing Project

So for a while I've been thinking about horror/suspense/dark fantasy/thriller/mystery novels that have writers as protagonists, antagonists, or some other sort of significant but nist-less character, and I've decided to try to put together a list of as many I can find.

Off the top of my head, I have:

Lisey's Story by Stephen King
Bag of Bones by Stephen King
Misery by Stephen King
The Shining by Stephen King (noticing a trend here...)
The Hellfire Club by Peter Straub
Small Town by Lawrence Block
Who Made Stevie Crye? by Michael Bishop
Faerie Tale by Raymond E. Feist
The Peter Wimsey novels in which Harriet Vane appears, written by Dorothy L. Sayers
The Tim Underwood books (eg The Throat, Koko) by Peter Straub

I am specifically excluding straight SF, non-dark fantasy, and mainstream works, such as Herovit's World by Barry Malzberg or The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, and Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon.

Does anyone have any further suggestions?

Nuggets gleaned while catwaxing

While avoiding working on my book by surrounding myself with other people's at a local used bookstore, I came across one of the weakest book blurbs I've seen in my life:

Giant's Bread by Mary Westmacott (aka Agatha Christie)
"A satisfactory novel..." -- The New Yorks Times

Talk about damning with faint praise.

Still more circular catwaxing

I was in rare form today. I wrote 1300 words of an entirely different novel (un autre roman) in an attempt to avoid working on either of the two novels or the novella with looming deadlines.

And then I wrote a blog post detailing the hour-long process of tweaking the first paragraph to get it right.

Not sure how long it's going to take me to top that one.

There are some cats money can't wax. For everything else, there's Wikipedia.

Reading up on 1984 fashion, early eighties movies and the casts thereof: one hour.
The one throwaway sentence you needed the reference for: thirty seconds.
Having a well-waxed cat? Priceless.

a copular verb in the present tense

Elizabeth Bear (1:01:28 PM): ...does anybody know how Russians punctuate dialogue?

Leah Bobet(1:04:39 PM): I do not, sorry.

Bear (1:05:28 PM): I have learned that Russian lacks a copular verb in the present tense, and so it may be indicated by a dash.

Bear (1:05:39 PM): IE, they have no equivalent of "to be."

Bear (1:06:17 PM): I am a jelly doughnut, then, in Russian becomes I -- jelly doughnut.

Bear (1:06:34 PM): Aha!

Bear (1:07:15 PM): They use a combination of the dashes and the guillemets

Bear (1:07:17 PM): win!


One wonders how one translates "To be or not to be" or "I think, therefor I am," into Russian.

...ooo, here's a webpage on domovoi....