Cormac McCarthy is Jesus Christ

Reading Child of God by Cormac McCarthy has taught me little that I didn't already know about the author, merely reinforcing my opinion that McCarthy is perhaps the greatest living writer in the world. I've been spending a lot of time over the past couple of years picking up a lot of rules on how to write well and engagingly, and it's remarkable how McCarthy ignores basically every single one of them, yet writes the most compelling and exciting books I've ever come across. I'd like to know if his writing is brilliant because he doesn't know the rules and doesn't need to, or if he knows them but cunningly subverts them. I never could have imagined that an author whose content is basically just "and then he did this, and then he did that" could stand out for me as being a great writer, but McCarthy is certainly this. I've now read four of his books and rate all of them five stars. Apparently he's working on four new novels at the moment; at the grand age of 78 I hope he's got a few more years left in him to deliver some more classics and get the Nobel Prize that he deserves. Reading his novels makes me feel like a little kid sitting next to a fire and listening to a wizened old man telling me the story of his life, and this is a very good thing indeed when that life is full of scalp hunters and demons roaming epic American countryside.

Speaking of the rules of writing, I may have followed a couple I've picked up recently, regarding engaging the senses of a reader and building thought-provoking metaphors, a little too religiously. I thought that my new story, Zombie Mega Apocalypse, was more or less finished, until I read it aloud to my girlfriend last night, and realised that it was way too wordy, and definitely needs another draft before it's ready to be unleashed. Hopefully I can knock a few hundred words out of it at the weekend, and then it's back to the novel. Maybe I need to put the rules of writing to one side and just write, I guess paying too much attention to rules can leave you end up writing just like everyone else, and if I can't be Cormac McCarthy, I want to be me.