Rod Raglin
This blog will touch on the experiences I have as a writer (not to be mistaken for my experience as a writer, i.e. how many books I've written, etc); the pleasure and the pain, the joy and the grief, the satisfaction and the frustration, the magic and the reality - have I left anything out, oh yeah, the rejection, rejection and more rejection, the humiliation and the embarrassment, the jealousy and the resentment - that pretty much covers it, except for why I do it which perhaps I'll realize along the way. Are you totally confused? Good, let's begin.
Story of disgraced journalist lacks credibility
Kitty Logan is a disgraced journalist. In her unbridled drive for success she's cut corners and libeled an innocent man. The tabloid television news show she worked for is being sued for a lot of money.
The only one who still believes in Kitty is Constance, an editor and Kitty's mentor, but Constance is dying.
When Kitty asks Constance what story she regrets not writing, Constance tells her to fetch a file folder from her office. In the file is a list of one hundred names and nothing else. Before Constance can explain the importance of these names or how they're related she dies.
Partly because Kitty sees this as an opportunity to salvage her career and partly as a tribute to her late friend she decides to investigate these names and see if she can find and write the story that links them.
She can't. Or at least she hadn't been able to forty percent into the novel.
Rather than the unfolding of a promising plot premise the reader is presented with Kitty's very ordinary life, with the exception of excrement being smeared on her front door numerous times from irate readers and supporters of the man she libeled.
After interviewing a half dozen or so people on Constance' list and getting nowhere Kitty's getting frustrated and so was I.
At the beginning I had stretch my suspension of disbelieve to include the improbable plot point the the story hangs on - that a tabloid news show would allow a story to air that accuses a high school teacher of sexual misconduct with a student and fathering her child without solid evidence, like maybe DNA testing. I mean, do they have a death wish?
Being a journalist myself I know this would never be allowed to happen. If the reporter was incompetent enough to submit such an incendiary story without irrefutable evidence it would have been killed by the news editor, and for sure never got past the producer.
However, besides this grievous lack of research of the author's part I finally abandoned the novel because the story was boring and the writing mediocre.
Six names down, ninety-four to go? I don't think so.
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