A note about influences

Evan S. Connell

There's a sense in which Sodom, Gomorrah and Jones is a marriage of two of my favorite novels, Evan Connell's Mrs. Bridge and John Dos Passos' USA trilogy. I use Connell's storytelling strategy of short vignettes, and I use Dos Passos' storytelling strategy of layering narrative with news events and impressionistic things. So what I have may seem like something of a "new" structure but in fact just combines the story strategies from two of my favorite works.

John Dos Passos

I am eager to finish all the nit-picking so I can sit back, relax, and return to this thing as an actual story, trying to read it not like a writer but like a reader. Be a while, I suppose, but it's an important step near the end.