Postcards from Gothenburg harbour

januari 4, 2010 kl. 9:42 e m | Publicerat i Skrivande | 4 kommentarer

Having finished reading Dostoevsky’s ”Poor Folk” today, I took a stroll along the river. How glad I was to be alive and kicking, wearing a new pair of silver-coloured shoes!

I had this voice in my head: ”Go west, young man”, and I headed westward.

After a while I wondered if I wouldn’t enter America soon, but I had only crossed the border between Masthugget and Majorna (two parts of the city of Gothenburg / Göteborg). The thing is you can’t really walk to America from where I live (in Sweden, Scandinavia, Europe) unless you turn east and cross the vast plains of Siberia and the (hopefully) frozen Bering Strait. I could do this. The indians did it more than ten thousand years ago, and it can be done again, or … I could save money and book a flight. These are the options since the old ferry line Gothenburg – New York stopped running in the 70′s.

Anyway, I have this manuscript ”Mörker över Manhattan” (that’s Swedish for ”Darkness over Manhattan”), that I last year ISBN-registered and tried to make a bestseller. Well, it turned out to be just another fiasco.

I’m rewriting the story now and I also have the intention to make the story much, much longer (from 20,000 to at least 80,000 words). I should also change the title.

Can someone help me out with that? The new title?

The story is about a 53-year-old widow, bored with life, who, by the help of a friend, starts looking for love again. She finds it on a plane to New York, and the guy she falls in love with is a 25-year-old singer/songwriter-wannabe who travels to the city in hope of getting inspiration for awesome songs. She is well-situated, he is poor, she’s in love and he’s only eager to write songs to get his career starting.

What should the title be?

Please help me find an even better title than ”Darkness over Manhattan”. Perhaps something more … catchy.

Håkan Tendell