Cooking the Hook - NEW

"In reality, the woman belonged to sometime else as she was just here at this time by accident. A slip of the cosmic order had caused her to be born out of sequence, under the wrong stars. She had been overlooked by the universe. In the book of all names and beings, she was unlisted, with no past nor future written down for her. She was invisible to the gods, the passage of time and the protection of the stars."

In the late 50's I spent most after school hours in the public library waiting for my father to pick me up on his way home from work. I wore out the children's library in short order and haunted the upstairs, adult stacks where there many places to hide with whatever books I could reach. I was in third grade when I read John Hershey's “Hiroshima”. I remember taking it to the desk and asking the librarian if it was a true story. Alarmed, she asked, “Have you read it yet?” I knew I was probably in trouble, but I had to answer true. She looked at me sadly and said, “Yes, I'm sorry to say it really happened.” Not long after,  I was sent home from school for refusing to participate in the duck and cover exercises that were supposed to save us in the event of an atomic bomb attack. I told anyone who would listen that the wall of windows and bricks in our classroom would bury and burn us alive and we'd all be dead of radioactive rain and we'd never see our fam...

For those of you who don't know, this is WUUCON . It was grand, but now we are back and the task it to apply all that we learned to whatever we are working on. Picture trying to swallow a Whopper whole, no chewing permitted. I feel for the people who came to the conference with what they thought were completed manuscripts. There  were more than a few people with that pie-eyed, deer- in-the-headlights look on their faces as Lisa Cron crossed her forearms to make one of her many points or Donald Maass' eerie silences hovered over us as he studied the distance and waited for you to really absorb what he just said. All I have is a raggedy first draft. I don't think you call it an autopsy when the patient is still alive, but that's my task at hand. There will be screaming. Tears. To that end, I made a fresh start yesterday by relocating my workspace. The studio is still all about the textiles, stitching and visual art in a big way and mess. In one corner is the sma...

I posted the following to the group FB page. I'm late to this dance too. My first two hours off the plane were spent explaining my absence to a two-year-old who acquired language while I was gone and he wasn't buying my story. His watchword, the one all writers should quiver in front of, was “Why?” quickly followed by, “Hello, Nana.” simultaneously comforting himself with my return and scolding me for going in the first place. Maybe it's because I'm reaching old. Maybe my heart is just too scarred over, but I felt mysel f unwilling or unable to lean into to the sweet gravity of camaraderie that flashed all around me like groundling firecrackers. It was all wonderful to behold, felt like backing your butt up to a bonfire, not too close, thanks. I knew I wasn't alone in my reticence. The ghosts were not on the sixth floor at all. None of this to say I'm sad or sorry. On the contrary, I feel like I've been on a successful raiding party and have come h...

The trouble with bad guys is, there's no trouble. You just don't get their perspective on the situation.

It's not my blue heaven, but it will surely do. A good friend lives a short drive away and the complex is keeping the pool opened and maintained as long as the warm weather holds. We seem to be the only ones who know about it! For a while now I've been struggling with Scrivener, trying to make it print out only the synopsis. Even in the windows version, I can see the MAC mind of the designer everywhere. This PC brain finally solved the problem and I was able to bring a list of scenes with me, poolside. Reading and thinking my way through them and it dawned on me. You really can't kill the main protag three-fourths of the way through the book. Nope. Other less significant things were revealed, but this one's a biggie.

    Annabea and Tam had been secretly teaching each other to read and write since the little girl could sit up and hold a crayon. Tam had never learned and was reluctant to subject herself to scorn so she made do as many unlettered adults did. Each morning when chores were done, Tam would take off her apron, smack her broad palms together and say to Bea, “Time for school,” something she had no firsthand experience with.     The two-year-old laboriously stacked three county phone books on the kitchen chair, climbed to her perch and waited with her grubby little fists clutching air while Tam got out the pad of lined newsprint and the cigar box full of pencils and crayons. Tam warned her, “Now don’t be letting other people know about our business here,” as the two of them drew copies of the bold letters from the front page of yesterday's newspaper.     The truth was that Bea had figured out reading and writing on her own while she sat on an apple b...

I'm seriously considering relocating my laptop, or maybe even a basic, used desktop to the kitchen. It seems like all new ideas come while I'm either doing dishes while listening to the radio or while I am driving. The notes I take on legal pads or junk mail envelopes don't carry the spirit with them when I bring them upstairs to transcribe. On the happy note, I've discovered a living artist who I plan to commission for my book cover. Up to now, I haven't spent a moment of thought on it. Now I've found someone who has the style and vision. Odd that it's compelled me away from procrastinating away from finishing the first draft.

I've been spending most of my free time writing, but I'm at that place I'll call “Dithering Heights”. Where writers go to fart around, waste time and not get needful shit done. Where we fool with stuff that's already written rather than address things like, “Was THAT necessary?” or “That scene suffers from pointless suckage!” Also the ever popular “Who the hell wrote that tripe?” and "WTF?" My characters have begun having conversations about getting the oil changed in the car, reciting shopping lists and disagreements about what brand of ravioli is the best.  Time for a break. An excellent weekend included the best..... Friends, family and baseball.  

I'm just starting to look at my first draft with revision in mind; the Frankenstein kind of revision and it's terrifying. Is there life in all this shit?? Comes this.            Salvation .  At least a signpost.

For whatever reason, the universe, or more particularly, the internet, has been coughing up so much (mostly) good information about writing that I'm feeling a little overwhelmed. Fearful that I might miss something important. I have several craft-related books going on at the same time and a handful of novels and short story collections and I have not grown or found any additional time in my day. Meanwhile, my manuscript needs a scene by scene analysis. Shaping and pruning to follow. The hard work is ahead, So what do I do? I keep hearing conversations between various characters.                             "Have you ever made a mistake?"                "What d'you mean?" He rolled over onto his back. "I'm fuckin' perfect."                "You know what I'm talking about." She sat up dragging the sheets with her and looked out the...

I have been idly dreaming about having a small, vintage manual typewriter, as if that would help. I don't even know if I can still type on a manual machine and if I started using one would it wind up crippling me and what about that day job? I still spend eight hours a day on the computer and get paid for it. No matter how I lust after the sleek, shiny black vintage machines for sale all over the web, I'm not going to get one until I actually put my fingers on the keyboard and whack away for a while; see how it feels.  Although I had an ancient manual typewriter as a kid, I never learned to touch type until the late eighties on a computer keyboard. The whole notion is probably a pipe dream fueled by watching a couple of episodes of Band of Brothers last weekend. There were several scenes of a soldier pecking away at a portable typewriter, so incongruous yet so ubiquitous during World War II. I spent a lot of time over the weekend looking for an archive of the music t...

High as a kite with no string. Sometime during the transit of the Pink Moon I wrote the meat and bones of the finale. Hit print and passed out. I know it looks kind of like this now, but I can make it across and back and I'm not afraid of heights or alligators. I can fly and I taste bad.

A week is too long to think about something before putting it on paper. Spent the morning slipping back into all the characters skins. Even managed to kill one, but it might not have been the right one - I felt no sorrow or loss - so that will have to be revisited. Still lotsa words today.

In the writers group the other night, one of my friends pointed out that my winning contest entry worked out to be worth about three dollars a word. I reckoned that it might be the most money I ever earn as a writer. I think I'm going to remember that statement. Then, this morning, this popped up in the feed making me wonder how the serial format will work out. I remember how much I looked forward to each new issue if SK's "The Green Mile" when it was put out in the grocery stores alongside the weekly TV Guide. People were lined up to buy that one.                 "Thursday brings the launch of Julian Fellowes’s new novel. It’s called  Belgravia , and it reads,  from its description , as extremely  Downton Abbey -esque: “Set in the 1840s when the upper echelons of society began to rub shoulders with the emerging industrial nouveau riche,” the announcement goes, “ Belgravia  is peopled by a rich cast of characters.” There ...

     Ace sat with his back to the room and appeared to be reading a small prayer book. Actually, he was tearing out the pages one by one and eating them, chewing slowly and looking up at the ceiling of his cage as if he was memorizing the text. Billy, the bar's owner and bartender, said he only ate one or two pages a day – it was not as if he was hungry. Billy fed Ace every time he fed himself. In fact, he fed Ace first like he was worried about being poisoned; a fair concern because he treated the cook like dirt.      It bothered Bea to see Ace locked up like that. It was obvious that he was constantly pissed-off, unlike most captive monkeys who sank into apathy after a while. If anyone but Billy approached the cage Ace screamed and flung himself around inside. If you put your hands anywhere near his reach or grasp there would be blood. He once ate a drunk's left little finger.      The day he escaped she helped him by not saying a...

...and that is entirely enough about that . Back to work.

I'm still frittering with adrenaline. Hunting for my humbles and knowing I should be outside making a sacrifice to a slew of deities. Later babes, just feeling this for the moment. "Dear Deborah, CONGRATULATIONS! You have won the Writer Unboxed UnConference Scholarship package..."

"Thank you for your interest in the Writer Unboxed UnConference scholarship. If this is an application for consideration, thank you for your submission. Please  note that we don't have the available staff to respond to every submission personally, however, each submission will be considered by a 'blind' panel, and the scholarship winner chosen based upon merit and without prejudice."

Too near death today... I rolled up to the red light at Rt.29 and Killian/Indian Trail today, heading back from the park in Lilburn. It's a broad, busy intersection. I was first in line in the left northbound lane, the lane to my right was empty. Some kind of police activity going in the gas station on the corner there. Two cars, blue lights. First responders. There were no cars passing through the intersection. A pedestrian crossed in front of me. He had the light, he was in the crosswalk. I saw this: a man, sixty-ish, silver-haired, tan, fit and smiling. Taking a pull from a soft drink. Crisp, striped short sleeved shirt, pressed khakis, a gold watch on his wrist, he was close enough that he might have gotten crud on his pants from my bumper. He was watching the cop show too, head up, eyes front, not stuck to some damn gadget. He was in line with the passenger seat of my car ready to take a step into eternity when a flatbed truck - the big kind that can carry tw...

"It's the heart that makes the heat."

A drug dealing ladies man and part-time assassin with psychic skills meets the woman he'll mend most of his ways for. A new age con artist herself, she's got her own brand of psychic ability, and a troubling history of being on hand for untimely deaths.  When they meet, he’s on the lam from the life and she's married to a gangster wannabe who's blackmailing her to keep her in line. Cosmic lust comes before trust, but they must learn to work together if they hope to thwart her husband's plans to sell her and her secrets to settle a deadly debt.                  “So, just how do we turn this darkness into light?" she said and shuffled the cards. The deck was old and soft and made a purring sound in her hands. He picked up her thick braid, squeezed it gently and whispered in her ear,            "One well-deserving motherfucker at a time.” Then he wrapped the braid around her neck, tilted her head bac...