Cooking the Hook - NEW

    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...