Cooking the Hook - NEW

What are they going to do? Kill me? Today I packed off the first draft of Prophet's Tango, book 1 to a couple of readers.

I've been studying the Tarot for years. I'd love to make a living being the exotically draped crone telling and making fortunes on a vine-dripping, candlelit veranda somewhere. Terrified that it will come to pass. When I have been so bold as to give a reading (something about getting paid to do this is frightening) I tell people that the cards are just a way of shining a light on possible choices. Choices we all have, moment to moment. Pointing out options that one might not have considered. Signposts...cue the twilight zone music. It's like this. I'm deep into revising, rewriting actually, the novel I've been working on for three years. It's really two, possibly three, books and there's been a full-time job and a lot of life along the way so I don't feel bad about the time span. I've come to a place in the story where I have to acknowledge Anna's profound loneliness, and as the dudes say, I am unmanned. Can't get it up. Can't go th...

I walk in circles for a half hour, netting up the tree trash, setting up a gentle underwater cyclone to gather the wandering loose crap into the center. I made another circle with the brush all around the insides. Think of Death with his scythe. By now the really small stuff has gravitated to the center and I net it up and dump it over the side. The pump is ancient and does little more than create a desultory current. The cleaning is up to me. All the while, I've been back thinking about the Problem at Hand..whatever scene or situation in the MS that I'm working on, or working hard at avoiding. Today was the first time this year that I've gotten into the water and put this routine in motion and it paid off handsomely. While I was staring at my toes a real, juicy motivation came to light for one of the antagonists in my book. Before now, he was just a miserable bastard. Now he's a miserable bastard with a mission.

Is like shaving off prison tattoos a square inch at a time. Maybe. So far it works like this. I'll read the last scene that WORKED and then the new victim, the next one and the one that follows it. If it fails on enough fronts - and I've had more than half do just that, I brood over the truth of it. The five 'whys'. Then I start the autopsy. Print and then redact - just like in the movies- with the broad, black marker anything that's crap. Anything that's not a jewel. Then I brood on it some more and find a different way to set some, not all of those jewels. A setting that not only makes the scene worthwhile but nods to the one before it and sets up the next. Dominos dipped in nitro.

I was with Charlie yesterday and my phone fell down behind a low table in his room. It's coffee table Jim built from salvaged doors a few years before he passed. Gorgeous. Heavy. Perfect toddler play table. There was some blind groping and I recovered the phone, blew off the dust bunnies and found this accidental image. Hiding under the back of the lower shelf was Charlie's Caddy!  It had been missing for a while and he was tickled to rediscover it. I was beat when I got home and didn't trust myself to write anything much beyond a bit of dialogue that occurred to me on the drive so I started tinkering with this rather haunting image, adding text, mocking up a book cover. I'll spare you. But studying the image, I had a stark revelation about the WIP. Every character - with notably few exceptions -  has a car that's associated with each of them in a way that is as incidental as saying "Ray was an old-school greaser." It should come as no surprise t...

Colin had been working on getting the pool cleaned out after a very tough winter. Tough in that, for the first time in memory, there was no ice to worry about. The bio-diversity of the water left standing over the winter was particularly nasty. But it's filled now - (just before writing this post there was a torrential downpour, so it's probably topped off!)  Two new ducky lifeguards are hard at work dribbling chlorine here and there. Now all I need is for the water temp to get up to where I can get in and do the hand scrubbing. Maybe next weekend. This morning I went on a little ride-a-long with Charlie and Jake to urgent care. Poor little bugger has been perking a sinus infection for a few days. Time for some pink medicine.  He'll be his usual charming self by Monday when I spend the day with him. After a second overdye, I finally got that Vera Bradly backpack a color I can live with. It's a bit large for day to day but will be nice for when I haul the...

It's very easy to let this habit of reporting slip away when nothing creatively shareable is going on. Writing is like that. Raw first drafts are hard enough to share with other writers in small groups. You are lucky if you can find crit partners who will be both straight with you and instructive. I've recently been that lucky and have been giving most of my free time over to the first draft, which is morphing into its first major revision. my peonies have bloomed and gone! Stitchers, imagine, if you will, a piece you've labored on, mostly in secret (shades of Quilt National!) - an epic piece, say 8 feet by 22 feet - that's right, I said FEET, not inches.  And so the powers that be have let you know that No Way will it ever see the light of day in that form and you have to make a triptych out of it. Somehow hacking it into hangable pieces. At first, the rebel in me said, "Fuck you and your pony!" but after looking at this steaming pile of  222+k of words ...