Cooking the Hook - NEW

I've been emailing back and forth with an unofficial beta-reader. Unofficial, but she's willing to read and comment and for that, I'm deeply grateful. She's a reader, not a writer. Bonus! She was sad to report that, at the end of part one, she did not like my female main character one bit. I was glad to hear it because that was my intention. I starting thinking back over how hard it's been for me to make her as fully faceted a character as the male MC. Then something the beta wrote about when she stopped liking Anna made me realize that, because of a very violent experience, Anna is suffering from post traumatic stress disorder which was not recognized, particularly for crime vicitms, unitl the 80's, the decade after this story takes place. I did a little quick google and she has many of the long list of criteria found in the DSM . Although she spent a short time in a mental facility, the stay was adjudicated and she resisted what little treatment there wa...

My FB feed is flooded with ads where authors (or maybe it's their publishers) are giving away books for free. Nada. Nothing.  After writing several books worth over the past three years, all I can think is this.

The entire "me too" thing has given me some pause about my female main character. Have I given her enough agency? Is she weak?   I let the question sit for a few days. I'm not touching it. The story is set in the mid 70's. Nobody even knew what it meant. She's not weak, but the price is steep. I'm not writing a comic book and I'm not going to pander to any current social trends.

I spent the better part of six hours rewriting a scene that was basically legless. It finished out strong and then I did something dufuss with the laptop. When I went looking for the scene later I couldn't find it. Somehow it looked like Scrivener had eaten it whole. I dug around and found the previous, shitty iteration and started jotting down what I could dredge from memory about the changes/improvements. Then I started doing stupid stuff in Scrivener, like remove and then place chapter headings. Do people do that anymore. Were they too clever? Annoying to the reader? ...and there it was, the chapter I thought had evaporated. Intact, just not in the sequence I thought it had been. whew. I'm going to bed before I fuck something else up.

The wheels come off my cart with only the slightest provocation these days. I'd rather be driving my car, blasting music or fooling around with the much-neglected house and garden. Ass in chair, fingers on the keyboard and chances are one in four that I'm spewing toxic invectives on FB about that carnival freak masquerading as our president. I should sue him for all the anxiety he's caused me. Then again, I've cooked up a few new inventive ways to dispose of bodies. Revision is equal parts wading through molasses in January and opening your veins until you faint.

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...