Cooking the Hook - NEW

Alone the next morning with her coffee and tarot cards, Anna was adrift in the ocean of sensations and emotions she’d been steeping in since the shooting and  imagined that she glowed in the dark. Anyone who looked at her could see it. She pulled one card from the deck - the ten of Swords.  Her soul pinched her hard on the heart. The dead man lay prone under a black sky, ten swords staking him to the ground, his cloak and the earth under him bloodied. She remembered the day Tam caught her trying to duck the same card back into the deck. She was eight or nine and it had frightened her. Tam pinned the card to the kitchen table with a strong finger. “ No, no, little girl. There can’t be no light without darkness.” Her aunt bent down beside her at the table and put an arm around her. “ See this card? All them swords? All that blood? This is bad as it gets. Yes, that body is dead, but the spirit goes on, you know that. See his hand? Even dead, he blesses his killers...

  "The Killing" did not disappoint but there may just be a KILLING over the commercials!  Yesterday I put off reading an article in the NY Times about the resurrection of the show -I didn't want to run into any spoilers and I won't print any here.  The article had tasty bits about the actual writing of the story. Much to think about for my own writing. I've self-identified as what's called a "spontaneous" writer. A scene here, a character sketch there adding up to a whole pile of (very) loosely related fragments. Picture a cow shitting it's way across a broad pasture, wandering, circling and stepping  in  its old crap. It's become frustrating, pointless and messy. I won't call it a plot but I need to make a map for myself with the things I like about a good story, well told.  A  Start , a  Middle  and a  Resolution  - with plenty of wandering, woolgathering and time shifts and character exploration worked  in  along the...

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.