Cooking the Hook - NEW

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 ...