Writers on Writing

Grapeshot has not been idly sitting in front of the fire drinking rum toddies, although she would like to. This weekend was the big writer's conference and the only thing better than writing when you are on a roll is to talk about writing with other writers. Brain candy. Talk to agents who may exhibit a mild enthusiasm for one's ideas. Reconnect with old friends. Drink a few glasses of wine.

We were at a hotel with suave debonair hockey boys (a college team) and very young cheerleaders (maybe high school or even junior high). The hockey boys were dark, handsome young men sprawled on sofas in sport coats and ties looking bored out of their minds talking on cell phones or just zoning out oblivious to 200 middle aged writers in their midst. If onlyI had walked by with a wide angle camera to catch them posed just as they were, each one set apart from the rest, god what a picture that would have been.

Fortunately for all, the very young cheerleaders arrived after the hockey boys left. Different schools, different cultures, different times, different mores.

In the mail when I got home a nice (sometimes they actually are nice) letter from an agent rejecting World of Mirrors. Nobody is connecting with this book, which is the one I'm going to chop 15,000 words out of, take out of the series, make darker, sexier, with even more betrayal and violence and market it as a stand-alone thriller and proced with my computer crime series. We'll see; we'll see.

I had a character named Earl that was trailer park trash before the TV series. This business of seeing my ideas in the paper and on TV is freaking me out.

My short story is finished (almost) rather a long one for me at 5500 words in which I was channelling the voices of my father and his brothers long ago in North Georgia and this experience was a little weird but not unpleasant and just when I thought the story was finished. along came a final o-henryish twist that I like a lot. Just one more paragraph, actually.

Sometimes at a writing conference, the light bulb comes on in your head with a fantastic flash and a glare and even what seems (at least for the moment) like brilliance, when someone is talking about something else entirely, and that's just the way it is.

I am always awed by writers, some of the most intelligent people you will ever meet, not necessarily exhibiting their erudition but it's there along with the unusual backgrounds and throw in imagination and hard work (can't ignore that) all of which combines to create books that we want to read.

If you want to take a look at an edit of the prologue of the novel I can't sell, hie yourself over to Flogging the Quill. http://www.floggingthequill.com/ The editing is first-rate.

I'm taking a bit of vacation and won't be updating the blog until Thanksgiving weekend, at which time I will have tales, because as Goethe said, "who takes a trip can tell a tale," and that is still true.

Aloha, for sure.

Grapeshot