Festival Madness

Festival Madness is my Work In Process Novel, now 417 pages of print and coming up to the exciting climax which I am trying to put into place without using up huge quantities of words. In the Sunday Globe, I finally found a photo of my "villian" who is really pretty cute and my protagonist likes him, defends him and doesn't realize he is a very bad guy. What makes Festival Madness unique is that the entire middle of the novel takes place at the Burning Man Festival (sic) in Black Rock City, Nevada.

You do know about Burning Man, don't you? Well, if not, just google it. I google everything. Wonder if google as a verb has hit any of the dictionaries yet.

So many things have to be set in place before the killer is revealed and the denoument (good old English class word) can take place. Writing is work in so many ways. Think of a plot, fill in the holes, think up characters, locales, scenes, conflict, lots of conflict, and keep everything in your head while writing it all down in a unique voice. Jeez! I have to confess that once I hit 70,000 words it is hard to remember every little thing. If I have to keep looking up the same thing, I set a bookmark. These are cool word shortcuts that are very useful. The "find" command is also very useful, as is search and destroy. I think so many people are writing now because word processing makes it easi(er). It still ain't easy, but the idea of typed pages and changes and all that retyping is more than daunting. My first draft is usually pretty garbagey, but I keep hacking away at all the bad stuff and trying to turn it into good words.

I keep a list of slang, words and sayings I might want to use. The first five words on the list are: tenebrous, duress, razzle-dazzle, bada-bing and jimjams. Good words! You get the idea. I've actually used jimjams already. English has scads of good words. Scads. There's a pretty good word.

I am reading a Death in Vienna and it is well written with a good sense of place. My only carps so far is that the bad guys are always 3 jumps ahead of the good guys (remember Helen MacInnes?) and coincidence seems to be playing a big part. Hell, it's only a book. The problem is that when you write you know the rules and when they get broken you notice, but rules are made to be broken although there are them that would dispute those words.

I haven't heard how things are in Frisco, Texas today. Hope they are getting abelly full of being a laughing stock. Probably too dense and self-righteous to realize. At least nobody brought a gun to school. Are there more really sick people in the world because there are just more people? This is something I've wondered for a long time.

Goodnight from Massachusetts.

Grapeshot

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