My Fair Lady

Tonight we're going into town in crappy weather to see My Fair Lady at the renovated Opera House. We go to the theater often enough, but it's been years since I've seen a Broadway musical. Have you noticed that the number of revivals far exceeds the new productions, and if you count the new productions that are derivative of other works, e.g. "Wicked", the list of new becomes even shorter. S.O. reread a big of Shaw's Pygmalion, which MFL is based upon, and said it ran fairly true to the Shaw play.

It is true there are only a few plots, and an exceedingly small number of new dramas. I mean, the Greeks stole from the Romans and Shakespeare and the Elizabethans stole from everyone, and so it goes. A new spin on an old plot is always good. Wish I could think of one. Actually, I have thought of two, but haven't developed them beyond the thinking stage. It is the writing stage where the hard work really begins.

Speaking of work, I'm back, hacking away at Promiscuous Mode, cutting even more words. My writing group thought the new beginning sucked. Why I even started writing Crime Fiction is now a mystery to me, since I appear to have so little talent for it. On the other hand, I had little real talent for computer programming and I became very good at it, due to diligence and application. And persistence. Give me a bug and I would find it, no matter how obscure it was or how long it took.

My process now is to try to cut 10 words from every page (more or less), which will decrease the word count by about 4200. I've already brought it down by 4,000 words. I look at each sentence and try to determine if it can be terser, sharper, more finely honed. Well, you get the idea. Do I even need the sentence? I notice that sometimes I will use a "tell" sentence, followed by a "show" sentence, and therefore the "tell" can disappear. On the other hand, I see a part of the story that needs a little bit more development. It always happens. Cut some, add some, and hope the result is still a decrease in the word count.

I wouldn't be so obsessive about this except so many agents have said, "not for me." I never know if the computer crime, the locale, the promiscuous main character, or the story is what turns them off. Time and again I've heard that the writing is good, whatever that means. After five novels, all of them rewritten umpteen times, I have probably written the one million requisite words. Used to be 500,000. What the hell happened there?

Soon, this blog and its sister blog, about Proust, will total 1000 posts. Zowie! If I knew who the 12,000th reader was, I would send him/her a book. I could have written another novel instead of all these posts. Blogging is thinking aloud. Keeps me sane. Well, you know, sort of sane.

Alors, and onward,

Grapeshot