Still playing catch up

Not recovered yet from The New England Crimebake, but at least I'm not waking up feeling like I've been tasered.

On the writing front: Last week I took the first pages of the novel my writer's group liked (loved is much too strong a word) best, a novel that one agent really liked, but he didn't represent that sort of book, and passed it on to his colleague and "it didn't really work" for her. Another agent liked, but was only selling cozies, and this ain't your Aunt Agatha's knitting mystery. Nope.

One publisher said the beginning was rushed (I was following the current "wisdom" to drop a body in Chapter one and had slashed the first 40 pages to get there), and also that the character wasn't believable, yet they asked for any future novels. Go figure.

So, after heard from an agent that the East German book (because of old technology, not the writing) is pretty well unpublishable, and not being able to figure out a way to bring new technology into the picture, that book will either be retired to the backup drive or brought into the world via POD. Haven't decided. Too bad the wait was so long the technology is historical. Yup, that's right. Remember CD-ROM's? No? Thought not.

So, I dusted off the "Wisconsin Book," Promiscuous Mode and took the first 6 pages to the writing group and with the years gone by, they thought it pretty much sucked,. Not of course, what I wanted to hear, and some of the writing did seem a little kludgey because in the meantime I've knocked off another 200,000 words writing this and that. More experience and all.

So . . . wondering what to do. Don't really want to sh__can 3 novels, nosirreee. Nobody wants to do that. So there I was last Thursday, driving to Toastmasters, only 6 minutes from the house, and barely time to think of anything, but a new beginning popped into my bed, practically fully-formed.

So I wrote it. Anyone reading these 6 pages gets the whole setup, and should fully understand what the book is "about." And the body drops later, but we get a chance to "meet" the body. How this is going to work out is anybody's guess.

Made a fab Vietnamese shrimp recipe last night. Lots of good veggies and seasonings. Tonight is goulash soup again. All holiday shopping done, and now the pears have to ripen and we're good to go. Grocery crowded. Everybody's cooking up a storm.

I enjoyed Jane Kramer's article on cooking Thanksgiving in foreign countries, having done that once myself.


Grapeshot