Suck It Up

Actually, my week has been more like _uck it up! When the pressure is on, it's a bad idea to try to keep up with blogs and tweets and the like. Dashing off a few words can be deadly. So, these words will be measured.

When I am writing, every novel has a song that I associate with it, and I usually play the song over and over until it melts into every cortical fold and becomes subtext to the novel. The Shadow Warriors song was Pachebel's Canon, but, alas, I had to cut the scene with the Canon, but I still think of it as The Love Theme from The Shadow Warriors. It was a fantastically sexy scene, too. I hope to canabalize it sometime.

World of Mirrors also had it's song. Another Night by the Real McCoys. Yup, The Love Theme from World of Mirrors.

What of Promiscuous Mode? Can you believe Walk Away Renee? I must have played it a hundred times. The Love Theme From Promiscuous Mode. I Will Survive played during a key scene. I love that novel. My writing group loved the novel. Significant Other loves the book. But alas, no agent has loved the novel. Alas, alas.

And Festival Madness? Mais oui, that novel had two love themes. The first is Total Eclipse of the Heart and the other is Desenchante (please add all the accents) by Zazie and Obispo who sang it to me thru earphones on an Air France 747 over the Atlantic. So romantic. It took forever to get the CD. My brother-in-law finally sent it from Europe. Amazon wanted a godawful amount of cash and I just had to have it.

So now I'm working on my "fem jep" (woman in jeopardy) suspense novel, In Flight. So far there are two song possibilities. One is I Need to Know by Marc Anthony; the second is I'm Shipping Up To Boston by the Drop Kick Murphy's. Not too romantic. But still. It has a certain je ne sais pas and the energy it created when Papelbon came in to close a game was phenomenal. Right now I'm playing Marc Anthony. The odd thing is that song is associated with my drug lord, not the main character. I love my drug lord. He's a total play against the stereotype.

This book is, like the others, not exactly writing itself, although the beginning did, creating false confidence. I am plugging away, one sentence after another, one page, another scene and I just closed in on 75,000 words. I always write everything long and then cut. It's easier to take words out than put words in. Believe me. I cannot for the life of me write one of these 75,000 word mysteries. 75,000 words always seems like a little chicken-shit book that you can almost read in one setting, the kind of novel that you might finish before the plane lands. Horrors!

This is NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month. Unfortunately, I always have a BIG EVENT in November (see beginning of this post) and it would be incredibly stupid to try to do that, too. Maybe next year. Basically, what NANOWRIMO does is give you permission to write a really shitty first draft, which is what most first drafts are, with the exception of Robert Parker who, I am told, writes such a stellar first draft that he doesn't revise. My god, I hope none of my first drafts ever see the light of day. We are talking really BAD Sentences.

Of course without a publisher breathing down my neck, I don't have to hurry and can write bad sentences with aplomb, knowing there's adequate time for rewriting.

The Huffington Post today advised calling a self-pubbed book an "independently published" book. I like that. Pretty cool, no?

I hope this lengthy post makes up for weeks of not much. I haven't tweeted (except for one disastrous boo-boo) or posted to Face Book either. Exile and cunning and all that stuff. Ha ha.

Grapeshot

Sucking It Up is a Universal Experience

Proust, Joyce, and others have had to suck it up, too. Even F. Scott Fitzgerald.

http://www.columbusalive.com/?sec=upfront&story=alive/2007/1206/u-mental.html

I don't compare myself to them, novelist of computer crime as I am, but it's nice to be in good company.

Grapeshot

Recipe en route, as well as photos of last night's broccoli-mushroom quiche. So stop by again soon.

Tonight it the party at the local mystery book store (Kate's) and I'm taking a lovely appetizer.

Grapeshot

James Joyce

Here is a link to an essay about Joyce's Ulysses which is so readable and lucid that I have to share--a bit about Rushdie too, but mostly Joyce.

http://greatliteraryworks.blogspot.com/2007/08/crucial-book-of-salman-rushdie.html

We watched last night, via On Demand, The Good German. The better parts of the movie were "real" scenes of postwar Berlin from old documentaries. The story was cliched to the max, but George Clooney is always easy to look at (ask Ms Snark), even when he's been beaten up beaucoup times. I won a tee shirt in a short, short story I made up about the movie poster. Actually, my story was better. No humblesness this morning. But: what the hell does one do with a tee shirt that reads "The Good German"? I have to confess I gave it to the VietNam Vets. It was also kind of small. The stupid-ass decisions we have to make every day.

Writing group meets tonight. Still need to get those agent letters for Promiscuous Mode out. The agents ain't gonna line up on my doorstep without communicatio, without queries, without synopses, without killer first chapters.

Festival Madness is almost ready, still lacking the killer first paragraph with a 'Hook.' The book one is writing is always the best one.

I'm having serious doubts about the marketability of the YA we are planning. The current wisdom is to write the book you love, the book you must write, but that wisdom hasn't produced anything but (at least) two unpublishable books. So I dunno.

Now for breakfast: Cheerios with vanilla yogurt, 2% milk, and half a banana. Good! Good for you! Some nutritional nazi will come out of the woodwork saying drink skim, not 2%. To them my cat's middle paw. Ooops! Friday is cat blog day.

Alors!

Grapeshot