Writing Is Rewriting

During the Patriots/Green Bay game last night, I got back into my novel revision which during this pass is strictly cuts and fixing word usage when/where it jumps out.   With regret, I've cut several whole scenes and am contemplating cutting a semi-major character and all those references.  Ugh!  This is the part of writing that isn't much fun.  On the plus side, I must have sliced and diced several thousand words.  If I expunge the character or at least his many phone calls, I can purge a few thousand more, making the novel . . . the right length?

Do you like slim books like Dame Agatha Christie's that can be started at 9:00 p.m. and finished at 11:00?   Or do you like the big meaty novels of P.D. James or Elizabeth George?   Every reader has her faves.  I know local publishers who will not look at a book with more than 75,000 words (slim, slim, slim) which eliminates character depth, subplots, local color and really hones in one one story line.   That's not how I write, and those slim books are straight whodunnits, usually small town cozies.    Do you know what a so-called "cozy" mystery is? It's a story where "more tea is spilled than blood?"  Isn't that a great description?  Miss Marple comes to mind.  Usually a cozy has an amateur sleuth set in a small town and the murder occurs off scene, in other words, no graphic violence.  No sex and usually no bad language. Your 12 year old could read it.

The word "lite" comes to mind, but these are a beloved part of the genre, also known as "traditional" mysteries, but those can have sex and violence and a professional sleuth, think Spenser, Robert Parker's slim volumes without any "kerfluffel,"   Of course, Robert Parker wrote 3-4 books a year, so naturally they wouldn't be 125,000 word tomes.   The Boston mystery community misses him a lot.  No one can take Parker's place.

Back to rewriting.  Parker claimed he never did, that his first draft was also his last, and he wrote fast, so this is a great mystery to me how anyone would NEVER have a clunky sentence or forget the color of the car a character drove, or eye color, or all the details that make a book believable.  I genuflect before such genius.

I make my corrections in red ink.  It will be a job and a half to fix the manuscript.  Word for MAC has been throwing hissy fits lately.    Spell check aborts, losing my changes, the tool bar has to be tweaked every time a document is opened, and now the printer thinks I'm printing "small" pages and is doing something goofy to the page.  If you go to the help screens, you want to run off screaming, because the "fixes" are hideously technical and come with lots of warnings and even an old geek like me wouldn't  touch some of them with a ten foot pole. I don't know if re-installing Word for MAC would help.  Maybe for a while, but it began to crap out after just a few months.

My desktop looking neat for a change

Well, bleak thoughts that do not help the situation.   When software doesn't work as intended,  it makes life very difficult, like when the new financial software changed all my accounts to Euros during a upgrade and I couldn't change them back.  Alas, Microsoft Money, you were such  a gem, why did they get rid of you?

Enough gnashing of teeth.  It's the solstice, almost and the days will become longer and winter is truly here.  Not my favorite season, and once the holidays are over, endlessly bleak.   St. Agnes Eve and all that.  "The owl for all his feathers was acold."  How I love that poem.  Reading Proust again, too.  The favorite authors keep calling.

Back to editing and chopping out words and paragraphs.  I notice that sometimes the exact same thought is stated twice, and I can just strike out the poorest statement.   Chop those words.  Out!  Out!  Damn word.

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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.

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Kate's Mystery Books

This evening, Kate of Kate's Mystery Bookstore in Cambridge, MA will throw her annual holiday party, a soiree not to be missed. The crime-writing literati of the Boston area will gather to chat with fans, autograph books, nosh, schmooze, and yes, imbibe.

Kate is Boston's best known promoter of the mystery genre. Her wide umbrella shelters thrillers, cozies, horror, true crime and of course the traditional mystery. Her collection of black cats (statuary) is totally awesome.

With the book business in crisis, this is an opportunity to buy personalized (signed by the author) holiday gifts the recipients will actually read and enjoy, support local authors and give a leg up to one of our local booksellers. Kate can always recommend books that you or your gift list will adore, a knack born of many years in the business. Her knowledge is encyclopediac and her inventory is vast.

The party is from 5:30 - 7:45 at Kates (2211 Mass Ave in Cambridge). Close to Porter and Davis Squares. Lots of eateries and drinkeries nearby. The party becomes a mob scene but is ever so much fun. You literally rub elbows.

I'm bringing my spicy empenadas, a riff on Paula Deen's recipe. The dough is resting in the fridge and the filling is waiting for the diced tomato. The party food is always toothsome. One year there was a meatloaf to die for.

Look for me. Ah, hell. You'll probably be gazing at Robert Parker or Dennis Lehane. So will I.

http://www.katesmysterybooks.com/events.html

Come "dressed to kill."

Cheers!

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