Who's That Hiding Behind the Foster Grants?

Is it Iphegenia in Brooklyn? No! It's Grapeshot in Florida at the Sleuthfest Mystery Conference. What a fun way to spend a few days with mystery and mayhem and seafood dinners and good company.

http://www.mwa-florida.org/sleuthfest.htm

Lee Child is always a great guest of honor, accessible and fun and what a raconteur! He dispenses good writing advice as well. The writing team of PJ Parrish gave a great seminar, and the editors and agents were awesome, friendly, too.

Mystery writers are such wholesome types because they kill on paper and hence have fewer

"issues."

Onward. Lots of writing to do. I always come home "all fired up." Then there's the laundry, shopping, mail, etc. to deal with, but before the mood leaves, must write!

Today is cat blog day. Of course we've had to dispense extra affection after being away almost a week. Thisbe and Annie have settled down to the business of being spoiled companions of the feline persuasion again. Catnip has been offered generously, the old "smoking the peace pipe" routine.

Off to write.

Off to Florida

We/re taking off amid rain and snow for sunny Florida tomorrow. I'm attending a writing conference, and doing a reading with a manuscript critique and an agent/editor appointment. In other words, the Full Monte. I practiced the reading twice, once before my writing group and again before a public speaking group. Still am not perfect, to wit, I stumble over a few word, especially introducing myself.

This is kind of a last ditch effort to revive my so-called career as a crime fiction writer. No matter what the upshot is, it will be fun to be in Florida with fellow writers, schoozing and boozing and talking writing.

The last time I attended this particular conference, four years ago, an agent asked for the completed draft of Promiscuous Mode, and guess what? I'm still waiting to hear from him. He didn't take phone call or answer emails, nor did he return my SASE. This is the kind of action that knifes a writer's heart. (See a previous post from Kate Flora's blog).

This morning I gave myself possibly the worst manicure in the history of hands. Somehow it's all chipped and icky looking and it takes a lot to make colorless nail polish look icky. I managed.


Last night I watched the ending of Pride and Prejudice, with forays to the Academy Awards. Lots of drama and conflict on both. I'll miss "In Treatment" while I'm gone, but there's always a way to catch up on HBO programs.

We watched Frederico Fellini's 8 1/2 last week. What an interesting film. And how Felliniesque, with a few touches I had noticed in La Dolce Vita. There were tons of roles for aging women, not something you often see. Anouk Aimee (not aging) chain smoking and looking incredibly cool. If you haven't seen some Fellini movies, hie thee to the nearest rental store. Or Netflix. We are liking Netflix a lot.

Maybe I'll have writing tips, or writing gossip, or even good news when I return. To repeat, this is sort of a last ditch effort. In March I'm going to plow full speed ahead, damn the torpedos into Such Stuff As Dreams.

Onward,

Grapeshot

Surgery Without Anesthesia

For the last two weeks, I'm been excising extraneous words from Promiscuous Mode, cutting it from 109,000 words to 105,000. This was after a prior session which had already resulted in cutting 5,000 words.

I find it amazing that one can go back again and again making corrections. I also fixed a bunch of passive sentences, awkward phrasing (how did that get left in there?) and routed out unnecessary sentences, adverbs (especially) and adjectives.

It's hard work, this paring, but the novel is always stronger, better, more readable. A good editor could probably find a few thousand other words. After all, I cut 16,000 words out of World of Mirrors.

Next week, we're travelling to Sleuthfest, in Deerfield Beach, FL, sponsored by the Florida chapter of Mystery Writer's of America. I'm meeting with an editor or an agent and also reading the first pages of Festival Madness to an audience. Tonight I'm practicing on my writer's group and Thursday on my Toastmaster's chapter. Practice makes perfect, etc.

I'm also going to send out another half-dozen queries for PM. This is my last year of crime fiction writing unless something breaks. Then it's on to literary fiction, commercial fiction, women's fiction, whatever. And then to the young adult that is screaming, "write me! write me!"

It's hard to admit failure after pounding away at a project for almost 15 years. 5 books, endless rewrites, queries, groups, meetings and finally rejection. A lot of sucking up, believe me. On the plus side, I have become a decent writer--no one gainsays the competent writing. Seems to be the stories. They're good stories, but they're perhaps a little "thinky" as one instructor noted.

Heaven knows, anyone who programmed computers for as long as I did is bound to be "thinky." That's what computer people are--have to be. Thinky. What a word. What a concept. And mystery readers are people-people and like their stories "Feely."

I tried to make the transition from Thinky-thinky to thinky-feely, but I am not a touchy-feely person. Sorry, can't help it.

It's not that thinkers are unfeeling, but first and foremost, they're thinkers. Vivaldi was a thinker. So was Bach. Thinkers can write thrillers, but I have no interest, and probably less talent in that genre. No ideas, either. So it goes.

Listen, if you need 4,000 words, mostly redundant sentences, adverbs and a few adjectives, I have them for sale cheap.

Grapeshot

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award

In less than a week, I'll know whether World of Mirrors made the first Amazon cut. If it did, I'll be weaseling around and asking friends, fellow-writers and even my wonderful blog readers who are also Amazon customers (is anyone not an Amazon customer?) to sign in, read my first chapter and write a short review. And do tell the truth. If you think it sucks, I need to know that, too.

This is so demeaning, but of course even more demeaning is if the chapter tanked/and or cratered with the reviewer and was rejected. Right now my self-confidence if at the bottom of the storm sewer with last year's leaves and a few old mouse carcasses. You get the idea.

And I have a cold. I never catch colds. I am blaming it on not eating meat for 2 weeks, and missing all that good zinc and B-vitamins.

We had chicken cutlets with tomatos, capers and wine tonight, ripped right out of the food section of today's Boston Globe. Very tasty, and enough for tomorrow. The tomato and parseley looked so cheery, almost like Christmas was back. It's always a shock when everyone takes down the Christmas lights and the night is so dreary again.

Made reservations for Sleuthfest today, and I continue to tweak the beginning of Promiscuous Mode. I decided it didn't have enough tension and conflict for the beginning of a crime fiction novel. Why did I ever start writing crime fiction? I don't even much like to read it anymore, however, I still want to read Sue Grafton's latest. I don't get tired of her. And then there's poor old Proust who I've been dawdling over for 13 months and 772 pages.

My first readings of Proust, I totally missed all the humor. How is that possible? There is a lot of humor, not in the romantic love parts, but in his descriptions of the daily life of the family. Humor enlivens any kind of writing. Humor enlivens life.

Rant alert! Boston is a dirty town, sad to say. The "T" is dirty--people strew newspapers all over. Sullivan Square was filthy. The sidewalk was a continuous garbage can. Disgusting. We came here from Chicago which was, by comparison, squeaky clean. End of rant.

Another warm day, but rainy, and I didn't walk because of my blasted cold. It's almost worse than having a broken ankle. Onward.


Grrrrrapeshot