In a Key West Hot Tub

Literary characters are a breed all their own. First of all, Maxine, who insisted on being called that name, appeared just as I had completed the first chapter of my 1928 California book. She talked to me and began telling me her story. Naturally I began writing it down, and Maxine and I are off on a little adventure, maybe even a big adventure involving drug lords, lost sisters, murder and mayhem and even a little romance.

Maxine is in Key West now, in June of 2008 and she's come to see a woman who can tell her about . . . well, never mind. Suffice it to say that these two need to have a little heart-to-heart. I could have done that scene with everything hunky dory, just sitting on the patio having this nice friendly chat, but that's not what writing is about. The chat is not friendly and there's a bottle of champagne and a hot tub and a lot of angst and unexpected happenings that move the plot forward.

Everything is subservient to the forward motion of the story. There are surprises and many aren't very pleasant. Maxine, and now Nicole, are both surprising me, and all I do is tell their stories.

God, it's weird.

And in the meantime, poor Carla Curby sits on that Santa Fe train heading to California and I sure hope that when Maxine and I are finished, Carla will be as eager to tell her story.

I'm making pumpkin tarts tomorrow and a very fancy iceberg lettuce salad, and our guest is bring not the bacon but the fish, a whole red snapper that will be baked with garlic and thyme and lemon.

The rain has been general over the South Shore and environs, and we are just glad it's not the white stuff, except for the kids, who crave the white stuff.

Iris is bereft and bawls all the time because her baby is gone. The herd of eleven has been culled to seven. Some old cows, some new. Mary Ann's baby is undoubtedly sad, too, as her playmate is gone. All summer and fall they were calves together and hung out and did calf stuff. So sad.

Confidence

Image is from: edutechgeek.files.wordpress.com

Lately, I've spread my writing wings a bit beyond genre fiction and blogging. I've got one and one-half short stories written, a food memoir, a report on an event and even a deposition for a court case. I'm also looking forward to writing and delivering a humorous Toastmaster's speech.

What is remarkable is this: these days when I sit down to write anything, I have the confidence that I can do the writing, both first and subsequent drafts and that it will be at least acceptable. How did it get from my cybercrime sleuth to Jill of all trades?

Plant butt in chair is the big advice for writers. In other words, sit down and write. And yanno, if you do it often enough (5+ novels,umpteen blog entries, this 'n that) eventually you get the hang of it, and you know you can do it. You can produce whatever is needed without blood and tears. Sweat may still be involved, but one out of three isn't bad.

I'm feeling pretty good about this, because it's been a long time coming. When I first started writing, "they" said you had to write half a million words (500,000 for the math dumbos) before you were any good. I did that and more in 5 novels. Probably wrote close to 750,000 with rewrites and so on. In the beginning, that many words sounded impossible, when I had written maybe 75,000. Yikes! And another beginning writing teacher hushed me when I tried to bring this up in class. I believe he thought that it would discourage the "beginners." Dammit ! Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

Maybe I should thank my blog readers, whoever they are, for reading the blog and keeping me blogging, because "Suck It Up" counts for a words written, too, over the years. And writing with brevity helps the cause.

So thanks. Comments, as always are welcome.

Grapesbot

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

Let the Fingernail Knawing Begin

The planets are converging or whatever it is that planets do! Entrants in the Amazon/Penguin novel contest are waiting to hear from Amazon today as to whether they qualified! Then the narrowing and winnowing begins. From what I gleaned from the chat group posts, some submissions will be very good and some very bad. The very bad will be very bad because some entrants submitted first drafts or raced to finish a draft or keyed a hand-written submission into the computer, or don't understand that memoir is not fiction--the usual kind of mistakes that call for the clue gun! Miss Snark where are you when we need you?

The contest accepted all kinds of genres except porn, and again, the message boards have provided some amusement. No kids, the F word does not constitue porn, nor does a sex scene or two, depending of course on the scene and the level of gratuity.

A fantastic amount of fantasy and a mega-blast of sci-fi were submitted, or maybe those folks are just more loquatious than the rest of us. What can one really tell from a message board? Some crime fiction found its way into the contest, of course. What I didn't see too much was plain old mainstream fiction or literary fiction. Maybe no one is writing it. Few mentions of chic lit either, but maybe those writers aren't the posting kind. My analytical mind never stops.

The Gather contest deadline was yesterday. Gather/Border/CourtTV contest was strictly Crime Fiction. Post the first chapter. Now I have to do a major suck up and ask friends to join Gather and vote for me. Same with Amazon should I qualify enough to get into the last 500 or 1000 or whatever BIGNUM it is. Hope I have some favors to call in. It is always so humiliating to ask for things like good reviews and 'vote for me.' I remember my shock in 5th grade to find out a girl had actually voted for herself in the class officer election.

Don't worry. I won't ask my blog readers to vote for me. Some things are sacred. BTW, Sarah Weinman talked about Blogging at the writing conference this weekend. She writes THE crime fiction blog with plenty of good links. Just Google Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind. Cripes, hope I spelled it write. Suck It Up doesn't tax anyone's spelling ability.

More anon,

Grapeshot