Cabin Fever

How is it possible to have Cabin Fever when not confined to the cabin?  State of mind.  We have a state of siege.  Snow siege.  It annoys me that I cannot get to the back yard.  I thought about going out via the cellar door, but it has two feet of snow on it.  The snow in the yard won't bear my weight. I tried walking around the garage this morning.  Impossible.   We found another suet feeder and hung it up on the front porch.  In the meantime, the flicker and friends are on the last pecks of the backyard suet.

Even in Chicago in the winter of 1979, we could get to the backyard.  I have no desire to wade through waist deep snow.  What if I get stuck?  How embarrassing would that be?

The post-Christmas snow caterpillar has morphed into the sinister shape.  The cats have a hard time bird watching, because the birds are way up on the snow and the cats are down on the living room floor.  The orange cat has been inconsolable the past few days.  Does he, too, have cabin fever?  He likes to sleep by the hot air vents in the kitchen and the bathroom.  He sleeps on top of me whenever he gets a chance. 

I-tunes is playing a Latin version of Volare.   The first time I heard this song I was playing water frisbee in a swimming pool in Aurora, Colorado with a guy named Tim.  A million years ago.   

I am making a recipe from Gourmet for dinner, a diet chicken pot pie.  Ye gods, the ingredients list!   And I think I didn't get the sauce thick enough.  Instead of crust it has mashed potatoes (with low-fat sour cream) on top.  Sounds pretty good.  Definitely from scratch.  We're going to have some white chili next week.  In this weather it is temping to make comfort food with loads of calories.  Discipline.  Discipline. Yup.

A long ago Thanksgiving in Puerto Vallarta at Daquiri Dicks

It's hard to write.  It's even hard to rewrite when one has this "siege" mentality. Ah, for I have forty pages of edits left.   Then that book gets put away for a while.  I need to get World of Mirrors on the Kindle because The Shadow Warriors is doing all right.  How about them apples?  I haven't publicized it because I accidentally tossed my hand-written "plan" away.   Just a few modest mentions so far and of course blogging on Suspenseful Sunday with Seven Sentences.

This business in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and even Yemen is so interesting.  Who would have thunk it?  I watch a lot of TV and read three daily papers, dinosauress that I am.  Astonished to find two women who have never heard of the "Tiger Mother."  Astonished that people can go thru $160,000 for a college education and not learn anything.  Astonished by how high the freaking snow is.

I will never cease being astonished.  Astonished that my book is selling.  It has a good description of the Boston Public Garden and Fanieul Hall in winter.  Normally, I write summer books.  Now I know why.
I long for Southern Climes?  Puerto Vallarta anyone?

Grapeshot                      

Writing is Rewriting. And Rewriting Again. Yet Again. Arrrghhh!

Writing is weird.  In my novels I write a scene, and go over it the next day.  Fix.  Fix.  Then I go over the scene once more and take it to my writing group.  Bring home.  Fix.  Fix.

Onward.  First draft is finally done, a big achievement.  Listen, there is a reason why first drafts are called, "the shitty first draft."  After a suitable interval, time to tackle the scenes again.

Print the novel, and get out the red pen.  Yikes!  How did this scene already get four rewrites?  It well, it sucks.  Once again, with feeling.
More printing, more red pencils.  Cut them useless words!  Slice!  Dice!  Now we're cookin'.

One would think that everything would be perfect, and one would be wrong.  Where is le mot juste?  Le paragraph juste,  even the scene juste?

Hey, it must be perfect now.  Back to the writing group who hasn't heard it for lo, these many months.

Oh, no!  Back to the drawing board. 

Arrrghhh!  Writing is rewriting. 

Grapeshot

If you're looking for a Kindle novel that must have been rewritten 20 times, here's the link.  Cheap introductory price.  Lots of words for the money.   

The Shadow Warriors on Kindle

Here is a map of the island where the book is (mostly) set.  Learn about an interesting place you probably never heard of.

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.

Grapeshot

Completing a manuscript

So. . . . on Saturday around 4:30 p.m., about a month or maybe even a year late, I finished the first draft of my new manuscript, tentatively titled, In Flight, and  very tentatively, because while I was writing the book another book with that title was published.  So it goes.

Weeks ago my writing group said the thrilling conclusion was weak, which meant the main character had to get herself out of her predicament  by herself, and the only way she could do that (that I could see) was to shootl the bad guy.  Which she did.  Of course he was coming after her with a knife, yada, yada.  But that one act changed the whole tenor and feel of the story.  Which meant:

I had to create yet a third point of view to do a much darker ending

Rewrite a bunch of scenes from that point of view
Retrofit everything
Then write the ending

I was busier  than a one-armed paper hanger and I kind of felt like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.  Aren't old sayings fun?

Anyway, I persevered, and now the manuscript is ready for rewriting.  Writing is rewriting.   I have exceeded any reasonable word count and I need to cut and pare like crazy.   Started in on that last night, one day after finishing.  Found a bunch of useless words and they will soon be gone.  I usually know the beginning and ending of the book and maybe a few scenes in the middle.   Actually, with this book I winged it because the character came and sat on my shoulder and began to tell me her story.  Then she stopped, and I had to figure out the rest of it.  I only knew what she told me.  How weird is that?

So the ending was half-sad, half-happy.  There is still much work to be done. And my published novel won't be available  on Kindle for Christmas, nope that ball was dropped.   Oh well.  

Tomorrow I'll bake something and go for a walk, and post the recipe for those yummy apricot bars I've been bragging about.  There's always food to savor.  And words to pare.  What will I think of now when I awaken in the middle of the night?  For two years I been figuring out the plot.  Now?  Maybe plot points for the next book.  Become a plotter instead of a pantser (seat of the pants).   How do you like them apples?

Grapeshot

The Writing Life

My desktop. Sometimes, it's even messier.

It doesn't sound like much, but I've written ten pages this week. Think about it. If I did that every week, I'd have 520 pages at year's end, way more than enough for a book. You have to get into the groove. The important thing is to get something, practically anything, no matter how crappy, down on paper such that you can fix it.

Writing is rewriting. Dunno who said that, but it's true.

I had to do a lot of rewriting, even change the setting for one of the scenes. Surfed the web to become inspired. Looking for a certain kind of campground, and then I found it, and everything finally fell into place. Always aiming for authenticity.

If you have emotion (and you should) in a scene, then you need to dig deep to find the right words to express it. Unhackneyed words, the hardest.

I'm loosing track of the time of the story, and will have to put together a little calendar. That always helps a lot. Need to know if it's midsummer yet, and when would the sun be setting in New York state at that time of year. Even if it's fiction, you still need to get all the details right. Authenticity, remember? Yup.

Now, I'll do one more pass, then onward to Chicago, the boyfriend's nutty ex-wife, the theft of the laptop, and yet another plot point. Keep stringing out the plot like a string of pearls with an emerald stuck in (the surprise) every now and then.

Hard work, is writing. Rewriting not so intense, but also hard, just getting it exactly right. Of course what I think is right not necessarily shared by agents and editors or writing group.

Writing is getting your butt kicked to Madagascar and back.

Off to join Red Sox Nation in Texas, the state of my higher education. I daresay the ball park won't reek of Italian sausage. The smell did go away. Felt like a skunk bathing in ketchup.

So it goes.

Grapeshot

Did I say that writing is rewriting?