I’ve been working on a couple of novels over the past few months. The rough drafts are easy enough. The revisions have been more of a challenge. The editing is enough to make me consider employment in either the food service or housekeeping professions. As a blogger, I have never had the luxury or burden of an Editor. With the exception of the on-board spell checker, I’m free to rattle off my thoughts in as random and scatter shot a fashion as I choose. And hence, I have a blog with a readership that must reach at least the teens.…
Category: writing
Blogging, Writing, and Ginger
I wrote my first short story when I was in Middle School. It wasn’t very good, but I did have fun writing it. It was a bit of SciFi fluff about some colony meeting a bad end. It was followed by dozens of similar stories set in a wide variety of futures, exploring a number cliched topics that had already been written about my Wells and Verne. My writing style was minimalist at best. At about the same time I was writing letters to my friends, girlfriends, and any random stranger foolish enough to give me an address. These letters…
Completed Rough Draft
When I was in the 7th Grade I had an English Teacher who gave me a brown paper bag filled with old issues of Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine. I read all the stories, comics, reviews, and commentaries. Many of the stories were so bad I was inspired to write stories of my own. Many were so good that I couldn’t even image writing stories of my own. I wrote dozens of short stories while I was in school and I finished my first rough draft of a novel when I was in the 12th Grade. It was a fantasy…
Elephant Girl
“We’ve got two lives — one we’re given and the other one we make.” ― Mary Chapin Carpenter Jane Devin doesn’t agree with Mary Chapin Carpenter, she has a more deterministic view of the universe. Jane sees her life as a river flowing beyond her control, going places she doesn’t want to go, and forcing her to be something she doesn’t want to be. All memoirs like to find one note and continue to strike it over and over again. Memoirs by chefs and restaurant critics tell how food rules their lives. Memoirs of artists talk about art, musicians talk about music,…
Dear Suzanne Collins
Are you a fan of The Matrix? I love The Matrix, it’s a near perfect film with it’s classic hero’s story. I loved the characters, I loved the story, and I loved the look of the film. Then the Wachowski Brothers were seduced by all the money that a successful movie gave them and they forgot the story and characters in favor of special effects. The next two films had so little in common with The Matrix that they might as well have been set in another universe. I love The Hunger Games. It was original and amazing and gave…
Writing and~Uh, Not Writing
I’ve got a couple of weeks off. It’s not all that unusual, but it’s not all that common either. So I am writing. Sort of. I have the better part of a rough draft, which is the easy part for me. I need to add a snappy opening, slap in a few transitions here and there, and viola! it will be ready for that dread 2nd Draft. Then I go back and make sure everything makes sense and start to re-write a bit of the dull parts and try to pour some life into them. Editing has always been my…
Blood, Bone, & Butter
There are times while reading Blood, Bone, & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton that I find myself smiling from the simple pleasure of her prose. A good writer can tell you how she makes pasta. A great writer makes you want to dust the flour off your hands once she has finished telling you how she makes pasta. Gabrielle Hamilton is a great writer. The opening pages of Blood, Bone, & Butter paint an achingly beautiful portrait of an ideal life lived with the perfect family that you know it will go terribly wrong in short order. And when it does go…
This Page Intentionally Left Blank
There are times when the words don’t flow as they used to. Or I don’t put the effort forth. Writers write. Simple as that. But sometimes, it isn’t all that simple. Sometimes there is the desire to read one more book, try one more bit of software, watch one more new Tv Show, cook all those meals, and generally just kind of do all kinds of random stuff. I wrote a couple of short stories, but they are not all that good. It’s been so long since I finished anything I am not even sure how I am supposed to…
Huckleberry Finn and the N Word
The latest blow for Political Correctness sees a college professor edit Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn to remove the currently offense terms ‘nigger’ and ‘injun.’ At least he didn’t add zombies or vampires or sea monsters. Auburn University English professor Alan Gribben says that he always felt uncomfortable with Mark Twain’s choice of words so he plugged in the words ‘slave’ and ‘Indian’ to create his sanitized versions of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. I was watching Blazing Saddles not too long ago and the word ‘nigger’ was bleeped each time it came up. Since this is one of the running…
The Writer’s Market
The Writer’s Market is to aspiring writers what seed catalogs are to aspiring gardeners-something to drool over and think about and have long, usually unrealistic, fantasies about. I bought my first Writer’s Market when I was in high school, submitted my first short stories and poems as quickly as I could roll them out of my old manual typewriter. What a lovely sound those keys made as they slapped the paper. I miss that once in a while. I soon moved up to an electric typewriter. I still refer to the Return key and get blank stares from people who…