Thought-Drive

It's the holiday break, and I'm three chapters into the eight chapter quota I set for myself. In the middle of the third, I happened upon a turn of phrase which made me rethink the naming conventions of the books involved with my little project. Which is not to say the name the books have were flippantly decided, nor is it to say that I haven't said the names over a hundred times to myself already, and even grown quite comfortable with them. What I'm saying is that the line that came out of me made so much sense, and tied things up so nicely, that I was happy I didn't get the first manuscript through, that I still have time to make it really, really good. A royalty report I got recently leads me to believe that there just might be a window for me to sneak through to make a market for myself. To that end, I'm pretty grateful, and am going to do my due diligence. But I'm thankful for small things, too, this season. I unexpectedly found some soda in the back o...

Work for the year is finally done. Well, the work I perform in an attempt to make a living, at least. I have eight chapters to write before I return on the 3rd and somehow, looking back over things, I thought I'd be farther along than I am. That includes progress on this blog, as well. In other news, I finally have some sort of concept for what I'm doing with my twitter account . I call it the 140 Characters Project, that is to say, 140 tweets of 140 different characters, each no more than 140 characters. An example: Going without made her go within:red walls,kinky carpet,locked doors.Looked fine to her.She wrote wish lists,put to music,asking why not her   I plan on celebrating my progress at each of the four quarters (at 35, 70, 105 and 140) , the first of which is a dozen or so tweets away. I realize even if I wrote one a week (which I'm not), it would still be a labor of some years. Somehow, though, I can't back off my initial statement. I think about conver...

I wonder if failure and success work in the same way that heat and cold do, the latter not being something in and of it self, but simply a lack of the former. For instance, failure can also create a place holder, make space for future success. I wasn't able to write the short story before December 1, but I did double up on the writing for the novel. Ultimately, I fell short of my goal, but I don't feel any worse off for it. An artist friend of mine spent the month creating many, many pieces, the goal being a number with three digits. When she was finished, she said, "I think in the future I need to set more unobtainable goals," a statement whose wisdom could only be observed through scrutiny. In any event, the writing this past weekend went well, and not so well. That is to say perfectly. A business meeting of mine got cancelled, the first of any of its kind. A person I was introduced to wanted to discuss with me the topic of ghost writing. It took me a days to even...

First off: thanks. To everyone who reads this, reliably, or just the once. Even on accident. You make the list of things I'm thankful for this year. Other notables on the are the warm, fuzzy feeling I have concerning next year and looking back on the decisions I made this past one (see, I'm doing it, too, winding the year forward faster than the calendar). So, I can talk about the writing that got done with a fresh mind for once because I wrote this very morning. Off work for Turkey Day, I felt that I owed it to myself to tend to an additional chapter this week. I think the secondary goal is to hit 20 before   the new year hits me. The chapter went well, even threw in a bit of extemporaneous plot that didn't seem too horrid (as I was writing it, that is; remember I said that for when I get around to editing it into the 3rd draft). Also, this past weekend I had the occasion to do some legitimate research for that short story. And by legitimate I mean leaving the house, l...

A couple years ago I wrecked my car, which sucked at the time. It turns out that without any transportation, that summer proved to be the most productive time in my writing life. I finished the draft of a 90,000 word novel in thirty days, my first completed book. Fast forwarding to now glosses over a lot of struggle with the manuscript, mostly over trying to convince publishers that it would, in fact, be an awesome story for readers to discover their way through. Clerical error stretched out its shelf life, in such time I became a much better and wiser author, and thankfully so, because I better see now what it's going to take to push that particular round peg through the square holes provided to me. And I think I'm mostly good with that. So I think I've turned a corner, and will be able to look back on this time as a decisive fork in the long and winding road, and will smile at my decision. I'm not going to stop working on the series, but after the book I'm curre...

The rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. Love that quote, almost enough to look up who said it, then really figure out who said it. I totally dropped the ball last week. In fact, it wasn't until Thursday that I realized that I hadn't blogged. I wouldn't describe the winter season as busy, either. It just slipped off my mind and didn't stick back on until much later. But I have been writing, both this past weekend and the one before it. I even squeezed in some academic scribbling as well. My students had some opinions about a Jack London story that were different from my own, and I thought it was an excellent time to show them how arguments go down among literary types. Initially, I intended to comb through the story for quotes that proved my point, but what started as some light reading during a lunch break ended up being a few pages of rhetoric. It was the first time that I had taken to something like that seriously since graduating college. I wasn...

I'm in a productive place today. Sunday, I wrote after almost deliberately putting it off on Saturday, and coming up with a weak excuse on Friday. As the weekend progressed, the chapter in question occurred to me in the morning and in my still moments in the afternoon until I could almost recite it. Sitting down and putting it on paper was more therapeutic than it was strictly work-a-day. And I guess that makes me sound (more) crazy, but I stand firm on my position that this is a good thing. The drafted chapter marks my fifteen thousandth approximate word for this project, which isn't a quarter of a way through, but it still feels like something to celebrate. I discovered that at least for this particular series, I always start with several, disparate plots, and then wind them together like a stiff braid as the story goes on. I think when it's all said and done I'll refer to this technique as "something I just came up with," though I'm sure any number of...