There's no place like home . . .

I got back from my business trip a couple of days ago, safe and sound. And thoroughly reminded of how much I hate to travel.


I did have an alarming moment in my hotel room on Tuesday night. I was wishing I was home and when I closed my eyes and tried to conjure mental images of "home" what came up were images of my apartment back in Savannah. It actually took me a moment to remember what this place here looked like. Sort of freaked me out for a minute.


It's not like I just moved here. I've lived here over three years. But I had to struggle to remember what the living room looked like--I kept envisioning my old living room from before.


Anyway, that was weird.


I was hoping to get a little background work done while I was away, maybe research a couple of things for this TV show idea, and get some work done on that. Did I? Hell, no. I pretty much just vegged out the whole time I wasn't required to do anything. Didn't do a lick of work on any of my own projects.


I did take some pictures of some beautiful flowers at the venue where the event was held. I've started painting one of them now. An associate told me they were Knockout Roses. I guess she would know.


This same associate committed a couple of big time sins when I went to show her the pictures of the flowers I'd taken, by the way--she took the phone I used to take the pics away from me and dropped it (no harm done other than an unwanted adrenaline surge) and then she started flipping through my photo album, even though I asked her not to. Oh, well. She won't be able to unsee some of the things she saw, and she has no-one but herself to blame. She did like the flower pictures, though.


I got home Thursday afternoon, pretty much as tired as I've been in a long time. So tired, in fact, I decided to forego my plan to begin the second pass through my manuscript yesterday. Instead I spent most of the day relaxing as much as I could.


Yeesh. Being around people all flipping day long is exhausting. At the end of the day some of my associates wanted to go out on the town. I wanted to go back to my hotel room, lock the door, and just sit and stare off into space until it was time to go to bed. Which is pretty much what I wound up doing.


Hopefully this will be the last of these things I'll have to do for a while. It'll take me at least a year to finish recovering from this one!

Sunday morning vegging out randomocity

I'm taking some time off from the rewriting, now that I've managed to finish the first pass. Now, I'm going to let it sit for a while.


I have to take a business trip this week and I'm thinking I'll do the next read-through when I get back from that. At that time it will have been a week, which seems to be about the right amount of time to spend away from it.


So, no further updates on The Sorcerer's Daughter other than I've done the first rewrite, and it is now marinating for a while. And yes, I'm still happy with it, overall, though there are some specific areas that I believe need more work.


The trip I mentioned is for my day job--I'm providing support for my co-workers at an Expo out of town. I'll be spending some time on the road and hopefully, since I won't be driving, I'll be able to at least make some notes about this television project that I've been mulling over for a while now. It's time to actually get some words down on the page, I think. At least it's time to plot out the pilot, even if I don't quite have time to write the screenplay.


I'll also be thinking about the show's bible, the central characters, the over-arching story-line, and general thinking about the entire milieu. Specifically, I'll need to develop the politics of the time a little better, because a lot of that will come into play. I've also got to work out some religions that will become important.


This is a bit of a scary time for me, creatively, though--I'm almost done with a project and don't really have another one in mind to start on when I start shopping The Sorcerer's Daughter around to publishers. I don't know why, but it always causes me some anxiety. I've got some ideas for novels but nothing is stepping forward, demanding to be written, at this point.


Which means, once I'm finally done with the rewrites, and had an editor look at it and dealt with the issues that she finds, I'll go back to writing scripts. Which is not a bad thing, considering I enjoy writing scripts, and this TV show idea can eat up an awful lot of my creative time. But I'd kind of like to have an idea for a novel sitting there in my mind, too, just in case I need one.


Oh, well. It's not like I need something right now. Got lots of time yet before it's even a consideration.


I'm watching Apollo 13 on TNT right now, and this movie is a great example of what I try to remind people about--don't consider movies about historical events to be an education about those events. For example, in the movie, Nixon comes across as a total ass. In Jim Lovell's book, Lost Moon, the basis for the movie, Nixon is actually quite sympathetic. Since Lovell was actually there I tend to trust his perception over the folks who wrote the screenplay. While I'm no Nixon defender, there's no point in falsely portraying what he did and said during the events of the movie--the man gave history plenty of material to work with to make himself look like a slime-ball outside of the events of a failed moon mission.


But, if a movie gets you curious about something that actually happened, by all means, go out and educate yourself about it. Even if the movie gets it completely wrong, you would have learned something, and you can amaze and amuse your friends, pointing out exactly where the movie screwed it up!


I try not to do that, myself, but sometimes it's hard to bite my tongue and let a glaring error slide on by . . .

Progress report and pet peeve randomocity

I'm almost through the first rewrite of The Sorcerer's Daughter.


What I'm doing at this point is changing the stuff I changed my mind about during the first draft, correcting typos, tweaking a few places where I thought the language was awkward or unclear, that sort of thing. I need to insert a scene, too, which I will do in the next couple of days, as soon as I find a good spot for it. The new scene would resolve an issue that keeps bugging me. Basically, it takes care of an issue that is always lurking in the background, and really needs to be cleared up.


What do I plan to do after that? Read it again, this time looking for issues with pacing, plot, story-telling . . . I won't actually make any changes during that pass, just focusing on how it reads. Pacing, mostly, is what concerns me. Nothing makes a story seem more amateurish to me than a story where the pacing is not considered and the story seems hurried, or seems to be really slow. It should have a faster tempo in some places, a slower one in others, a medium tempo in others. Like a piece of music.


This something that seems to be a lost art to many of today's writers, and it drives me nuts. I suspect a lot of novels get rushed into publication so what you actually read isn't what would be considered a final draft a few years ago--the writer would have been asked to make another couple of passes through the manuscript in the days before everyone got to be in such a hurry to have something published.


So, that's where I am with that.


As for the pet peeve, it involves lazy writing, especially on TV shows, and in crime dramas in particular.


It goes like this: "The victim was stabbed. Angle of the wound suggests the suspect is left-handed." So, we spend the rest of the show looking at who among the suspect pool is left-handed. Finally, we see someone writing something and see that he or she is using---dum dum dummmmm . . . his or her left hand! Gotcha!


Here's my problem. I write left-handed. If I ever stabbed somebody, it'd probably be with my left hand. I also fire rifles and shotguns left-handed.


However, I play guitar, golf, and tennis right handed. I bat right-handed. I throw with my right hand. My right hand is my shooting hand when I play basketball--though, oddly enough, I score more baskets when I use my left-hand, though that feels awkward to me. But I suck at basketball, just like I do most sports.


I had a friend who threw a baseball with his right hand and a football with his left. My dad was right-handed with almost everything, except golf.


What I'm saying is, just because you write with your left hand, doesn't mean you do everything with your left hand. There is a distinct possibility that someone who is inclined to stab people would write with his or her right hand and prefer to use the left for stabbing folks. Or, maybe he or she deliberately used the left hand to throw idiot television detectives off the trail.


It's just lazy writing. It's a quick way to resolve a story without having to work too hard at it.


Drives me nuts.

Rewriting randomocity

So, I'm about halfway through my first pass through the first draft of The Sorcerer's Daughter.


I actually enjoyed rereading it, even though, as a first draft, there are a lot of things that actually don't make any sense because I changed my mind about some plot points along the way. That's one of the things I'm fixing through this pass.


There are a couple of things I need to add to it, a couple of beats I need to add. Maybe one or two that need to be deleted or at least moved around. On the whole, though, I think it tells the story I want to tell.


In other words, so far, so good. Still got a lot of work to do on it, but it's coming together.


Now that I'm at this point I feel like I can allow myself to entertain other projects, so I've been revisiting my idea for a TV series. I still don't want to give away too many details, except to say that it involves a series of stories and novels written by a science fiction icon that debuted in the 1950s. I've got some technical details I need to research, and I may as well go ahead and do that now. Normally, research is something I do later, after a first draft is completed--I try to tell the story first, and worry about the details later. However, in this case, since an important plot point revolves around some science that I'm sort of foggy on, I'll need to have a better understanding of it before I even get started.


Bummer. But I will have learned something. That's never a bad thing.


I'll probably spend some time putting together some stuff for that, too, over the next little while, just to give myself something to occupy my mind when I'm not obsessing over the novel. I've even sketched a  few ideas I had for certain characters who would appear in the thing, along with a motif that will become critical down the road.


So, that's my weekend--rewriting, researching, relaxing. My three "Rs".

First draft is done!

Yes! I just typed "END". The first draft of The Sorcerer's Daughter is done!


Yes, it needs some major editing. There are a lot of places in it I'm not happy with. But I now know where the road is going to wind up, and that makes telling the story so much easier.


So, please forgive my exuberance. Other writers will understand, I think.


Now, I'm going to take a little time off from it--the rest of today, at least--and then reread it. I won't touch it, other than to look it over, until I've read through the entire manuscript.


Then, it's getting out the hammer, chisels, the sanding paper, and all the other tools to start knocking this thing into some semblance of a coherent, interesting, readable work of fiction.


That, my friends, is the fun part!

Fourth of July randomocity

I apologize in advance for any excessive surliness. It's been one of those weeks.


I guess it would be appropriate for me to write about my thoughts as to the state of our democracy---that it appears to be dying on the vine, that every day it seems the voices of greed, hatred, ignorance, and religious lunacy seem to be getting louder and the voices of tolerance, fairness, and reason seem to be growing quieter. I could go on and on about how the wealthy now own this country and have mastered the art of getting the ignorant to do their dirty work for them. I could say that behind almost all of the problems in this country lies one single cause--greed. I could go on and on and on about how I just don't see our society surviving much longer without something dramatic and traumatic happening to force things to change.


I could do say all that, but I won't. Instead, I'll just say, have a happy Fourth, everyone, regardless of your ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion (or lack thereof), citizenship status, or economic station. We need you. We need everyone. We just need to realize that. Our country is not just white picket fences, two kids and a dog in a yard, a white house with a Chevy in the driveway. Our country is also Chinatown. It's Little Italy. It's the ghetto. It's all those places where people may not speak English, and where most people don't have white skin. Those people aren't African American or Asian American or Italian American or Hispanic American or whatever American. They're just American.


Anyways, I won't say any of that. That's what would be expected of me. I try not to be predictable.


So, my own plans are to write as much as I can. I'm inching closer and closer to the end of the first draft of The Sorcerer's Daughter. I may actually be done with it by the end of next week.


The weather here is supposed to be beautiful, which is fortunate, since the driver's side window of my truck is stuck half-way down. I'll be calling someone to have it fixed tomorrow--since it's not expected to be raining anytime soon, it can wait one day. But I'll at least be out walking around in the mild, sunny day. I may take some pictures of some lovely little flowers I saw on the property, to use as inspiration for a painting or something.


That's what's on my mind today. What's on yours?

I can see the ending . . .

15,000 more words to go before I reach my minimum word count for The Sorcerer's Daughter.


For a first draft a word count doesn't mean all that much, I know. But it gives me a good idea how long the finished draft will be--it'll probably be a tad shorter than the first draft. And no, I'm not shooting for 75,000 words, per se, it's just that is the minimum length before a lot of publishers will consider it a novel.


I should get there with no trouble. I'm getting near the end but I'm not that near. Still got lots of plot left to write about.


And I'm coming up on the really juicy stuff, too. What I'm going to start on next is what has kept me plugging away on this thing for months now. The really good stuff.


I mean, it's all good stuff, but this is the payoff. This is why I started writing this thing in the first place.


So, why I'm I sitting here, writing this, instead of writing the thing?


I don't know. I think I'm just kind of catching my breath. What I'm about to do involves a lot of action, a lot of running around, that sort of thing, and it actually wears me out, writing about that stuff, almost as much as if I were doing it. Weird, huh?


Part of it, though, is fear.


Fear of what, though? I guess, fear that I won't be strong enough as a writer to do justice to the story and these characters. Sounds kind of pretentious, doesn't it?


But I believe I'm telling a powerful story that people will get into, I have a central character that people will relate to, and, if I pull this off, the part I'm about to start on will probably be considered the best part, by the millions and millions of people who will be reading it once it gets published.


Kind of intimidating. What to do?


Easy, actually. I'm just reminding myself that the only person I really need to please, at the end of the day, is me. As long as I like it, anybody else liking it will be gravy.


Okay. Let's dive back in.