Small Town Jericho

I took the girls out to a playground today, and they spent the entire day running around while I wrote. We had our first slight nip of the fall, and one of those gorgeous sunsets that only seem to happen in your imagination. The sun hung low in the sky, enormous and red, and I looked up from the picnic bench I was typing at to where the girls were chasing some little boy with a football, and thought, whether or not I ever achieve any success as a writer, I will look back on moments like this and romanticize them. Usually that's hard to see except in hindsight, but I guess I was in a reflective mood. I thought about my first kiss, about when Lisa and I still lived in our first house, about when the girls were babies. I think the lie of nostalgia is that all those moments are behind you. It rarely occurs to me that those moments never stop happening, but this time it did. So I drank as deeply of the moment as I could, trying to lock it into memory, so I could enjoy it again later. Call it preemptive nostalgia.

Learned an important lesson tonight

I firmly believe that some time in the relatively near future, I'm going to be in a position to write an acknowledgment or a dedication on a work of art. Maybe not this year, maybe not next. But sometime. When that day comes, I'm going to try really hard not to snub anybody, just because I can.

Cause that shit hurts.

Character Voice

Chris's father is a man of few words. Or at least, he was. Now I'm cutting scenes but trying to make sure the necessary information is still there, and he's having to say more and more at any one time, and I'm finding myself struggling to keep his voice. I guess I'll have to put it all down first, and then work on making it sound like him. It's frustrating, though, because his uniqueness of voice was one of the things I was proud of. Not having all my characters just sound sort of like me, you know?

Anyway, that's just something I'll have to work through, but I found it interesting, and what's a blog for if not for that?

Note to self

Chris is fourteen. Remember that, damnit!

Effect without cause, sub-atomic laws, scientific pause

I've been getting increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that I haven't made a backup of my novel since mid-August or so. I've since rectified that.

I think I can realistically cut another eight or nine-thousand words. Beyond that, I just don't know how to do it without making the story suffer. So I'm going to cut what I think I can but start moving away from cutting to more active suck-vacuuming. (i.e., concentrating on the quality of what remains, rather than on what to take out.)

In other news, I sure can be an insufferable prig sometimes.

Hey, I see that I got my 666th visitor. Greetings, satanic portent from Arkansas!

3.0

I've finished a round of cutting/editing/tightening up. I'm down to 103,219 words, which is still much too long. I have one or two people that I know would be interested in seeing it now, at this length, but If I'm going to have to cut another 20,000 or so words anyhow, it seems to make more sense to do that cutting before I submit to anyone. I'm going to take another look at my outline tonight and see what else I can find that could go.

On another note, I just realized that I never heard back on a story I submitted back in April. That's one frustrating thing with not doing simultaneous submissions. It takes so long for markets to get back to you that you forget all about your works that are out there. And this is at least the third story I can think of that I've never gotten a response back on. (Though at five months, it's not yet out of the question that I could get a response back before too long. I've got others that dropped off the face of the earth years ago. Including one agent's request for the full MS of Prototype. Dang it, when I spend the money to print and ship a 90,000 word MS, I'd at least like to hear back from people.)

(Before anybody mentions it, yes, I've queried the market. And on the other, older ones, yes I've long ago assumed the worst and moved on.)

Gah!

I just realized that I've changed my protagonist's age back and forth so many times, I no longer remember what it is or where all the different places I've alluded to it are.