10 July 2009

I started my current manuscript in March; unlike my previous work, It's Not About The Cookies*, this one poured out without any wailing or pulling of hair on my part. In three months time it grew from a suggestion of "You should totally do this as a story!" from a friend to a bloated 175,000 words.

That's a lot of words.

Too many, actually. When you figure my first three books weighed in at 111,000-113,000 each...this one is downright obese and needs a little help from my inner Jenny Craig.

I trimmed it down to 150,000 on the first pass, but now that I'd into the slice and dice process, trying to edit as I rewrite, I find I'm adding as many words as I'm excising. Halfway into it, with an incredible amount of wordicide (shut up. That is too a word), I've got it down to...150,000 words.

Typically I don't let anyone see what I'm working on at this stage of the game. It's still a first draft, still raw, and the idea of allowing other eyes to see my literary vomit is just a wee bit uncomfortable. But I'm going to do it anyway.

Char, wife of Murf, the one who was in that horrible accident last week, is on the mend (long, long way to go for sure, but it looks like she'll make a full recovery) and wants to read it. Now, how do you say no to that? "Um, sure, you're laid up in a hospital bed because you damn near DIED and you've had TWO major surgeries AND you need a distraction from your hovering husband...BUT I'm not gonna let you read the manuscript of a storyline YOU suggested."

Yeah, I'm mean but not that mean.

I'll spend the weekend going through the second half of the manuscript, and then I will mentally wet myself as I send an electronic copy, formatted for use with a Kindle...and then hope that she doesn't laugh her stitches loose because it's that bad.

Oh yeah, it's that bad right now. A first draft is first for a reason.

So...I'm off to the evilness otherwise known as "The Gym" for a little bit and then I'm heading to Borders where I will pick at words and try to not add more than I am removing, and I will feel incredibly self conscious about the whole thing knowing that next week someone else will be reading this bloated and convoluted book.

If I really do wet myself please don't point and laugh. Just pass the Depends and tell me what a good little Wabbit I am.



*Shameless self pimping.

9 July 2009

It was time for a change. Again. I wanted something a little softer to look at, and I wanted something that had my RSS code embedded...thusly did I play around with free templates and risk borking everything up by tweaking them.

'Course, the comments didn't migrate...Such is the suckitude of switching from HTML to XML.

Still have some tweaking to do, because some of the blogs I follow didn't seem to migrate. What to do, what to do...

8 July 2009

File under things I never thought I'd hear myself say:

I'd let Betty White grope me for the laughs...

6 July 2009

Your Words...They Displease Me



My editor.
He's not always nice, you know...

Right about the time I was making my previous post, one of my favorite people was in a nasty, nasty accident. Murf's ("I keep forgetting I have a blog") wife, Char, was slammed into in the middle of an intersection by a drunk driver doing 80 mph. She's pretty banged up, as one might expect, and she's in ICU with a laundry list of injuries, but eventually she should heal up physically.

She's got a hell of a long road ahead of her, but for right now, she's here, and that's all that matters.

Char and I fell into an easy friendship when she married Murf; we might go weeks without talking, but when we do it's comfortable and not strained with my odd conversational shyness. It helps that she can talk enough for three people

A week ago I was helping them set up a new blog; they're enjoying the wonders of having a teenager in the house and it seemed funny to start blogging about it. Now it looks like Murf will be using it to update friends and family about how she's doing.

He could use a little emotional support, I think. It's the suckiest of ways to launch a blog, but if you're inclined to lurk, it's here.

Guys...if your wife or gf mentions that she needs to shave her legs, do not ask if she wants him to fire up the weed whacker.

Just sayin'...

Dear MS Word Grammar Police,

Thank you for being so thorough.

Truly, I never would have guess that the sentence, "I'm going to believe him" should actually be "I is going to believe him."

Obviously, my education was sorely lacking.

Sincerely,
Thumper

After a horrific drive to Borders today (saw the aftermath of one 3 car accident and three minutes later saw a Toyota Yaris--same car I drive--plow into the side rail at about 40mph...it didn't hold up very well which freaks me out just a little) I managed to finish the first draft of my current work in progress.

My first 3 books weighed in at roughly 113,000 words each and the 4th one a mere 58,000.

This one? Right now it's between 160,000 and 170,000 words. That's like, a lot.

Clearly I'll be doing a whole bunch of editing over the next few drafts. I should probably set it aside for a couple of weeks, but I don't have any other work lined up, so I may plunge back into it tonight after the Spouse Thingy leaves for work. Or I may just sit here and drool on myself. Not sure yet.

And because she asked, Yes, Charlie, this one picks up just a couple of weeks after the end of Finding Father Rabbit. You get your wish. It may suck, but you're gonna get your wish.

See what a good friend I am? I write on command.

And don't tell me trained seals work on command, too, or I'll have to hurt someone...

I am so very, very glad that I developed the habit of saving my work to a flash drive instead of just the hard drive, or today I would have lost an entire manuscript--just half a chapter to go, and this sucker is about 160,000 words at this point--when the laptop crashed.

Save, save, save, and BACK UP your data sooner rather than later...

Validation.
Told ya she wasn't asleep...
Only plus is that it seems to have worked out for the tattoo artist.

It's 95 degrees out and your child has a realistic looking life sized baby doll, which came along for the ride when you went shopping. Do you:

a) Take the doll with you when you exit the car?
b) Put the doll in the trunk?
c) Put the doll in your child's car seat, thereby causing a mass of concerned adults to swarm around your car, debating on whether to just call 911, break the window and call 911, or break the window and then beat your sorry ass when you get back, and then call 911?

If you shopped at the Nut Tree Shopping Center in Vacaville, CA today, you chose the wrong answer.

Oh, and you can thank the old lady with the walker for writing "It's a doll" on your window with lipstick. She probably saved you some serious bucks, because surely the next people passing by would have noted the same thing the first group did, and they might have chosen to beat your ass...

For when you really really really don't want your date to get away...


Available at Think Geek

Ok, you do not go in for a tattoo ON YOUR FACE and fall asleep. No freaking way. This kid got exactly what she asked for and regretted it afterward, now she's suing the tattoo artists for giving her 56 stars on her face when she only wanted three.

Kids, don't tattoo your face.

Ever.

It'll save you from crap like this...

You know you've gone too long without a blog post when you forget your password...

I am seriously blog-blocked of late. 99.9% of my writing has gone into a new manuscript, which is rapidly becoming bloated. With about 15% still to go it's already at over 130,000 words--a good 27,000 more than the final draft of Charybdis.

Much editing to do during the next few drafts...

Dear Kanye West,

Please shut up. Really. Shut the Phk up before you look even dumber than you already apper to be. Because quotes such as this

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph.

only reinforce the notion that you're a very rich, spoiled, and not terribly bright man.

Oh, and that 52 page missive loaded with your own words of wisdom, with pearls such as "I hate the word hate!" and the occasional blank page...please don't publish that. And if there's a publisher out there that would actually pay you money and then spend real cash to distribute it to the masses... Let us all pray that it's printed on toilet paper and not bound in book form.

Your fifteen minutes are up, Kanye. I appreciate your talent for hip hop, but come on. It's time to go. And on your way our, please take note that George Bush never hated black people, you are not the demigod you seem to believe, and a book can't sign a freaking autograph.

To my parents...



HAPPY 60th ANNIVERSARY!!!

These kids in the national spelling bee, they're making me feel stupid...

Sometimes California really sucks...

How spoiled am I?
The Spouse Thingy set this up for me while he was off last week:



I can work from the bedroom now, AND it's huge, so I can actually see what I'm working on. If I run MS Word at 160% view on this thing, I don't even have to squint.

When I need to, I can close the door so there's no more worrying about someone wandering through my office while I'm buried deep within a scene, because if that happened one more time...well...there might have been screaming and perhaps a little blood involved.

It's conducive to watching TV in bed together, too, in case you need to be convinced that you, too, want this sweet, sweet setup.

But I don't think the Spouse Thingy will come over and bolt it to the wall for you. Not without payment. You'd have to offer him a lot.

And you better not offer him what I did...

File under WTF?

First thought upon waking this morning:

Why are people from Canada called Canadians? Why aren't they Canadans? Because if they're Canadians, why aren't people from the U.S. called Americians?

I have no idea why my brain went there...

Do not stand in the middle of Lowe's and tell me you've got good wood, because really, sometimes I'm like 12 years old, and I will snicker inappropriately...

For some reason, we thought it would be just a spiffy idea to hit the flea market--which is on acres of blacktop--in this:




For some reason, it was not entirely pleasant.
Go figure.

Experiencing blog block...major major blog block...

They've been married 62 years; he's almost 90 years old, and this was their impromptu piano recital in the atrium of the Mayo clinic:




How cool is that?