Mmmm, crow

You know, I always laughed a little when I read blog posts from people who said they couldn’t post or they were shutting their blog down because they didn’t have time to keep it up. I thought, come on, how hard can it be to fit that in?  Well sheesh, now I know. Work has been crazy and Becky’s been nasty sick with the flu and it’s been hard finding the time to write books and stories, let alone blog posts. So I apologize for my secret judging of you all. And in better news, Richard Helms, the editor of the Back Alley Webzine has selected my short story RUINS OF DETROIT as one of the three he’s able to nominate for a Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society. Yay me. This story is one of my favorites, even Becky can’t stand it. It also holds a special place in my heart because it was the first piece of original fiction I was paid for. Yay Rick. Check out the entire story here.

Live: From Real Life

I woke in a foul mood this morning, but it seems to have subsided so far so that’s good. This weekend was great writing-wise. After doing 1500 words on the novel Saturday, I rolled up my sleeves and did 2,000 on Sunday bringing the grand total back up 60,000 which makes me happy. Who knows if they’re good words, but I suspect they’re better than the ones they replaced.

 I’ve written here before about my difficulty coming up with good motives for crimes and lately I’ve been feeling like none of my motives were solid or credible reasons for murder and sundry. And then god bless Kwamie Kilpatrick. The vaunted mayor of Detroit has been nailed in a another web of his long list of fabulous crimes. But the interesting part to me was the crimes and how they relate to the Detroit Police Department.

There was a party at the mayoral mansion and afterward a stripper who was there was murdered and the weapon used looks to be a police issued gun. All of the officers involved in pursuing that investigation have been fired, harrased, or “disappeared.” And this is a city where almost all of the murders go unsolved. What a great place for a PI, right?

Idol Worship

I originally planned on writing about the crisis of faith I’ve been having in my ability to plot out the rest of the book I’m working on. But just thinking about it in the shower this morning and how to write about it was enough to get me off the ledge. So then I thought about taking Patti Abbott’s suggestion and writing about my editorial process at DEMOLITION. But I think I’d rather write about Becky and the main claim to fame she has in life.

Becky loves to sing and she’s pretty good. Karaoke has long been a special thing for us on dates and she’s got great stage presence. As part of this love, she’s made the trek around the country several times to audition for American Idol. I think that’s just cool. The closet I’ve ever come was going from Flint to Ann Arbor in high school to audition for Cedar Point amusement park. But this makes her a participant in a hughe pop cultural experience, kind of like being in line for the very first showing of Star Wars.

Have any of you been involved in anything like this? Have you auditioned for a game show or sent a video in to be on The Real World? Anything?

Sandwiches and Jesus

Becky and I had a date last night and went to see 27 DRESSES. It was a good movie, though not as amazing as Heigel’s last outing in KNOCKED UP. But it was fun and everything I expect from a romantic comedy. And scattered through were some very, very funny lines. And in an effort to promote the contributions of screenwriters during this ugly strike I thought I’d name the screen writer here and quote some of my favorite lines from the movie.

 The writer is Aline Brosh McKenna who also wrote one of my favorite movies from last year THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA. Here are my two favorite lines:

“I feel like a just found out my favorite love song was written about a sandwich.”

And then this exchange later in the film.

“You don’t have any needs?”

“No, I’m Jesus.”

Good stuff. It’s movies like this that reallt make me think it’s time to stop fighting nature and start writing romantic comedies. Maybe more about this struggle later on the blog. I’m sure you’re all giddy about that.

Showers and Houses

Becky and I had our wedding shower on Saturday. What a weird time that was at first. Lots of people from both sides of two families, many of whom have never met, playing weird games. Becky and I just watched an laughed (and my dad ate and watched TV hidden away) and then opened a lot of cool presents. Sunday we went to the Home Depot to buy stuff for our new house. We bought tile, and appliances, and drywall, oh so much drywall. I took my parents over to see the house on Saturday and took these crappy pics with my phone. But you get the idea. I may have over-exagerated when I said it didn’t have any floors or walls.

   

I also had a great writing day Sunday. I did 1600 words on the novel and another 100 words on the short story. I’m thinking the short story has lost it’s gloss for me now and I don’t feel the need to work on it at the same time as the novel so I’ll probably save it for when I’m done to help clear my brain.

Brothers Forever

Busy day at work today, good night of writing last night. I got 500 words done on the novel and was able to chip off another 150 or so on my new short story. I also switched it to 2nd person present tense. Normally I’m not a fan of gimmicky tenses like that, but it sounds really right for this story so who am I to argue? I still wasn’t happy with the title so I took the dog out for a walk and while I was out I came up with one I like much better. It was orginally called FLARE PRAYER, but I like THE HEMINGWAY STRIPPER much better for a story about a violent, pregnant stripper and her impotent security guard boyfriend.

Stewie (the dog) was funny during our walk. Normally he zips along speedy everywhere but when he came to a patch of ice or snow he would slow waaaaaaay down and waddle his little body across it and then speed rigth back up. His bumble-dunce owner would be advised to pay attention seeing as he’s already went butts up severak times this year on the ice.

TMI, or not enough I

It sucks that I can’t write about my entire life here. When it was just me and I didn’t have much going on in my life it was easy to document everything here. But now that my life is encompassing more people and the events have broader family and social ramifications, I’m finding that I can’t talk about everything that I want to.

In general, I’m a pretty private person and you normally have to pry information out of me (just ask my mom), but when it comes to this blog (and to a lesser extent my fiction) letting it all hangs out serves as a great therapuetic outlet for me. As great as this blog has been for getting my writing career off the ground, and building my name, I’ve much more enjoyed being able to work through some of the hardest and most exciting times in my life.  And as time goes on, that’s going to happen less and less and it makes me sad.

Don’t fret though, you will still get a healthy dose of my personal life mixed in with the slam-bam excitment of my writing ups and downs, but maybe just not in the amount, detail, or timeliness as before.

Some of you probably even think that is too much. But I don’t care…mostly.

And so it begins

My new writing year is finally under way. I’ve got the revised outline shored up enough and the dead weight cut, and I added a bit over 500 new words to the mix. I also got down 128 words on the beginning of a new short story I’ve been thinking about that might be nice for the newly renewed Plots with Guns. But that will have to wait until I get this book done which I think should be sometime in the next month or so.

And Becky said I should mention her because she has such ego and self-esteem problems.

Edit: She just said I can’t say that because it makes her look bad.

Edit: She just said I can’t write that because it’s a lie.

Edit: Okay, so maybe I am making it all up, you’ll never know.

Are We There Yet?

This weeks seems like it’s been going on forever. I can’t wait to get back to my regular schedule next week. And in a completely unrelated note: why do people buy vowels on Wheel of Fortune? I’ve never understood this strategy. I bet these are the same people who buy stuff they don’t need just because it’s on sale.

I still haven’t written any prose this new year, but the other day I did do some freewriting and came up with two big answers to two big questions of my plot. One of them I really like and should be good to go, the other will take a bit more development. I really like this process for getting a handle on my story. I’ll read through what I’ve got and then generate a list of major questions, most of which I have no answer for and assume I’ll never be able to figure out. But then I stare at the page for a while, and then start writing about the questions using a chain of thought freewriting style. Without fail, I find my answers. They may not always be the right answers and more often than not it takes a couple tries to get one I like, but that’s how it happens.

On a broader scale though, I’ve been evaluating what seems to be the biggest problems with my plotting and that comes down to one thing: motives. I know that seems simple coming from a crime writer, but I have a hard time with motives. I’m a pretty easy going guy so I can’t imagine too many scenerios in which I’d resort to the sorts of acts my characters resort to. That’s why the one phrase I kept repeating over and over again while I was freewriting was “what does this person care about the most.”

A while back on one of the discussion boards, Laura Lippman was talking about one of the reasons she liked Irish crime fiction so much. She said Irish society still has a sense of shame. In America even the most vile deeds can make someone a celebrity so what do people have to kill about?

So how do you find your motives? And what process do you have for getting to the core of your story?

Never Open with Weather

It was 8 degrees last week. Why is it now almost 60? I hate this state. All of the pretty snow is melted away and my sinuses are in full rebellion. This whole week I’ve got to get up earlier and be in here a half hour earlier than normal. And my normal shift is pushing the limits of what I consider acceptable waking time. I don’t get these authors who write full time and don’t have to get up early for a job, but CHOOSE to wake up at 6 or 7 am to write. You call it discipline, I call it crazy. In a perfect world I would be up around 10 am and stay up until all hours of the night. I love the late night and the middle of the night.

But before that can ever happen I have to finish this new book. And so far this year I’ve not only failed to write any new words, I’ve actually ended up cutting 16,000 of the ones I already had. But it needed to be done, and rather cut 16,000 then waste another two weeks and cut 30,000. I’ve got a solid outline prepared of the rest of the book and now I’m in the process of planning the last 100 pages or so. I’ve managed to pull out four plot strands that need to be answered and wrapped up but I only have solutions or answers for two of them. In one of his comments last week Greg Bardsley says doing this forces him to confront plot questions that he has been “writing around.” That totally describes what I’ve been doing in the pages I cut and it doesn’t make for very good storytelling

So we’ll see if I can solve these problems with dramatic and inventive solutions and wrap everything up in a neat and satisfying package. Or maybe it will all just end up being a dream…