The End: Part Two

This will come as no surprise to most who know me, but I’m ending this blog. Again.

Reasons both personal and professionally have contributed to this decision but what it comes down to is my writing was going well when I wasn’t blogging and now I’m all jammed up mentally and creatively since I started it back up again.

I’ll still be updating through Twitter because I can do that from my cell phone when I’m bored out in the world, and you can keep up with pictures of Spenser and the rest of the family on my Facebook page. But read my lips: no new blog posts.

My Town Tuesday

I know these are usually done on Mondays, but let’s talk about My Town Tuesday. As I sit here in this vile state with an awful economy, frigid temperatures, and about a foot of ugly, dirty snow on everything I’m prone to contemplate why I’m still here.

First of all, because Becky and I both seem to have bucked the trend of unemployment in the area and have good jobs with good benefits. Also, both of our families are here and that makes it very nice for Spenser. But what about before Becky? Before my new family life? Why did I stick around?

It’s not like I didn’t try to get out of here. I lived in New York City for a while. But while that was a great experience, I realized I have no business living someplace that expensive if I’m not willing to work a hundred jobs and sacrifice greatly to live there. Once I came back, I ended up eventually in Ann Arbor and that seemed to be good enough for me. It had everything I liked about New York — independent cinema, good restaurants, lots of bookstores, a good theater community, a good writing community, etc.– and was cheaper by comparison.

I toyed with the idea of being a screenwriter or TV writer for a while, but the only step I took to getting out to LA was applying for a couple of fellowships. I suspect the reason I never moved someplace else, more specifically some place warm, was fear. I’ve never been good with money and most of my independent living adventures resulted in me living back with my parents for a time. That’s all well and good when you’re close to home, but on the other side of the country it seems a bit harder to pull off.

My other brief consideration of moving someplace warm was a time I wanted to move to Florida so I could go to grad school at Florida International University where Dennis Lehane, among others, had studied creative writing. I even went so far as to attend Sleuthfest in 2003 where some of the staff were attending. It seemed like a good idea because grad school would provide more stability than just up and moving someplace for the fun of it. But on that one I took the easy way out, again more out of fear than anything else.

So there you have it. But I still tell Becky every now and then that we might have to move to LA if I get a screenwriting or movie offer that I can’t refuse. And these days she seems more than happy to go along with that.

Truth from Babes

The photo, as promised.

Thanks to Paul Guyot for the clothing for our chunky baby.

You Don’t Mess with the Snowhan

I don’t know where that bout of blog productivity came from last week, but I posted every day except Sunday which is quite a bit for me lately. And I enjoyed it. Back in the day when I started this thing I know I had all sorts of energy to blog every day and write a bunch of short stories and do the Blog Short Story Project and manage Demolition. Ah, the energy of a younger man…But I think these days the work I’m turning out is at a higher level and I guess I’ll make that sacrifice.

The weekend was nice and snowy which gave me the excuse to stay in and not do much except read and work on revisions. I didn’t get as far as I wanted to on revisions because I hit a bit of a wall and then panicked and wondered if I should be working on this at all. But I took a deep breath and went out to shovel the driveway (while the brand friggin new snow blower I just bought sat uncooperatively on the porch) and when I came back I figured out what to do.

We had every intention of going to church on Sunday since we haven’t been in ages and I’ve been missing it, but with that much snow on the ground I wasn’t taking Spenser out until I had a chance to shovel. So I read some more in TOROS AND TORSOS and it’s only getting better. I also watched some playoff football, ate some sirloin burger soup, and we capped the night off with a viewing of YOU DON’T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN. This was a movie that was better than I expected when I added it to the Netflix que. The Israel-Palestine subplot was interesting to view in light of recent activity over there. I think it was handled well with humor and made some interesting points without being preachy…which I guess is easy to do with enough bare backsides flopping around.

I also promised Paul I would post a picture of Spenser in a shirt that he bought for him but of course I forgot to upload it from the camera so look for that later today.

On Patrol

I’m writing this with a nice Johnny Walker and water next to me and the Pittsburgh San Diego football game on the TV. Becky is feeding Spenser at the end of the couch and it’s generally a cozy night here at the Q homestead.

I finally read THE DAWN PATROL and regret every moment I spent not having read it. (Actually that’s not true because when the book first came out I was in the middle of an ugly reading and writing funk and needed to read outside of the crime circle for a while so this was the perfect time to read it) What a great book. I could go on and on like so many others about what a great book this is, but I had an interesting reaction to this book. While I was blown away at how good it was, I thought at the end “I could do this.” Maybe not right now, and maybe not in the near future, but this is the kind of book I could write when I put my time in. Winslow has a great quick conversational style that I’m able to do in som e of my better sections of work.

This isn’t to say I’m claiming to be as good as Don Winslow, I’m not and this book made me feel like a schlub in many ways. But it gave me something to aim for. I love Dennis Lehane but there is no way I’ll be able to do what he does, and I don’t really want to. I’m not aiming for literary respect or anything like that, but I want to be operating at the top of my chosen form. Like Winslow. And like Michael Connelly. It gave me fresh energy as I pound into my revisions.

I’m also thinking about going back and finally reading Winslow’s Shamus Award Winning CALIFORNIA FIRE AND LIFE. I’ve held out for so long because I was angry that this book won the Shamus over Robert Crais’s LA REQUIEM which I still consider one of the best PI novels of modern times. But after THE DAWN PATROL I think it’s time to let that chip fall.

So next on the docket for me is Craig McDonald’s TOROS AND TORSOS. This series has intrigues me because I love stories about writers, and I’m a big Hemingway fan, and I like that whole adventure writer scene of that time, but I never got around to reading anything in the series. And then at the library today it was right there in the new releases so I read a few pages and was hooked. After that is either LUSH LIFE (I know I know, this is right up there with missing on TDP) or Charles Bock’s BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN.

What’s in your TBR?

A Post-Christmas Carol

I’m taking down the Christmas decoration tomorrow and it only seems appropriate that we have a blizzard on the way. For some reason the end of the holiday season seemed to come quite abruptly this year. I suspect it has something to do with spending the long New Year’s weekend– when everybody else was slowly phasing out their Christmas stuff– in 80 degree weather in Florida. So we come back home and everybody else has moved on and the Christmas music on satellite radio is gone and I’m left looking at the ugly side of winter in Michigan.

I love the Christmas season but it can be such a huge let down as well. Especially this year since I will be the one doing the un-decorating. In the past, my mom did most of it when I lived at home and when I lived on my own, my decorations consisted of a small Christmas tree that went right back into it’s trash bag for storage at the end of the season. But this year I have to take down all of the ornaments, the whole tree, the stockings, the garland, and the outside lights. This is stuff that’s fun to do the day after Thanksgiving but not so much afterward. And to top it off, football season is almost over and it wasn’t even a very good one to begin with.

So instead of wallowing in my misery, here are a few things I’m looking forward to in the next few months:

1) Getting my new book done and getting it out into the market. Also getting started on the next novel project

2) Love is Murder in Chicago in less than a month – This is like a little mini local Bouchercon. It will be nice to catch up with all of my chums, but I also have some very important meetings on the burner as well for this regarding the previously mentioned book.

3) Family vacation to Las Vegas and Arizona in March – Becky, Spenser and I will be once more planing it to some place warm, this time to visit relatives. I’ve always wanted to visit Vegas and Becky just so happens to have family out there. Yay for family.

4) There’s also just the unknown possibilities out there. This is a fresh year. I could win the lottery, get a book deal, or do any number of cool things that I don’t even know are possible right now.

But first I have to get the stupid decorations down.

The Process Wonk

(Cross posted from First Offenders)

For the most part I enjoy revisions, especially the beginning stages where I’m taking the lump of promise that is my rough draft and shaping it and polishing it. Of course it gets real tedious after the seventh or eight draft and I still can’t figure out how to fix my ending, but that hasn’t happened yet with this one and I don’t think it will. For this book I had my depression and fits of rage at the very beginning. I was so sick of all of the revising I’ve been doing over the years without success and I didn’t see any end to it in the near future so I panicked. But then I got over it, wrote a bit of something else and came back and realized I have something I think is pretty good. And now I’m making it better.

Here’s how I’m doing it.

After I let the rough draft cool for a couple of months, I went back and started reading it from the beginning. I had a separate file open where I would note things that didn’t make sense, or things that I thought were stupid, ideas for expansion, and such. After that read through, I looked at my notes and saw three major things I need to work on. So what I did is made an outline of every chapter from the first draft and then cut out the chapters I thought were useless or took the story in a direction I didn’t like. And then I started a new outline for the next draft.

Here I used an old screenwriting trick to anchor my story with three major plot points and a few smaller plot pinches. This was nice because I realized I had all of the strong anchor points I needed already, they were just mostly in the wrong places. Some big scenes came too late and some came too early without enough buildup. So for a couple of days I built the new outline around those anchor scenes and added a few new scenes and cut a few more until I ended up with an outline that has two more chapters than the original. The ending is still the same, but all of the other major plot twists happen at different times than in the first draft.

Now I’m at the point where I’m taking all of those scenes from the first draft and putting them into the correct order in the new draft. I do this a few chapters at a time and then I’ll go back and read the chapters and polish them and make sure they fit with everything that came before hand. When I’m done with this draft, I’ll let it sit for a little bit and then do another read through to see if everything still makes sense. Then I’ll send it out to my readers and see what they have to say.

I’m going to Love is Murder at the beginning of February and would like to have this current draft done by then so I can talk it up to the editors and agents I meet there.

How does this compare to your revision process? And for the readers out there, do your prefer a perfectly polished final product, or do you like the raw energy you get from something closer to a first draft?

Old Lang Write

I got an email yesterday from Paul Guyot and he was talking about his work output of the last year. This got me thinking about my own writing output from last year so I went back through my records (thank you GMail) and came up with a list of what I wrote in 2008 and I gotta say I’m quite happy with it.

-40,000 or so words on the third draft of a novel I ultimately abandoned

-Ten pages of a screenplay adaptation of my Thuglit story

-Two drafts of a The Hemingway Stripper

- Two drafts of a story for Jen Jordan’s anthology

-The opening page of another short story

-Two and a half drafts of my current novel

This is in a year where I didn’t expect to write much. The year started with an ugly case of the writing blues where I didn’t write much and hated everything I did manage to write. I think I was finally able to get over that hump toward the end of February when I came back from my honeymoon and had a good start on The Hemingway Stripper short story and a screenplay. I fiddled around with both of them over the next couple of months until May when I started chipping away at a new book.

I then expected to see a substantial drop-off in my output after Spenser was born, but that never happened and I managed to finish the book I was working on and get a good ways into another one before starting revisions. I also wrote another short story that was ultimately picked up for Jen Jordan’s UNCAGED anthology.

So looking back is all well and good, but this is a new year so what do I see for myself writing-wise in 2009? Hopefully I’ll get the book I’m working on now nice and polished and on submission to agents, then I’d also like to finish the novel version of my Thuglit story MURDER BOY and the screenplay version of that story as well. I also have at least one short story I want to finish and a couple more kernels of ideas.

And what about you? How did your writing go last year?

New Year, New Look

What do you think?

A Bleak Start to the New Year

My first two reads of 2009 came by way of Bleak House Books and they were pretty good. I finished Reed Coleman’s EMPTY EVER AFTER during a long, luxurious breakfast during the Florida trip and I finished Libby Hellman’s EASY INNOCENCE yesterday. Other than sharing an unfortunate knack for stilted dialogue, both books had great plots and excellent character development.

I’m glad I read at least a couple of books in the Moe Prager series before I started EMPTY because the entire plot revolves around the complete history of Moe’s caseload. It also means that I can’t go back and read any of the ones I missed because I think Coleman gives away the ending of every one of the books I haven’t read in the series. But the true strength of this book is Moe’s journey through his life as a PI. To find out who would hate him so much to terrorize him and his family, Moe digs back through every case he worked looking for suspects and the best scenes in the book are the ones of redemption and revenge with past villains and lovers. I think the book was set up for a darker, less neat ending than the one provided, but it was still an excellent book.

I was tainted in my reading of EASY INNOCENCE because I’m a big fan of Laura Lippman’s stand alone THE POWER OF THREE that handles teenage girls much better than Hellman does, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to like in EASY INNOCENCE. Ultimately the story of three teenage girls who start hooking to buy fancy purses and clothes, it’s how these girls react to the adult level trouble their scheme brings down on them that make the book work. There are a few touching character moments and I think the lead PI character is a nicely developed hero. The plot is nice and twisty and I read it fast enough to amaze myself. If Hellman ever comes back with another adventure I’ll be sure to pick it up.

Next in my TBR pile is THE DAWN PATROL and I’m looking forward to that one.

What are y’al reading out there these days?