**
It doesn’t help that we’re just days away from the three-year anniversary of Katrina. But the truth is, no one with hurricane-induced posttraumatic stress syndrome should send their youngest child to college in Florida.
Fay isn’t a hurricane yet, but they expect it to turn into one before it comes ashore. The path has been vibrating back and forth across the western coast of Florida, with landfall expected close enough to my daughter’s college that they’re ordering an evacuation. That means they close the campus, and where the students go and how they get there is up to them.
“Keep yourself safe,” I tell my daughter in one of the thousand phone calls I’ve made to Florida in the last 48 hours.
Her response is predictable. “I can’t believe you said that. It’s just a little Category 1. I went through Katrina, remember?”
Like I could possibly have forgotten? I say, “It’s not the hurricane I’m worried about; it’s the evacuation traffic.”
“Oh. I’ll be careful.”
But I lied, of course. I am worried about the evacuation traffic, but I’m also worried about falling trees and rampaging storm surges and roving lawless gangs and all the other nasties that come with hurricanes.
I’m really great at worrying. Unfortunately, from here, it’s all I can do.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Friday, August 15, 2008
Rewriting, Again
I’m rewriting The Deadlight Connection once again. How many serious reworkings does this make? I’ve lost count.
So what drove this particular rehashing? The realization that I didn’t have enough conflict between my two protagonists. In the first book of the series, The Archangel Project, Jax and Tobie spar back and forth constantly. In Deadlight, they were getting along way to well. The sizzle was gone. It was…boring.
So I’ve rethought Tobie’s motivations and goals, gone back to her roots, and started rewriting. In the process, I’ve recaptured the characters I loved in Archangel and given this new book a much needed spark. Maybe, just maybe I can finally say, "By George, I think I've got it." About six months late, but better late than never.
How did I go wrong? Distraction, I suspect. This has been a sucky year. But my mom’s in our house now, things are beginning to settle into a pattern, and while I find my writing hours reduced, I also find that in my non-writing hours I’ve started doing something I haven’t done in a long time: I’m thinking about my book.
Which is how I realized I’d lost the conflict between Jax and Tobie, and how important that was for making the book a fun, fast read.
Now, if I could just finish the #@%& thing!
So what drove this particular rehashing? The realization that I didn’t have enough conflict between my two protagonists. In the first book of the series, The Archangel Project, Jax and Tobie spar back and forth constantly. In Deadlight, they were getting along way to well. The sizzle was gone. It was…boring.
So I’ve rethought Tobie’s motivations and goals, gone back to her roots, and started rewriting. In the process, I’ve recaptured the characters I loved in Archangel and given this new book a much needed spark. Maybe, just maybe I can finally say, "By George, I think I've got it." About six months late, but better late than never.
How did I go wrong? Distraction, I suspect. This has been a sucky year. But my mom’s in our house now, things are beginning to settle into a pattern, and while I find my writing hours reduced, I also find that in my non-writing hours I’ve started doing something I haven’t done in a long time: I’m thinking about my book.
Which is how I realized I’d lost the conflict between Jax and Tobie, and how important that was for making the book a fun, fast read.
Now, if I could just finish the #@%& thing!
Monday, August 11, 2008
Choices, and Gone Baby Gone
One of the realities of life in our family that has long driven my girls crazy is the way my sister—the novelist Penelope Williamson—and I tend to talk about writing for hours and hours and hours whenever we get together or chat on the phone. I remember one time Penny said, “The more I write, the more I become aware of the choices I make every time I sit down to write a scene.” Ever since that conversation, I’ve been far more aware of the choices I make, and how the number of choices I have to make seems to expand the more experienced I become.
I think this is true for most writers. As beginners, we tend to rush into each scene with lots of enthusiasm and little sense of conscious choice. But as we gain experience, we become aware of those choices and begin to make more deliberate decisions. Where to start a scene. Where to set a scene. Whose point of view to use. When and how to end a scene. And on and on.
So what does this have to do with Gone Baby Gone? Steve and I watched this movie Saturday night. And then, last night, we watched the Bonus Features, including the “Audio Commentary by Writer/Director Ben Affleck and Writer Aaron Stockard.” When I first saw it listed as a selection, I said, You’ve got to be kidding. The entire movie with a soundtrack of the director and writers talking about the movie? Sounds boring, right? Maybe for most people, yes. But for those of you out there who are writers, fascinating. Because most of what they talk about is the choices they made—some good, some bad, and the compromises they had to make. I also found it fascinating to realize, by watching the movie through their “eyes”, just how many subtle little things I’d missed. Whatever you might think of Affleck as an actor, there’s no doubt he understands storytelling, and has studied and learned from the masters.
A few weeks ago, Steve Malley ran a post on the wisdom to be gained from watching the bonus features on DVDs. If you want to take his advice, Gone Baby Gone would be a great place to start.
I think this is true for most writers. As beginners, we tend to rush into each scene with lots of enthusiasm and little sense of conscious choice. But as we gain experience, we become aware of those choices and begin to make more deliberate decisions. Where to start a scene. Where to set a scene. Whose point of view to use. When and how to end a scene. And on and on.
So what does this have to do with Gone Baby Gone? Steve and I watched this movie Saturday night. And then, last night, we watched the Bonus Features, including the “Audio Commentary by Writer/Director Ben Affleck and Writer Aaron Stockard.” When I first saw it listed as a selection, I said, You’ve got to be kidding. The entire movie with a soundtrack of the director and writers talking about the movie? Sounds boring, right? Maybe for most people, yes. But for those of you out there who are writers, fascinating. Because most of what they talk about is the choices they made—some good, some bad, and the compromises they had to make. I also found it fascinating to realize, by watching the movie through their “eyes”, just how many subtle little things I’d missed. Whatever you might think of Affleck as an actor, there’s no doubt he understands storytelling, and has studied and learned from the masters.
A few weeks ago, Steve Malley ran a post on the wisdom to be gained from watching the bonus features on DVDs. If you want to take his advice, Gone Baby Gone would be a great place to start.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Book Club Sales
Last week brought some good news. The Book of the Month Club and Mystery Guild are buying both C.S. Harris’s Where Serpents Sleep and C.S. Graham’s The Archangel Project. Both titles will be “featured alternate selections”--one in October (I think), the other in November.
But this is the really neat thing: the Science Fiction Book Club is also buying Archangel! They say that although it’s a little out of their usual “realm,” they think the remote viewing element will appeal to their members.
How neat! Does this mean I can now say I write “science fiction”?
I guess not.
But this is the really neat thing: the Science Fiction Book Club is also buying Archangel! They say that although it’s a little out of their usual “realm,” they think the remote viewing element will appeal to their members.
How neat! Does this mean I can now say I write “science fiction”?
I guess not.
Friday, August 01, 2008
An Interview with C.S. Graham
This weekend, WRBH will be airing an interview with “C.S. Graham” on The Archangel Project. If you don’t live in the New Orleans area, you can listen to the interview by going to their website at www.WRBH.org. If you’re in the broadcast area, WRBH is at 88.3 FM on your radio.
The website doesn’t do podcasts, so if you want to hear it, you need to click on the “Listen Now” button on the website at the exact time the interview is being broadcast: on Saturday, 2 August, at 8:30am Central Time, and on Sunday, 3 August, at 8:30am and 10:30 pm Central Time.
The voice of C.S. Graham in this instance will be my co-author (and spouse) Steven Harris. It’s a great interview, so if you can, do try to catch it. We hope to get it up as a podcast on the website noon.
As for me, my mother is now in our house. Everything is still chaos, but I’m trying to get back to work on The Deadlight Project. I'd love to go up to the lake for some intensive writing, but that will have to wait until my mother gets more settled, and my youngest heads back to college.
The website doesn’t do podcasts, so if you want to hear it, you need to click on the “Listen Now” button on the website at the exact time the interview is being broadcast: on Saturday, 2 August, at 8:30am Central Time, and on Sunday, 3 August, at 8:30am and 10:30 pm Central Time.
The voice of C.S. Graham in this instance will be my co-author (and spouse) Steven Harris. It’s a great interview, so if you can, do try to catch it. We hope to get it up as a podcast on the website noon.
As for me, my mother is now in our house. Everything is still chaos, but I’m trying to get back to work on The Deadlight Project. I'd love to go up to the lake for some intensive writing, but that will have to wait until my mother gets more settled, and my youngest heads back to college.
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