Month: September 2023

Done Once More

I have rewritten the rewrite of this rewritten novel so many times, I believe I may never need to write a new book again. I shall just rewrite the rewritten rewrite!

You’re a writer. You know how it goes. There comes that moment, when, way down there in your writerly guts, you know there is nothing more to say.

Here’s a little passage from the book:

“There is nothing more to be said,” the princess stated coldly.

Auric stared at the princess, his mouth hanging open in surprise, his fists working in frustration, his eyes meeting her cold, determined, green-eyed stare in disbelief and anger. 

“Nothing more to say,” she said firmly.

“No, I imagine that there is not,” Auric replied haughtily. “When you change your mind, I am quite certain that you know where you may find me.”

It’s done, my writer friend. The rewrite of the rewritten rewrite of my current novel. D-O-N-E, finito.

And this done is done. You know, the one that’s finished as in there is no more to write. No words to say. It’s all out. We laugh, we cry, but we finish.

And, well, there it is.

Now it’s off to my readers, as a thanks-and-see-how-your-input-matters sort of a deal, and then off in search of an agent.

Oh, sit down, I must, for surely this is exciting, isn’t it?

Truly?

Express to Geezerville

So, like you, like every writer, like anyone and everyone who spends a great deal of time at a keyboard, I have eventually found myself stuck in the Carpal Tunnel.

My neurons, upset about the traffic, actually switched lanes and tried to take the Guyon Tunnel across town instead. No good. Blocked. Probably holiday traffic. So, I had to get them fixed.

One of the great mysteries of life is why stuff that is so easy to do is so very hard to undo. Perhaps the Pyramids were a vast mistake, which is why they’re still here.

Anyways, out from under the knife, one more day before the dressings come off, my puppy firmly wedged in my lap and absoLUTELY determined NOT to let me use the voice keyboard on my fold-phone, my mind reels back to things the nurses said to me…

“Don’t worry, sweetie”

“Oh, you’re a funny one”

“Put on your clothes now, cutie…”

Wait a minute.

These are not the words nurses say to virile men of a certain age. Those are not terms of respect.

We use those terms on GRANDMA!!!

OMG! They see me as a GEEZER!

They thought I was a feeble old man!

Sweetie? Dearie?

Pat your hand while you sit in the park and watch the birdies! Feed you milk-toast from a TV tray while watching Matlock! Shoes? Don’t you mean slippers?

How did this happen? How did I slip from cool video producer to vintage cracker-sucker in just one day? Successful writer and author to elderly gent in his jammies in just an hour? Cool guy goes under the knife, wrinkly old geezer comes out. Whaaaaat?

What kind of hospital is this?

I wasn’t scared of the surgery, but I’m sure as hell not getting anything else fixed! Not now that I understand the side effects! The risks are just too great!

Sweetie, indeed…

A Fantastic Twist

Oh, the Saga of Me continues… wait, don’t sagas usually have a dramatic grand finale? Uh oh…

So, in the meanwhile that I’ve been re-working the half-maligned-yet-quite-ballyhhoed rewrite of a previously published novel, I happened to mention to my OWN lovely sister that I was rewriting a book.

My sister the psychologist! I’d written much of Droppington Place with her in mind! How did I not send her a copy?

She asked to read all three novels (Sawdust Man, Droppington Place, and Marigold’s End), and I apologetically sent them along.

What a knockhead was I to have excluded her from my reader’s list in the first place. But now all was fixed.

She picked out precisely the themes I’d intended in the first two novels, but get this… Ready?

Okay, a touch of backstory:

Droppington Place is the story of a twelve-year-old kid who gets trapped inside a magical realm made entirely of paper, overseen by a silly-yet-kinda-maniacal Elizabethan playwright overlord made of sawdust. What? It could happen.

Sawdust Man makes the playwright a sympathetic lead character in a bittersweet love story that takes a thousand years to tell. Same guy, different story.

So, here’s the really cool twist:

My sister the psychologist saw that Sawdust Man was actually a SEQUEL to Dropington Place!

Holy cats! Do you see what this means? My sawdust playwright just might be a recurring figure in any number of magical realism stories!

Why had I not seen this before? Many, many thanks are owed to you, dear writer friend, for riding with me on this crazy adventure, and certainly to my lovely sister the psychologist for her unflinching support and her crazy, zany, utterly brilliant idea!

It’s the Founding of an Empire!