Blog RSS FeedWow, this one is about writing!
Yeah, for real. Only because things are going well and today I had a little mini-breakthrough that I really like.
I was thinking about this yesterday, because sometimes I stop to think that (with the pushed pub date), when this book comes out, it will have been seven years since I started it.
Yeah.
That’s a lot of years, isn’t it? Seems that way to me, anyway.
But what I realized is this: you always read agent blogs or authors’ blogs where they talk about having your two first books hiding in a box under the bed, or in a drawer, and I realized: Bad Girls Don’t Die — it IS my first two books. This especially hits me anytime I reach a passage that I know has been rewritten multiple times, getting better each time. I can recite the original, or the v. 2, even while staring at a page that contains a completely new version.
I basically think of this book as “Book-Writing Class”. I’ve learned so much about structure, pacing, characters and their motivations etc.
Of course there’s plenty more to learn, isn’t there?
I guess I’d better get back to work. Although I have to say, the construction next door (going on month… 16…? To build one house…?) is especially horribly loud today.
Also, in the “huh?” category, our mailman last week asked if we could move our trash cans — or our mailbox, which, by the way, is a slot in the wall of the garage — because our trash smelled. In the first place, it’s, what, four feet of trash cans that he has to pass? In the second place, maybe — just maaaaaaaybe — the smell is coming from the port-o-potty just over the property line? To which he said, “Maybe they can move the port-o-potty.”
Yeeeeeah, I don’t know. These are the “why on earth can’t we park in front of your driveway as we chuck our chocolate milkshakes at the house across the street?” type of construction workers, not the Boy Scout kind.
Related posts:- The big beautiful blue bin.
- Inspirations and the muse.
- It’s all fun and games until it starts to smell like the thing it looks like.
October 3rd, 2007 Katie Alender
Katie, I’ve just read the very end of your blog and cracked up. That is so true: I sit there in the movie theatre and read all the credits — isn’t that pathetic? Honestly, I love reading through the names. The movies we go to see are 95% American, and the names always make me cry; they are so American, a whole potpourri of the world in there.
Everyone in my family has made fun of me for this, but still I sit there and get my full money’s worth of the viewing experience. And lately, whoever puts the movies together has been rewarding my kind of nerd, putting in little freebies towards the end. Everyone else is half the way out of the theater, and only I am still comfortably seated, noting who the fashion advisors and animal trainers were, laughing away at the funny little piece they’ve kindly left for the very end, halfway through the very last credits. Good old Hollywood.
Yes, credits are wonderful places to observe idiosyncratic behavior. For the most part (in my experience), people get to choose how they’re credited, which explains those FRANK “THE STUD” HARRISON names.
Not to mention reading through the movie credits and realizing that one of the stars sang one of the songs and you didn’t even realize it.
And the bonus joke, there is no greater reward.
I should have known you would be the one, Mary!
1. All this time, I thought that those funny names were things the producers did to tease their friends. Now that I know that folks choose them for themselves, well, I might never be the same again.
2. I like the way that you are doing a sort of on-the-job training for yourself instead of hiding a book under your bed. I never understood that thinking. Either make it worthy of the light of day or ditch it. Don’t hold on to useless crap, kwim?
3. We have a mail slot that goes right into our house. There’s the cutest little door on the inside that makes me happy every single time I open it to get my mail. And really, I have no point here except that you made me think about it so I’m sharing it with you.