I am unable, utterly unable, to focus for long on any one project. My first start-to-finish novel, The Editor, is in the rewrite pile of starts and stops. The opening chapter sucks, big time, and every time I try to fix it, make it better, it somehow gets worse. My first collaborative attempt at a mystery, a novel about 3/4 finished, one abandoned by all and recently picked up again by me IS my current focus. My earlier “current focus” of the last month or so, the Chronicles of Irene, a true-life influenced novel, is on a back burner while I try to figure out why it fails to interest me. I know it’s not the story — the woman lived an amazing life, if short, and abruptly ended. So it must be the writing. Do all writers bore themselves so absolutely at some point with what they once considered “compelling prose”? Let me think. Oh yes. I have two other novels or novellas underway. One a sci-fi murder mystery that works from pre-world history into modern day and back again . . . And another that is a collection of loosely connected short stories and under the head The Six Degrees Stories. Most of the Six Degrees are now on the blog www.labelitcrime.wordpress.com and most of my attempts to focus on Irene are at www.itcouldabeen.wordpresss.com As for memoir — oh my, I just haven’t been going there, except by way of poetry, at all lately. I post poems at my blog www.lynndoiron.wordpress.com Obviously, I am scattered in writing, all over the place . . . This note is just to say: I know.
The Queen of Recyle
That’s what I used to tell myself. Not with newspaper or aluminum. Although I do put plastics and paper and aluminum in the recycle bin, I don’t, in fact, “recycle” then into something other than what they came to me as. No, the Queen of Recycle tag I gave myself was for taking one thing, a thing headed for the trash heap or the Thrift Store, and altering it into what might be of use, or at the very least, entertaining. In my craft space, I’m currently on a “sock” phase, making soft toys for my grandkids and the new hatch of babies making grandparents out of my dear old best friends. I even cycled the recycled socks through a “Softy Pal” photo story about their creaton over on Gather.com.
But I am now (in addition to the sock addiction) recycling stories. And I find myself in an undecided place. When I use a short story posted in one place, for instance, just off the top of my head, posted “here” in Doiron’s Cog as one of the Six Degrees Stories — when I use that story in another place (say, Label It Crime, my blog novel in progress) should I delete said story from “here” — you know, once it gets inserted “there”? If I were recycling socks instead of stories, there’d be no indecision because the sock gets used up in becoming the monkey or dog or cat or bear.
I think I’ve just answered myself. All I need do, if I find myself in this fuzzy place of not knowing again, is think of my stories as monkeys, dogs, bears, etc. Each one becomes what it becomes, but can’t be in both places at the same time. Well, unless I’m writing sci-fi and/or fantasy adventure . . . then, who knows . . . I mean these word formations could clone themselves perpetually. (Now, that’s a scary thought!)
BBC Crime Story site Offers Questions
At the BBC’s Get Writing site I came across a series of questions, including Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How in relationship to Crime. So I pulled a suspicious character from my Six Degrees Stories, Jeff Harrison, by name, from the short-short Sometimes He Thinks. Since writing Jeff into existence, he’s creeped me out the way he saves all the baked goods his neighbor leaves at his door, storing them inside his cupboards, filling shelves with their plastic-wrapped staleness, buying ant traps to keep them safe from critters. He seemed a natural choice when I came across a Crime Story prompt to write a thousand words a day through the month of February, and today I used him to come up with the following responses to questions asked:
Who – Jeff Harrison
What – serial killer
Where – not in Pennsylvania but several other states
When – when he attends Public Works conventions out of state
Why – frustration, psycho, issues with women
How – by happenstance, not premeditated, not a stalker of those he kills, but is a stalker of those he admires. Those he does not admire, he barely acknowledges. Those he kills, he acknowledges even less, except by their labels which come after the fact.
Write a To The Bones Reduction of the Central Conflict: THE conflict would be Jeff’s eventual demise and what brings that about; how he is stopped from further murders. He is stopped when he brings the murders home, into Pennsylvania and his own apartment bldg.
Story encapsulation in a paragraph: Women are dying but their deaths are not connected. They are distanced by miles, by states, by sections of the nation from one another. A woman found dead in her car in New England one October, the labels cut out of her blouse and jacket, is filed and forgotten as an isolated incident. The following spring, an elderly shopper is found dead by the dumpsters at Wal-Mart in Des Moines, missing labels on her clothing are not indicated in police reports. In most reported homicides of lone females – from Arizona to Montana and Texas to Florida – no missing labels are mentioned. But when Sonnie Lindegarde becomes a roadside victim shortly before Christmas in 2007, a research student takes the time to notice those missing labels. The student is Cher Lindegarde and her sister did not cut labels from her clothing, nor did she buy from discount houses that did. Her sister is not the one meant to die, according to Cher, and the ways they had gone about life would indicate Cher is right: Sonnie, the hard worker always with more care and anxiety than seemed healthy, and Cher of wild abandon who slept with, well, with men with a pulse and a kindness somewhere inside.
Story Breakdown, not easy
Simple, but not easy. This breaking up a story into palatable chunks. I do it because I read a considerable amount of online material and when the writing seems to go on interminably on a page I become antsy to get to the end. There’s something about coming to the end of a page, turning that page, beginning again at the top, reading down the left side, the right side, another turned page, and so on. I wanted readers of my story offerings to have moments that might “seem” as if they held a real book in hand, the mandatory pauses while that “page” gets turned. And, the choice to not turn a page at all but simply move on . . .
The tech part of adding links and such between the chunks gets tedious but, once I’d done a few, is easy to do and double-easy to check and see if the link does in fact take readers to the next page intended.
The not easy part of story breakdown is where to make the breaks. How to decide if enough has been left to entice the reader to go for more? At the moment, for me and this Six Degrees Stories collection — it’s very much a game. Keep hoping for feedback. But, regardless, I’m enjoying the gameplay.
The Last Sunday
The very last Sunday of January 2008 and I’m sitting fifteen minutes into the nine a.m. hour typing this. Amazing! Not that I’m typing here, no amazement in that; I write everyday, mostly nonsense, but it’s entertaining nonsense . . . entertains me for the minutes I give it. Fair enough exchange. Usually.
Not as “fair” the last couple days. The “entertainment” value has decreased significantly due to “no new” writing and major rehashing of a lot of old stuff. I guess I grin every now and again, if not at those forgotten characters of mine, then most assuredly at my convoluted sentences and overwritten moments. You would think I’d take things more in hand, tap that delete key faster than dogs scratch at fleas, get rid of the irritable overwrites. But they tell me where I’ve been. They’re like these snapshots of style–verbose in ‘03, terse in ‘06, maudlin in . . . well . . . most of the time. Like now: dwelling on the fact that this is the last Sunday of January 2008. Wasn’t Christmas just yesterday? At the outside, the day before?
The first of those rehashed stories is up in my “Pages” labeled The Six Degrees Stories. I broke up the 1500 or so words of “The College Dean” into four parts and made the font big, maybe too big. So, if you go there and find yourself yawning before you get through the first 300 or so, it’s an easy deal to move on.
I need feedback. About everything from presentation of blog to what’s contained in it. Thanks.
Blog Craft
It’s been a long day and the Blog Craft Manual is spread all over the place but I’m getting there. Today I figured out that Options was a place where I had “options” and could change the looks of some pretty shabby looking site titles and tag lines, etc. I doubt I’ll ever change from the lumbering eejit I am about getting to the FAQ area or Forums chock full of help for the blunderers such as me. (I don’t care if ’such as I’ is grammatically correct for ’such as me’ ::: me sounds more like me and I’d like to be able to write as me, as much as possible, right from the get-go.
I also spent a considerable amount of time on my regular website trying to figure out how to post serialized segments to stories –short stories and long stories and novels, too, for that matter. And not just my work, but maybe a place for other writers and/or artists to put their work up for serialized view. I already pay for the hosting service; I know a couple of people who are fine writers and looking for an audience (as am I)(hmm, as am me? nah . . .).
I don’t know just yet if any of my web crafting today will work out with my blog crafting — but hopes are running high for some sliver of success. What I need is some feedback.
