Today marks an anniversary for me. Exactly one year ago today I sent the very first query to an agent for Finnegans Festive. So I’ve been shopping it around in fits and starts for a solid orbit around our sun (in a leap year, no less).
It took me nearly a month to send my second [...]
Archive for March, 2008
Chapter 8.5
March 30, 2008
As I’ve been writing Finnegans Afoot, I realized somewhere along the way that I needed a chapter inserted in a section I had long since finished. (I’ve mentioned this in earlier posts.)
I started work on that chapter yesterday, and I was delighted to find that I managed to squeeze more than a thousand words out [...]
Chapter 13 is finished
March 29, 2008
I don’t know why I had so much trouble earlier finishing this chapter of the Finnegans Afoot story. I guess I needed to let it incubate a little longer in my head because when I sat down to work on it this morning, the material just flowed onto the page (well, onto the screen). As [...]
A raisin mystery
March 26, 2008
Maybe I should just stop listening to audio mysteries. I don’t think I’ve heard a single one I’ve liked (or at least haven’t found lots of fault with). Over the last weekend I listened to Love, Lies and Liquor by M.C. Beaton. Beaton is probably better known for her Hamish MacBeth mysteries, but this [...]
It happened again!
March 25, 2008
I was sitting at my desk yesterday, working for the man, and an idea popped into my head for a completely new Finnegans novel. I quickly grabbed the notepad I keep nearby for these moments and begin scribbling down the idea.
It just kept blossoming. All through the day I was grabbing the notepad to get [...]
More about names
March 24, 2008
Following up on my earlier post about naming characters, I thought I’d give you some of the background on my two Finnegan characters and how they came to have the name they do.
Greg Finnegan is a retired English professor. He has built himself a small reputation as a scholar of Midwestern regional literature (and this [...]
House burning as metaphor
March 22, 2008
I recently read the book An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England by Brock Clarke. I’d seen it heartily recommended on another blog, so I swept my reading pile off my desk and grabbed the novel from the library (having waited my turn after eleven other readers before me finished it).
I had understood [...]
Naming names
March 19, 2008
I read long ago that John Irving would sometimes select the names of the characters in his novels from the telephone book. Or it may have been that his writer character T.S. Garp did that. In any case, I was reading another writer’s blog last week and came upon a recommendation of this very same [...]
Well, writing
March 17, 2008
Back in my undergraduate days, we were schooled in writing at the curmudgeonly guidance of William Zinsser and his classic work On Writing Well. It was an instruction for writing nonfiction, and it is now in its seventh edition, so it must still carry some weight.
I suppose I’ve internalized most of its lessons, so I [...]
I know them well
March 11, 2008
When I can’t write — when I’m being paid by someone else to do what they want me to do — I can still think about my stories and make notes that get stuffed into my pocket for retrieval later.
What I have been pleased to find is that the littlest idea — for a scene, [...]
