What of my other work?
Joshua didn't care for Kassandra's Song, so I sent him Crosstime Cop. I entered the latter in the PNWA contest as a thriller. We'll see.
On the SF stuff, I just shut down on Firestar, so I'm not working on it for a bit. I like how it starts. I am working on Setosha instead. The off-hand group is giving me some very good feedback on it. I also submitted Kassandra's Song for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and got cut right away. This wasn't mainstream fiction. They should have said so up front. I may forget to enter next year.
Then there's Minus One, which meant I didn't work on anything else. I didn't mind. The words were flowing.
Friday, April 24, 2009
On Writing Jags -
A writing jag is when you get totally consumed by the writing. You come home from work, you write for several hours, you go to bed, sleep poorly, get up and write some more.
Another way to say 'writing jag' is to look at numbers. How about these? I started writing the novel Minus One on March 23rd. I finished the last update on April 23rd. 103,000 words. Or this: in the first week I wrote 50,000 words. THAT is a writing jag.
So what is Minus One about? It's a mystery, but it's also a novel of personal growth and change. Jan Sutherland is a singer in a group that does folk, some country, and some oldies pop. She, her twin brother Jay, and the other three members of their group (Angie, Charlie and Pete) are "Friends Making Music". When the novel opens she is giving a farewell performance. At the end she walks off the stage, is cuffed, and transported to the Women's Prison in Hannah, KY (a fictional place). There she is to serve 7 to 10 years for manslaughter.
The story flashes back to how this happened, and then resumes with her time in prison. She is paroled after 5 1/2 years, and reluctantly is persuaded by her twin brother to go back on stage. The group has changed their name to Minus One as a reminder to people that they are a singing group that is minus one member. When she rejoins them, they become Minus One and Sister Jan, a country group that also does some traditional and some folk.
There is a caution for language. There's no lurid scenes of sex or even very much violence (though she did kill two men).
I did some research on prisons, and the story draws from an amalgam of prisons in the US. Conditions in state prisons vary widely. Some, when someone is paroled, give the former inmate a bus ticket, some money, and that's it. Others, such as Virginia, Washington, and Colorado make a very strong effort to rehabilitate the inmate so they can re-enter society. There are some very dedicated people who have to balance society's desire for punishment with society's desire to make these inmates functioning members of society. It is not an easy path. And the work of parole officers is often only seen in the exceptions when someone resumes a life of crime.
I picked Kentucky for the location of the story because of the music scene there, that it still had links to the folk music world, and it was in the middle of the country. Jimmy Jack's, a restaurant/bar that is a central location in the story is based on my memories of O'Reilly's Pub in downtown Indianapolis (which, despite the name, is not Irish). Indianapolis has a very active music scene, and some of that was transplanted.
One other point (I might blog about this some more later); Jan and Jay are that very very rare set of twins: male and female, but who appear identical except for the male and female bits. That happens in something like once in every couple thousand sets of twins. It is both important and unimportant to the story. It helps personalize Jan by showing the differences between her and Jay.
I'll let the reader ponder the rest of the story. Prison isn't a pleasant place, but what some people call coddling has been found, through a lot of experience, to be a very effective way to lower the recidivism rate. These are people in there, and we need to try very hard not to make enemies of them.
A writing jag is when you get totally consumed by the writing. You come home from work, you write for several hours, you go to bed, sleep poorly, get up and write some more.
Another way to say 'writing jag' is to look at numbers. How about these? I started writing the novel Minus One on March 23rd. I finished the last update on April 23rd. 103,000 words. Or this: in the first week I wrote 50,000 words. THAT is a writing jag.
So what is Minus One about? It's a mystery, but it's also a novel of personal growth and change. Jan Sutherland is a singer in a group that does folk, some country, and some oldies pop. She, her twin brother Jay, and the other three members of their group (Angie, Charlie and Pete) are "Friends Making Music". When the novel opens she is giving a farewell performance. At the end she walks off the stage, is cuffed, and transported to the Women's Prison in Hannah, KY (a fictional place). There she is to serve 7 to 10 years for manslaughter.
The story flashes back to how this happened, and then resumes with her time in prison. She is paroled after 5 1/2 years, and reluctantly is persuaded by her twin brother to go back on stage. The group has changed their name to Minus One as a reminder to people that they are a singing group that is minus one member. When she rejoins them, they become Minus One and Sister Jan, a country group that also does some traditional and some folk.
There is a caution for language. There's no lurid scenes of sex or even very much violence (though she did kill two men).
I did some research on prisons, and the story draws from an amalgam of prisons in the US. Conditions in state prisons vary widely. Some, when someone is paroled, give the former inmate a bus ticket, some money, and that's it. Others, such as Virginia, Washington, and Colorado make a very strong effort to rehabilitate the inmate so they can re-enter society. There are some very dedicated people who have to balance society's desire for punishment with society's desire to make these inmates functioning members of society. It is not an easy path. And the work of parole officers is often only seen in the exceptions when someone resumes a life of crime.
I picked Kentucky for the location of the story because of the music scene there, that it still had links to the folk music world, and it was in the middle of the country. Jimmy Jack's, a restaurant/bar that is a central location in the story is based on my memories of O'Reilly's Pub in downtown Indianapolis (which, despite the name, is not Irish). Indianapolis has a very active music scene, and some of that was transplanted.
One other point (I might blog about this some more later); Jan and Jay are that very very rare set of twins: male and female, but who appear identical except for the male and female bits. That happens in something like once in every couple thousand sets of twins. It is both important and unimportant to the story. It helps personalize Jan by showing the differences between her and Jay.
I'll let the reader ponder the rest of the story. Prison isn't a pleasant place, but what some people call coddling has been found, through a lot of experience, to be a very effective way to lower the recidivism rate. These are people in there, and we need to try very hard not to make enemies of them.
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