MEET ANGIE DAVIS, THE SILENT BOOMER'S HEROINE

I was thinking to myself that readers of this writer's blog, might like to meet my friend, Angie Davis, the heroine of Angie's Choice. Once readers meet her, I thought cleverly to myself, they might want to know more about her. This occurred to me after spending four hours Friday morning endlessly shifting around and rewriting the first eight paragraphs of Chapter Eight and asking myself why I was spending so much time rewriting and polishing.

"When her father died, she'd been in a transitory mood, tired of rootless living and wanting to understand how she could rejoin the human race and remain true to herself. She’d tried to give something of herself to her father, but he was beyond receiving, and when he died, she felt even more distant from the human race. Full of guilt, she had to acknowledge to herself that she was not sorry enough when he passed. Immediately after her father's death, she allowed herself a fling with a jazz-playing saxophonist, an Art somebody, but that ended quickly. Their late nights together in the small clubs and the impromptu jams into the early morning hours quickly wore her down. She knew, then, she'd come too far back to the daylight hours—those hours within which most people lived out their lives—to return to the chaotic life she'd lived in her twenties. After three more painfully drifting years, one more brief relationship and several jobs, she began seriously to consider the idea that a marriage might present a pathway back to normalcy. She had considered marriage only during the longest darkest wintery nights of despair, but that's when she met Curtis Davis." 

Sometime soon, I'll write about all the reasons a writer moves around paragraphs and endlessly rewrites them...maybe. It's actually a pretty subtle process. Some days I'm right on top of the subject, sometimes not.