COLD BEATNIKS THE SILENT BOOMER

cathode ray tube brain injection

My plan was to rewrite just the final 3 chapters one more time because I felt I'd grown careless as the long process of the 11th rewrite drew to a close. So I got two chapters done pretty fast, then a cold struck, and I'm just coming out of that cold. Hope this week to finish the 12th rewrite of the last chapter. I checked into getting someone other than me to print it out, since the publisher wants to receive those old fashioned manuscripts rather than electronic files that are now common in the market place. Boy, colds get me down nowadays, sap my strength and attitude too, but I got a ray injection into my brain. 

BIG BANGED BEATNIK

Eleventh rewrite done. Reduced the novel Ghoul World by 168 pages and by 54,595 words. The last two chapters produce a problem. They are explanatory and introduce a utopian theme to the dystopian ending and they explain all that has gone before for the reader. I kept a lot of things mysterious to the reader till the end. I fear to submit it in this state. I can see it as a movie, and, oh, so much would not be included that is in the novel. What a problem! Could an entirely new vision and revision be required? A 12th rewrite? Good heavens and gadzooks.

BEAT BEAT BEAT AND POPE FRANCIS

A beautiful sunny warm day in Vancouver, and I'm supposed to be writing at the River Maiden. That's our Honda Civic outside, resting in the shade. Didn't sleep well last night. My mind is elephant tired. No day for writing. I'm about 25 pages from finishing the 11th rewrite, and I've been stuck for several days now from being tired or unmotivated. When I'm like this, I'll go over a previous days corrections and find new worse errors. So I shall not write today, even though I got up earlier than usual and started rewriting earlier. Just too tired to care. Will try to walk on Burnt Bridge Creek trail. Maybe a stroll would be better than a walk. If you've read this far, looking for news of Pope Francis, you won't find it. I just thought I'd see how many people ended up here by Googling him. I like him, by the way. Sad he messed up the pedophile situation. His heart seems to be in the right place.

BEAT NEAR END OF REWRITE

A beautiful drizzly warm Vancouver USA day. I'm still poised before my laptop, writing away. I'm at Chapter 51 of the 52 chapter Ghoul World. This rewrite has taken a little more than a month longer than I planned. Hope to finish in another week, two weeks at most. I think writers usually take a little longer on their projects than they guesstimate. 

Photo Marvin Ronsdorf

Chapter 51 introduces a happy surprise—a happy sad ending. I guarantee progressive readers with the environment in mind will be most pleased at the final two chapters. In the last chapter, a possibility for more novels presents itself. At the moment, at age 80 [81 on the 20th of October], I cannot imagine another novel, but the opening is there in case I or another writer would like to pursue it, an ending with a much greater latitude of possibilities than most novels written as serial fiction. I can't tell you why that is true. My revelation would ruin the novel.

BEAT BEAT

Caption

There are days like this in everyperson's life when s/he wants to quit writing at last for good. Confronting the very small odds that one, even if one writes pretty well, will find an agent who will find a publisher, let alone a movie producer who'll produce the film s/he wrote the novel Ghoul World to reach, is daunting. Sigh. Specially if one's age suggests his/her thoughts may be out of date. But here s/he sits, poised at a Barnes & Noble with laptop open ready to go to work.