SILENT BOOMER FINDS HIMSELF WITH CRACKED POTS

Laura Dufala ceramic

Rewrite of Sophie's Choice went so well this morning that I drove to McMennamen's in Troutdale, Oregon to take in the "Cracked Pots Art Show". The day was humid and hot for Oregon. Signage at show offered statistics about America's trash production from which the recyclers work. 

Beautiful crafts. I bought earrings for Mertie and an inexpensive piece of ceramic wall art by Laura Dufala of Gresham, Oregon. A couple of young women offered skirts made of men's ties. Thought of Mertie, but they required hand washing. Domesticated me, asked. The work that most intrigued me was Kelly Phipps Metalworks. Click the link and take a look. She's damn good, but the best pieces were out of our price range.

A mere two pages left in Chapter Nineteen. Rewrite lifted my spirits. I caught an inconsistency in the original ms that was a chapter apart. Some days my attention to detail is better than others. The violent ending has begun from which Angie Davis will emerge a transformed woman. 

McMennamen hotel from pitch and putt golf course

Strangely (atheist that I am), I heard myself think "coming in on a wing and a prayer" as I contemplated the final landing of Angie's Choice. How many remember that old WWII song?

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.