IN EVERY OLD SILENT BOOMER IS A CHILD

Art about imagination found here:

If I don't improve on the number of entries I put up here, I may lose potential readers of this writer's blog. I notice all the single visits or the odd two visits as readers check in to see if I've put up new material. Actually, nothing much is cooking except my hopes arise anew as I think of new ways to improve the four books I'm rewriting currently. For example, I'm considering changing Programming Frank Singletary to a third person narrator rather than the first person, Frank, who now narrates the fiction. As far as rejection letters or acceptances? Still no new events. I've decided to put Chapter One back into Ghoul World. The chapter goes a long way toward informing the reader of how the Rotting Plague works on human biology. Odd, that I read something into one rejection letter and IMAGINED that removing Chapter One would answer the complaint I IMAGINED was being made. Tonight, my wife and I were watching a science fiction movie, and I noticed the writer made a mistake I continually am learning to avoid...extra words and illogical reality. The piece of dialogue went, "I felt almost like I was drowning." If the character "almost" felt like he was drowning, then he couldn't have felt as if he was drowning. He either felt like he was drowning or he didn't. I told Mertie the line should read, "He felt like he was drowning." She suggested, even more forcibly, "He was drowning." The character was not describing an actual near-drowning event. The remark was a psychological remark. Another word I overuse is "just" as in "I just wanted to get your opinion." Wouldn't, "I wanted to get your opinion" work just as well. Granted...I do see occasions where "just" is justified, just between you and I [me].  

FORGING A NEW TITLE

Find photo here I'm considering a major change in my novel, The Porn Writer. I'm trying it on for size. The new title to be Programming Frank Singletary or The Programming of Franklin Singletary. And the first three lines of the novel will be as follows: "First, we must agree. I’m a robot of flesh and blood. Everything else follows from that during those days I shared a second floor walkup on Main Street with Rosereo and Irma." and so it goes. This alteration will cause not much else to change in the novel either but it's an entirely different take on what happens in the novel without changing anything that happens. Over the past couple of years I keep toying with how to approach a novel in which all characters are portrayed as the robots that neuroscience is proving we are, and nothing will jell. The few times I've tried, the language feels awkward, but, then, maybe the expressions only feel awkward because reality is changed. I think DeLillo's work probably shows some of the ways I might go at this late time in my writing career. I mean, after all, DeLillo is all of a year older than me.

THINKING LIKE A WRITER ABOUT THREE NOVELS

I'm making changes. I hate changes. I don't want to do the work. I want agents to flock to my novels as written. After all, they're completed. Why do I need to do more work? Probably because I see weaknesses myself. I've decided two of my novels need better starts: Angie's Choice & Ghoul World. Angie's Choice once had an agent, but Ruth Cantor couldn't place it. She sent it to the very largest and best publishing houses. She liked it. It's first and second chapters are used to introduce characters. I've decided to get to the moment when Angie and her husband are taken as hostages more quickly. In a flashback, I'll put the info in later. I see the movie scenes.

I've already made an improving change in Ghoul World, dropping completely Chapter 1. Fortunately, it could be dropped with no other changes necessary. Instead, I'm starting it at what was Chapter 2 when my protagonist, Charley Manning comes into view, sitting at a McDaniel's eating a couple of McNugguts, waiting for a client. As a movie, I'd start in either one of two other locations. Action scenes. I intend to rewrite this one more time for more style changes if someone doesn't pick it up sooner. Meanwhile, so I don't feel as if I'm doing nothing toward publication, I'm sending Ghoul World around with the one major alteration. 

Immediately, because it'll go faster, The Porn Writer is already getting a third rewrite to make every line as simple and forceful as I can make them. It's structure is fine. I just want to take all the fancy writing out of it. This will go fast while I send Ghoul World around. I get lots of erections, working on it. Let us celebrate the miraculous powers of the creative imagination. It can create an erection as easily as it creates god!

WRITING IN YOUR SEVENTIES AND BEYOND

Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey (One Flew Over The Coo Coo's Nest) quit writing, he said, because he couldn't "keep all the balls in the air" anymore. Some of his problem, no doubt, can be attributed to his love of acid and marijuana, but some of it might have to do with age.

Today, and for the past week, I've been struggling to polish off an essay I call "Tom Brokaw's Identity Crisis". The problem I'm having feels like the ordinary problem of any any writer...that is to organize my material in an effective and interesting way, but it's a problem complicated by advancing years. 

I clearly recall all the years when the entire sense and flow of a very long piece of writing stayed in my head while I slept and came back to me as soon as I sat at my typewriter (i.e. computer). This was a result of the faculty for "concentration" that puts a writer into an intense mental state that allows his subconscious to guide and inform his writing.

Well...the concentration is gone. Every day whatever I'm writing might just as well be a new piece of work for all my subconsciousness is concerned. I'm a stranger to it when I awake, and I struggle to arrange the paragraphs into an effective display. 

I guess what I write these days might be a little less organized than in the past, but I hope the words strike closer to the truth than in those days when I got more caught up in arranging the paragraphs.