Writing - the ups and downs

Last week I noticed noises coming from my laptop, sort of like a low buzz that had never been there before - I thought it was static on the old radio in my office. But no! It was my baby, starting to groan a sad good bye. The next morning I turned on the laptop and was flabbergasted. There were multi colored stripes running horizontally, a loud wall paper kind of thing, in shades of pink and brown. Not at all unpleasant but I knew the meaning behind the sight was not a good thing. I'd seen that look once before on the unit and that was when the video part of the computer went bonkers and had to be fixed, both costly in time and money. I'd hoped the laptop would last until fall. But it was living on borrowed time. It had been fixed two years earlier. I bought it used in the first place, though it wasn't cheap. Macs never are, it seems. So, a quick trip to my Mac Lady told me that the innards on my baby were shot and could not be fixed. Even if it could be fixed no gu...

I'm totally excited at this point in my editing of my novel. I'm nearing the last 20 pages and as the story comes full circle - and I must say well edited by several friends and myself - I can see why I've always believed in this story centering on Vada Faith Waddell's quest to be "somebody" more than who she is when the story opens. I'm excited as I begin to think of marketing this novel - again. I was burned out a year or two ago when I worked to come up with a new marketing plan. My feet were dragging and I was no longer interested in the project. That's called STORY BURNOUT. It happens to all of us, especially those of us who have labored to birth a particularly difficult story over the period of several years. What started out as a glorious projects brings one into the depths of despair as they realize the story may never be read by anyone other than oneself and his/her friends. The story wasn't difficult in the creativity phase. That was the...

Just a quick update on my progress reading through HUNGRY FOR CHOCOLATE. Since getting the BOLD print debacle corrected, things are going along much more smoothly with the story. I'm going to skip back to the story behind HUNGRY because of a few questions I received. That manuscript was with an excellent literary agent for four years. It didn't sell after repeated efforts. It may be that the story was before its time. That's why my next marketing efforts will be directed at a publisher in WV. Its tone is distinctly West Virginian. HUNGRY is set in WV and is about a surrogacy gone wrong. The main character, Vada Faith Waddell, wants to make some extra money - she can't seem to make enough for a down payment from her job at the beauty shop for a down payment on a new home out in the fancy subdivision of Crystal Springs -SO she decides to answer an ad in the local paper and become a surrogate mother. She figures it can't be all that hard. She already has a set of six y...

As I was printing off the 300+ pages to read, I decided mid print that for some reason I'd put the manuscript in BOLD and that I needed to put it in regular print to save on ink. Not sure why I did it in bold in the first place as I was setting up the novel. Anyway, I went in and corrected the problem. Changed the print to plain for the rest of the pages. After printing, I read the first 100 pages with no problem. Actually the novel read like a book off a book store shelf. (I always joked that my goal was to have a book on the bargain table at Big Lots.) When I got to page 101, the material no longer matched though the page numbers were in sequence. It took a while for me to ponder the situation and figure out what was wrong. Taking away the bold print had re figured the pages. I was now missing several chapters which I had to go back and print. Anytime I come across a problem like this I've finally figured out at my age that I have to work on it first thing in the morning. As ...

HUNGRY FOR CHOCOLATE is the novel on which I worked this past week. I finally finished making the changes my writing buddy/professor/friend Liz suggested. Now it's time to read the story through to see how it reads. This is a work in progress that I've worked on for far too long. But in writing a story, how long is too long? The story was born over ten years ago via a short story titled Joy Ruth and Vada Faith, twins - it never went beyond my desk, it may be more a character study than a finished story. Then it branched into a novel and became Vada Faith's story - a much changed VF from the first story. It became the story of her life, her relationship with her twin sister, and with her husband and extended family, then gathers around her surrogacy- a surrogacy that goes wrong, both in hilarious and heartbreaking ways. She's always wanted to be something more than she was and goes about it entirely the wrong way. More on this as I go through the endless process of editi...