Writing - the ups and downs

After I sent my 80,000 word novel, HUNGRY FOR CHOCOLATE, to the publisher last week, I decided I needed to do a new summary for this particular publisher. Since the book is set in West Virginia and that's where the publisher is located, I felt I needed a summary that incorporated all the mountain state elements and flavors of the story. Earlier summaries of this story centered on the surrogacy itself and on the relationships between the characters. Setting wasn't mentioned. Not so, this new one. I wanted to play up the setting as character. The story takes place in 1998, in the small fictional town of Shady Creek, West Virginia. The people are close knit, not tolerable of strangers, or new ideas. And, surrogacy to the people of Shady Creek was indeed "strange." The fact that the main character lives in a historic landmark, an old Victorian home built in the late 1800's, that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited in the late 1930's when she toured West V...

This post is about small steady steps and how going at writing in this way leads to success, in my opinion. Success being totally subjective and having different meaning for all of us in regards to our writing endeavors and how successful we want to be or even think we are. I've never thought much about the process of writing or of how I pick and choose when and how and what I write. I just know I do something each day toward writing. One small step. And it's satisfying. Whether it's journaling, blogging, reading - a huge piece of writing well, or working on an essay or a piece of fiction - somehow I am attending to the side of my self that needs to create with words. Small, steady steps. My first story to get published was one of the first I wrote. That lead me to believe that getting published was easy. All I had to do was jot off an essay that was mildly interesting with a dash of humor, Erma Bombeck style - give it a nice beginning, a good strong middle and an end...

Dang pancreas. It's had its way with me one too many times. I'm done with it. AND I'm declaring WAR on IT and any other body part that intends to stand in the way of my writing. FOR NOW AND FOREVER MORE! I've had to stop too many stories, often for months at a time, to deal with the havoc it wrecks on my life. Not to mention my health. And that of my family. After three or four such bouts with this cantankerous organ, I had to stop again recently while editing HUNGRY to tango with this persistently unhappy body part of mine. Our dance was done a few days ago at Ohio State University Hospital. Outpatient with Dr. G and his staff officiating. A balloon - perhaps a robust red party balloon - who knows? - was used to stretch some sense into the duct - hoping to put an end to all the shenanigans it had been doing, and then to assist the balloon a plastic stent was inserted to keep the little "devil" duct open as it is supposed to be naturally. After a muc...

Yesterday I was feeling sick but went grocery shopping anyway to pick up a few things we needed. I shop at one of those stores where you can buy everything from groceries, to the latest movie, to tires for the car. I passed one of those machines that plays music. The ones where you punch the song you want to hear and it takes off. Mostly the machines offer Celtic tunes, or peaceful songs to lull one to sleep. Not this one. It had some great selections. My choice was SODA SHOP CLASSICS and when it started playing, I was whisked back to the late fifties right there in the music/candles aisle of the super store. Back to when I was 12 or 13, just at the age when all of life seemed impossibly tragic and out of my reach. WHY MUST I BE A TEEN AGER IN LOVE by Dion & The Belmonts sent chills up my spine because I remembered singing that to the Ricky Nelson and Elvis posters on my wall when my first boyfriend shunned me, pretend mike in my hand as I sprawled on my twin bed with the b...