As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the world’s gone a bit nuts lately, so I thought I’d start with a picture of some ducks. Just because. Who doesn’t like a picture of ducks? It was taken by my daughter a few days ago, when we took a long bike ride down to the river, passing through a number of parks along the way.
We’re engaging in good social distancing practices, which are getting easier and easier to do as Oregon continues to close up shop and the whole world tries to fight its way through the COVID-19 pandemic. I truly hope all is well with you and yours. We’re healthy here, which is the important thing.
It’s pretty clear that disasters like this one bring out both the best and the worst in humanity. Fortunately, I think we’re seeing more of the former than the later. If nothing else, it’s proving what a tightly interconnected world we live in now. There really is no pretending otherwise, and as we come through this thing, I hope it’s a lesson we carry forward. As a species, we’ve got some big challenges ahead of us.
I’ve been fairly silent online, but mostly that’s because I’ve channeled that energy into full-time writing. How’s it going, you might wonder? Four months in, I still feel like I’m trying to get the right balance to things, and of course the last month or so the extra pandemic-induced anxiety made getting into that creative space especially difficult. Seems like a pretty small problem in the grand scheme of things, no? But most days, I get in my ten pages. (In fact, the sign over my writing computer is pretty simple: “1) Write 10 pages. 2) Everything else.”) I was beating myself up a few months back, because my process seems to take longer than I’d prefer, but then I stumbled across a post by Nora Roberts, the world’s bestselling romance writer, and the next day reread parts of Stephen King’s On Writing, a man who, at his best, I consider our modern day Charles Dickens, and realized that my mutli-phase process, such as it is, is somewhere between the two of them. And if it’s good enough for Roberts and King, well, that’s pretty good company to be in.
In the end, as I’ve gotten older, I do think most writers have no idea, really, how they do what they do. That includes me. We just make up little stories about our processes after the fact. Like all good fiction, sometimes these stories have an element of truth to them, and you can certainly learn plenty from storytelling giants like Roberts and King trying to make sense of their craft, but I wouldn’t take what any writers say about how they do what they do too seriously.
For me, writing is still done one word a time. Describing it as anything else is like trying to explain a rainbow to a four-year-old. Either you get too metaphysical and sound like an idiot. Or you get too scientific and rob the rainbow of all its mystery.
I’ve mostly finished one book that’s just starting into production, the first Karen Pantelli novel. If you don’t remember Karen, she appeared at the end of A Desperate Place for Dying and more fully in The Lovely Wicked Rain, as a love interest of Garrison Gage and as an erstwhile FBI agent who’s coming to terms with a terrible mistake. You won’t need to read those books to enjoy this one, but it will give you a glimpse into her character. I’d always wanted to write a drifter-type character at novel length, but I didn’t realize that’s what I had until I started writing her story. One writer friend of mine pointed out that I essentially came up with my own variation of Jack Reacher, but I have to admit, as much as I’ve enjoyed many of the Reacher novels, that never occurred to me as I was writing her story. When Karen walked onto the stage, I just wanted to find out more about her. I hope my readers feel the same.
More on Karen Pantelli soon, as I’m still awaiting feedback from some of my first readers and the book goes into full production (copy editing, proofing, design, etc). Wrote a few short stories between books, some of which sold and I’ll announce down the line when they appear. And for you Garrison Gage fans, yes, I’m well into the next book now, so hopefully it won’t be too long. My production has definitely increased dramatically, but it may be a year before it’s obvious to anyone else but me. The Run of the House comic is still on hiatus, as I try to figure out what I want to do with it, but I’ve got some ideas. It’s back to that balance issue. I’ve been trying to come up with a “unifying principle,” some kind of approach or process (ah, that word again!) that creates a structure that works for me and creates some extra motivation. Toying with a few ideas. We’ll see.
For now, take care of yourselves!
