News

Hey everybody. I know Jonathon’s been letting you know the power ups and downs of the last few days. Monday the fifth, we still had a houseful of friends, and there were just too many people to sit down and write. Then we had the big storm. No power on Tuesday the sixth. So A STROKE OF MIDNIGHT was begun at the local book store that has an internet access port-thingie. I did seven pages. They were good pages, but they weren’t the beginning of the book. Probably the scene will be in the first third of the book, but it ain’t the beginning. Sigh.
By Wednesday the seventh, we had power. Yea! I did ten pages, new pages, and that’s not the beginning either. A version of that scene will appear later in the book. I’m almost certain. Nothing is ever completely certain in my books when I’m writing them. I get surprised a lot. Maybe that’s what keeps them fresh for me, and for you.
So I had seventeen pages in two days, under less than ideal circumstances. Good, right? Well, yeah, and no. Yeah, I was happy that I’d managed to work with all the activity around me. Wednesday, we were invaded by the plumber, and the irrigation guys. To let you know how smoothly that went, when Jonathon and I tried to leave to get breakfast out, the plumber stepped into the middle of the road and blocked our way. He thought we were leaving for the day. He had to discuss that it was a much more complex job than they’d first thought. Isn’t it always.
When the writing is going well you could probably have an entire marching band behind me and I wouldn’t care. When the writing isn’t going well, everything bugs me. Distracts me, makes me want to throw up my hands and say, “How can I write with all this crap happening around me.” So the fact that I got nearly twenty pages with all of it happening was great. But none of it is the first page, the first paragraph, the first sentence.
I went back through my current writer’s notebook. It is a stenographer’s notebook, spiral bound. I’ve used this kind of notebook since junior high. I knew there were notes about this Merry book in there somewhere. I went through it last night, and found the notes I remembered. I actually wrote some of it on the plane going to vacation, and some of it on a bench with my little tropical dress and wide brimmed hat on. Jonathon was sitting beside me, with his hat and his tropical print shirt, reading a book. We sat on the bench and looked out at the water, with our bodies touching from thigh to shoulder; him doing his thing, me doing mine. But I sat there on our lovely vacation and wrote the beginning. It wasn’t the beginning I wanted.
I realize that the reason I have seventeen pages, but no beginning is that I’ve been fighting myself. I want to begin with something more up beat, not so dark, but the book is the book, and it wants, or needs, a darker opening. So this morning I got up, and let the book have it’s head. I’ve got about four pages, most of it typed in notes. But it’s the beginning. It is the first line, the first paragraph, the first images. This is it.
I will have to get up and go exercise soon, but after lunch when I come back to it, I will continue from where the notes left off. I know what I’m doing next, and I know the scenes that will bridge to one of the scenes I wrote earlier this week. It will be a different scene for the beginning being there first, a better scene. And that is how you know that you’re where you need to begin, because it makes everything that comes after make more sense, have more purpose.
Gotta go workout. Talk to you guys later, hopefully tomorrow. Bye for now.