Rhino Puzzlings

I'm finally getting back to revisions on  Trouble , the next story queued up on the assembly line for release. I sent it out for a round of beta feedback and am now making a pass to incorporate suggestions and look for enhancement opportunities  which is a kindly way of stating "places where I read the draft and go... what was I thinking?" The passage of time is a clarifying tool for certain. I'm actually enjoying it now, reuniting with this title after it had been suspended for a while. The clear eyes of editing don't come as easily to me when I am staring at it all the time. I hope also that this is my growth as a writer, slow and awkward as that process may be. I wrote three drafts of  Trouble , and the story evolved dramatically among each, from the initial setting in time, to the nature of the protagonist and the deuteragonist (a term I'm still learning), to the consequences of their actions. I kept approaching the story from new angles, trying to determi...

It's rewrite time. I'm making the prose more purposefully purple in  One Last Quest , my rewrite of my 2012 self-publishing adventure, trying to keep the howling Inner Critic out of the process while the Creator piece gets to roam around again. I'm still shocked at the  thinness  of this book, not just physically, but also in terms of characters and such-as-it-is plot. I'm not trying to be unkind to myself here, but on a re-read it feels much like those classic animation processes, where a background layer is moved along one step at a time as each character cel is placed atop it and photographed. I remember writing it initially, and retyping and refining it, and being bothered by the pace of change. Like animation, it was difficult to imagine the final product while focusing on the incremental steps. I've been working on developing out the characters lately, giving them motivations and goals and trying to add depth and purpose to make them more than a shallow, colo...

 The more I've learned of writing, the less organized I've become, and for that, I'm grateful. When I first started writing, I didn't have any direction beyond  don't let the inner critic get you down  (sound advice) but I still had no idea to how to structure anything longer than an essay, or more enduring than a joke. My first attempt at writing anything of length was a mercifully-forgotten adventure story, with a cast of around a half dozen irregular, quirky characters who would move around within the irregular, quirky plot. I had an idea of a Rashomon -style retelling of the story, within the framing device of a court case, told in flashbacks that would "dissolve" to the story as it happened. It was... ambitious. And I had a plot, of sorts, and an objective, of a kind, but what I lacked was experience, guidance, and notably: deep characters. I don't mean  deep  as in thoughtful or introspective, but deep as in "not thin or shallow." There...

I used to think that the main challenge of writing was in the drafting, and it is definitely a struggle some days. There are times when the Muse is feeling generous and dispenses a phrase or a sentence with minimal effort, and there are indeed days when ever word has to be reluctantly chiseled out of my brain and laid out on the page like a cadaver. Those days are especially hard on the Creator part of the brain, and it's in learning to keep creating  through  that obstacle that is a fundamental, necessary skill. Write on the good days, write through the bad. "Not feeling it" or "not inspired" are soft, comfortable excuses, and my solution to that (if you can call it a solution) is to have a buffet of ongoing projects to select from. Don't feel like working on the novel today? OK, how about going through the latest beta reader feedback? Or doing some character-building for that WIP idea? Or working on this blog? (Oh, hello .) Keeping the Creator going is a s...