I have said here previously that I don’t count words when I write. (I disagree with the idea of measuring “progress” by daily “bean counting.”) I don’t even really look at page numbers. Early on in a manuscript especially, I just write and write and write.
“In San Francisco, the first place I work in USA, I meet an American woman who loved my French accent. I learned after that to speak it with women in America more. ‘I love your accent,’ they always say that,” he chuckled.
Writing is much like swimming: taking pointers while on land is helpful of course, and having a lesson or two or three in the water is necessary, but ultimately you must attempt to swim in the deep end entirely on your own.
And I find when I return to the keyboard I may write whatever initially jumps to my mind. I may ask myself, “It has been a few days, so how is ‘Miss Sánchez‘ today? Maybe she’s off to see Mont Saint Michel? And perhaps she has a dog now?”
We tend in our 21st century to consider reading a silent and private endeavor. Yet for most of history reading was far more social than it is today.
I recall being assigned it in graduate school (too long ago now) in a course on Russian government/history. (There’s a real shocker, eh?)
Why as a writer bother with a several times a week blog? Isn’t it a distraction? Isn’t it a hassle?
We want to do it because we love it and hope readers will love what we do; when you love something the rational goes out the window; we are sure the next book will be THE BOOK…
As the world turns. A blog post is often how I start my day, and by 9 or 10 AM I am often immersed in what I am supposed to be writing for eventual novel publication.
I feel it’s a book for adults. Re-reading it I realize increasingly why I was bored with it as a teen. The issues and problems are more adult than I think register with kids.
I want to begin the new year by saying “Thank you” for your readership. Some of you have stumbled upon me due to my most recent novel…
Being pursued by the head of a major film studio desperate to buy the rights to your book would be “a problem” most writers would love to have.
Through media and social media non-Americans tend to see way too much of the US of the extremes: yapping politicians, Kardashians, people waving guns around, poverty, racial discord, hurricanes, wildfires, religious “fundamentalists” who seem to dislike everybody who isn’t their sort of Christian, and a slew of negatives on a near-endless list; or they see glitter that dazzles them: gorgeous national parks, Florida beaches, Las Vegas, snowy mountain retreats, cool New York City, Hollywood, shopping, and much more.
Over the previous three years, I had also fictionalized her in three novels, the last being that one above. In them I included reconstructions of various real-life interactions and even disagreements between us from back when I was in my 20s and young 30s. She never knew I had sneakily done that.
My grandmother is long gone. My mother is now too. My dad remains – and I know I shall miss him terribly whenever he too is gone.
Welcome here to my semi-weekly journal covering novel writing, travel, international matters, and whatever related that pops to mind…. sometimes seriously, sometimes rather less so. The center (centre) of my authoring universe. I hope you enjoy your visit.
Edward: “I hope I may be quite honest with you that I will be quite pleased for the opportunity to become far better acquainted with Miss Sánchez once we reach Holland…”
Robert: “My friend who wrote that letter, he’s passed eighty now. When I was in Paris fifty years ago, where I met him, he loved her dearly. And, oh, Nancy, how she loved him…”
Béatrice: “We will all of us have a drink to everyone we remember and love.”
Bill: “Fiction comes from fact, and lots of fact makes great fiction when you re-write it as fiction.”
Valérie: “Because you are born on a farm, this does not make you a horse!”
Isabelle: “I’ll set the table… This is better than a restaurant. Oh, and by when I leave… I expect you will have told me all about General de Gaulle also.”
