It's been a while.

Snow and poverty and a Saints Superbowl have pretty much kept me busy in the last few weeks. However, I am still writing, submitting, and Living the Dream. :) Okay, at least on weeknights and weekends.

Sometimes it's difficult to keep up momentum, especially when you're doing it alone. Or at least, when it feels like you're doing it alone. My partner is a very good writer who does not write, so while she is great at encouraging me and helping me work out Escher-like tangles in my plot, she does not have that writer drive in her.

There are days when I wish I had an entire room full of writers to sit and bitch with, especially when my prose seems so terribly lame and my characters 2-D and my plot...well, just stupid. There are times i wish I had a room full of people just as neurotic as I am, where we could all commisserate on the absolute masochism of our chosen dreams.

On the other hand, sometimes it's really great to have a girlfriend who just says, you're great, you can do it, and NO you can't skip writing to watch your Netflix movie. Sometimes, that's a really wonderful thing to have.

Now, I'm going to log off the internet (having dutifully sent out the three chapters an agent requested) and get back to Fairville. Poor Mo--I left her in a bit of a pickle, and I guess I ought to just go move things along. Namaste, my peeps.

Progress on Fairville!

My partner Fey has taken it upon herself to not let me be a slug. She's given me an ultimatum of no less than 1000 words per day (not much, if I can get myself to the computer). Anyhow, thanks to her dauntless efforts, I have now broken the 25K mark on Fairville. Since your average women's fiction novel is about 90K, that puts me almost 30% of the way there. AND I'm having fun with it. (Ghost story, chick story, set in a reasonable facscimile of the parish where I grew up--who wouldn't have fun?)

Snow is my friend

Since this pile of white mush decided to cover my state, I have gotten several thousand words written on Fairville, sent out one partial, and sent two more queries on All the Back Roads Home.

I've also eaten half a large mushroom and onion pan pizza (no cheese, please), five breadsticks, and goodness knows how much of Fey's cranberry double-chocolate sweet bread.

So. January brings succes and weight gain. I can live with that.

Louisiana History & Stuff

I'm trying to find a balance between research and actual writing. Considering I haven't been putting very many words on the paper for Fairville, I figured I should do something towards getting the story done. So I spent a good deal of yesterday researching the history of southern Lousiana, particularly Lafourche Parish (where the fictional town of Fairville is set).

I left Louisiana when I was 27 years old, happy to be gone. And in the 16 years since, I've never regretted that decision. But my love-hate relationship with the state of my birth makes good fodder for fiction, I think. I'm especially fascinated with the idea of coastal erosion, and that much of the land that existed in Louisiana even when I was a kid is now under the Gulf of Mexico.

Course, you know the question has to be asked--what secrets are going to be washed away with the tide? What buried mysteries will be exposed as the land is drawn out to the waters?

My challenge here is to translate those questions into actual story, and to create characters compelling enough and ideas sound enough to sustain a novel. The problem is, how do you write a contemporary novel set in Louisiana without playing into the standard cliches (voodoo, hurricanes, murder, Mardi Gras, political corruption)?

I don't think it's possible--there will be at least one hurricane in my novel, and plenty of corruption. Murder is a strong possibility, too.

But hopefully I can find some aspect of Louisiana history that is overlooked by the hacks and use it as a catalyst in my book. It's just so much more than Mardi Gras and voodoo. Really it is.

The Progress in Sketch Form

I created a blueprint for The Progress, which is a pivotal location in Fairville. Unfortunately, I can't upload .tif files to Blogger. I'll see if I can edit at home and upload it later.

Maybe now I can make some little Monopoly-sized characters so I can block out scenes properly....

It was this or The Sims....