Musings

So, I had a day that’s a pretty good snapshot of a day in the life of a working writer. I wrote all morning. Some was preparing the groundwork for a new project that I’m hoping to sell. It’s a mosaic novel format (where you get a group of writers together. They each create a character, and then we weave the storylines together into — we hope — a seamless whole. I’m going to try and run this rather like the staff on a television show. I have found that a lot of the skills I gained working in Hollywood translate very nicely into prose work.

Anyway, I did that, and I made notes about the third book in my EDGE series. I have some set pieces in mind, and themes I want to explore. I’m also trying to decide who needs to be a view point character. I like to keep the number between three and five. More than that, and the book becomes unwieldy. Steve Stirling made the point in one meeting of our Writer’s Group that when you add a new viewpoint character you add 150 pages to the length of the book, and I think he’s spot on. I also got the notion that it might be interesting to have all the viewpoints save my hero’s be the viewpoints of the women in his life.

After my brain turned to oatmeal I made (from scratch) some cream of mushroom soup, and then headed down to the horse. They were working on the indoor arena so I just turned Pi loose in the giant jump arena, and watched him run and squeal and buck and roll. I just wish he had a buddy to play with. After that I tortured him. If he could talk he would tell you that I tortured him because I washed his tail and mane. He hasn’t had a bath in months given the extreme cold and amount of snow we’ve had in New Mexico. The shampoo lather and the water turned adobe brown. It was gross. But after slathering on the cream rinse and the avocado detangling spray (yes, it’s absurd what we lavish on our horses) he has a beautiful black mane and tail. I guess I should mention that Pi’s a 17 hand bay with a single white sock, and a really absurd blaze. I’m going to get some photos done when the winter hair falls out.

This evening I joined George Martin and Parris for a quick dinner and then we went off to see BREACH. Chris Cooper is _amazing_. It was an incredible performance, and the screenwriter and director had the good sense to leta great actor carry the scenes without a lot of blather or fancy camera tricks. I highly recommend this film. It’s a good lesson in how understated can be powerful, and how less can be more.

I’ve ended the evening watching my beloved Keith Olberman (the Walter Cronkite of our generation), and writing this post. Just an aside; I kept a journal for many years. I’m finding some of the same satisfaction in writing here that I found in those silly spiral notebooks.

Melinda

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 10:09 pm and is filed under life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.