Up and Running

Well, it would appear the new computer is humming along nicely now so it's time to get back to work. l want to repeat something though. You can't put a price on automatic backup. I lost everything because I neglected to do it. Nuff said. I took the ladies' advice to heart and went back to the start of Chapter 1 and I have to say it works better this way. I'm not saying it's perfect but enough with the editing already. Time to move on so lets see what happens. It's off to the library today. I finally got around to reading Jerry Spinelli's "Smiles to Go," and I love it. I don't think he could write a bad book if he tried. I want to read the new Amy Carter book next if they have it. In reviewing the new and upcoming books for teens and young adults, I have to say that I am disappointed that vampires and the paranormal seem to be the hot genre. It really makes me wonder about our society when teens fixate on these subjects. I'm not saying they are bad books at all, only that it appears to reflect a disturbing mentality among our youth. If you read the lists of recommended reading, there are many in the top 10 that go back to 2002 or before. Perhaps our resident child psychologist can enlighten me. Time to get back to work now. I am way behind.

Back To Work

For those of you that don't know, my computer committed suicide a while back which caused me to lose everything. Note to self. How many times do you have to be told to back everything up? So anyway, the new computer arrived yesterday and I spent most of the day getting things loaded again. I can't say enough good things about Tiger Direct. Computer was shipped on the 19th, which was a Saturday, and it was delivered via UPS on the 21st, which was a Monday. Awesome. Getting back to business, the partners basically liked the direction I'm going with the re-write of the mystery and were kind enough to make some awesome suggestions, so I'll see what I can do before the next meeting on the 8th. The computer I bought is loaded with Windows 7 which meant downloading drivers for all my peripherals since they didn't work. So far I don't see a lot of differences other than being quite a bit faster in response time and some changes in the way Word works. All positive so far. One of the ways the partners have helped me is in defining my characters better. Ironically, the things they suggested were, for the most part deleted in the last version which they never saw. Of course, that version was lost so I start over. Oh well, life goes on.

Missing Muses

I was just wondering. Is there a test of some kind to identify fried writer brain? I'm just curious. I was thinking that if my brain is fried, it might explain why the must sisters have totally abandoned me. It's been ove two weeks since I've heard from them at all and the last few days they were here, it seemed they were in a hurry to go somewhere. Is there a bureau of missing muses?
I suppose I'm just going to have to make do and actually use those creative cells I claim to have. I mean, I have a deadline in abouyt ten days and I haven't written so much as a page number. Now , that is just plain frightening. So I go back to the old standby system. Start reading right from the beginning and hopefully by the time I get to the point where I left off, it will come to me.
I'd like to share something the ladies said to me last week. They complained that i hadn't sufficiently defined my secondar charcters and they were right. I'd focused on the plot and the emotions of my protaganist and left the secondary characters to fend for themselves. They were there in a previus versio, but at some point in the revisio process, I had abandoned them. So my point for today is to be sure you flesh out all of your primary characters, not just one or two of them, and don't assume that your reader will do it for you because they won't. Actually, they can't, and as a presenter once said at a conference, "If it's hard to read, they won't."
So I'm off to introduce the other boys in cabin five and explai why they are where they are at te start of the story. Don't give up on me though. The journey goes on and you haven't seen the interesting part yet.