The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor

A "good yarn". A long account of the travel west by the twelve-year-old Jaimie, his father, and their friends, to the gold fields in California. It's a much better novel than 95% of the stuff written today, I'm just not sure it's in the same league with some of the better Pulitzer winners I have read.

The problem is that it seems to be based on true accounts. Truth is stranger than fiction, and to have so many things happen to the travelers seems unrealistic. The boy gets kidnapped by bandits, captured by Indians, becomes a blood brother to a Sioux chief, is chased by radical Mormons, makes and loses a fortune, and so on and so forth. It's too much. Any one of these incidents would have made a great novel, to think that the boy lived through and survived all these incidents is too much.

And the thing that irks me the most is the use of dialect throughout, in dialog and narrative. That really grates on my nerves.

GWA Annual Contest entries

Polished up four stories to send in for the GWA Annual contest.

• Common Ground


• Ellis, Not Elvis


• Merle Littel


• Montag's Utopia

The entry fee is only a dollar apiece, but I sent $20 anyway, as an added donation, since they were asking for money to help fund the awards. Last year I won nothing in this contest, and I never heard who the winners were. I suspect there were not enough entries. Maybe this year we'll actually hear the results and I'll have some better news.

DWS first draft finished

Over 113,500 words. The longest first draft of a novel I have ever written. I feel really good about this one. I burned it on a CD and took it to Office Depot to get it printed out. Three hundred pages. I started this draft November first. It was, of course, a NaNoWriMo novel. That fifty-three days to write 113.5k words, or about 2140 words a day. How is that possible? Well, it's not high quality at this point. The trick of producing a first draft is to spew, and worry about making it better later.

There are a lot of problems with this draft, of course. Plenty of little details that changed as the novel went on: the age of a character, an action I referred to later that never happened earlier. These are the types of things that are easily fixed. And of course, plenty of word errors, which are a by product of using Microsoft Word and the spelling auto-correct feature. I am writing fast enough that I don't notice when Word corrects my spelling to a word that I did no intend. Also something easily corrected in the rewirte phase.

What is not easy to do, is to improve it now that it is on paper. The main things that are missing are the images that help convey my meaning to the reader. Finding just the right image is difficult and slow work.

What now? All the advice says to let it sit for awhile - a month maybe. I probably won't wait that long. After the holidays I'll probably start reading it and marking the obvious errors, and try to get the overview that is missing when you work on it for almost two months.

What is it about? Well, I haven't written the one line teaser yet. It's a story of a high school senior during desegregation in South Carolina in 1970.

Burning Books

I burned about half-a-million words today, the three novels of mine "Santeetlah", "Please Release Me", and "Fuzzy Mirror". Not permanently, of course. For two years I have been saving all the printed out versions of the novels, editing them with red ink, and stacking them in the corner of my home office. I kept saying I would use the paper for something - packing boxes to ship, scratch paper, cleaning windows. I finally realized it would take three lifetimes to use that much paper. I hauled it out to the backyard and set fire to it in a metal trashcan. Worked great. It was strangely satisfying to read snippets of writing while I burned the pages. The stack was about knee hige - I'm guessing a half million words total.

Cold Paradise by Stuart Woods

What garbage. This was a selection by my book club. In our defense, we are trying to read "popular" authors with some tie to our area, and Stuart Woods was born somewhere south of Atlanta. He's certainly popular, and prolific, but the boot is a thriller in the same vein as the Patterson novels. I didn't care for it at all, for the usual reasons that I don't care for these type of thrillers: improbable plot, shallow story, cardboard characters, manufactured twists and turns to keep you reading. And as an added bonus this one had lots of unrealistic sex scenes, that were not in the least bit provocative. If you have to write a sex scene, then read "The Mambo Kings" first to see how it's really done, don't bother with this novel.

Independence Day by Richard Ford

I'm very surprised I finished this novel. I believe it suffers from the all-too-common arrogance of some literary fiction writers. The belief that they can write about anything, no matter how boring or inconsequential, no matter how difficult the stretch to make their point, because they believe they are such great writers. I also place Updike in this category, with his Rabbit novels. Of course, they are successful, and I am not, so who am I to criticize them.

Ford is very good at dialog, dialog "tags", and the interplay between characters around dialog. Turn to any page and you can get excellent examples of the right way to do things.

Ford is very bad at telling a compelling story, though, and that ruins the whole thing for me. I don't sympathize or empathize with any of the characters. I don't identify with the story, which is what? I'm still not sure. I suppose it's just the mid-life crises of a rich, introspective, former writer. But I could be wrong. The novel didn't speak to me in any way, and certainly said nothing profound that I could find. I can't imagine spending so much time and effort writing something so banal.

And another thing - politics. The author obviously has a political leaning and it shows. I hate when the authors personal politics show.

So I am going to rank it pretty low in the pulitzers. About on a par with where I rank the Updike novels, which is pretty low, and for pretty much the same reasons.

DWS first draft update

Well, 90000 words is not enough for this first draft. I set the progress bar to 90k, not knowing hos many words it would be, never guessing it would be this long. I'm not just a hair shy of 90K and just getting to the end sections. Maybe 100K? I'll reset the progress bar and see where I get to.

Of course, the progress bar is just a useful tool. It's not about the word count, not in the first draft. What does it matter if it is 90L, 100k, or 120K? I just use the progress bars to keep track of "progress". It really does help to see that I am progressing on a daily basis.

Advise and Consent by Allen Drury

I'm impressed when I think of how much work this book was to write. It's detailed, well planned, well executed, and demonstrates a great understanding of character.

It's just the subject matter that is boring, to me at least. Politics. Anyway, if politics excites you, by all means, go for it.

Itty Bitty Lies by Mary Kay Andrews

I read this for my book club. Didn't buy it, so it's not in my librarything.com database. Not my usual fare, of course, but it was enjoyable. You just have to suspend disbelief with these light novels and have fun. The author did a very good job, craft-wise, of keeping the suspense building and the reader turning the pages. It was a little contrived, as all of these novels are, so that's not really a criticism. You have to write like this in order to sell these books, and Andrews did a great job with it.

My only real criticism is the large amount of dialog. I would estimate the novel at about 80% dialog - that's a lot. Settings, description, action, all suffer. But that's a minor criticism - it's probably just her style. She has a lot to pack into her 90K word joy ride.

GWA November contest - first place

My short story "Common Ground" won first place this month. This is the last monthly contest of the year, of course. Overall result for the year was first place also, as I wrote in a previous post.

Devil's Walking Stick update

Currently at about 72k words. This started out during NaNoWriMo, of course. It's code named "Devil's Walking Stick", after the thorny plant that grows around the South. At this point the plant has only a minor role in the novel, so I may drop it totally in the rewrite.

Now it's time to decide what direction to go in for the ending. Originally I intended two deaths, now I'm not so sure.  One death for sure, but the second one may not happen.

Final word count? I can't predict it. There is still a lot that needs to happen to wrap it up. Of course, 90k is a good target length, since anything longer than that will have difficulty getting published by a first time author.

GWA monthly contest - first place for the year

Attended the GWA Christmas party last night, where the awards for the monthly contests were given out. I got first place! Details of the stories I entered and the places I won are on my writing page. The award was cash - $50. The first money I have ever received for writing.

The tally for the year was first place - six times, third place - twice, fourth place - twice, and fifth place once. There were eleven contests, with no contest in December. Not bad for a year's work. I love these long projects, especially when I can look back and see actual progress.

The party was great. Laurie had a good time. I was my usual quiet, reserved self. Some things never change.

Now if I could just get a short story published. I think my New Year's resolution will be to work hard on that part of my writing.

The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett

I read something silly, just for a change of pace from all the Pulitzers. Silly is the right word. The novel is not serious in any way, and as a result it's hard to get excited about it, but it is fun to read. There's no point to it either, which is a little misleading, since the blurbs seem to imply satire or parody. If anything it is a parody of fantasy novels. This is the very first one in a long series of loosely connected novels. Maybe someday I will read another one - anything can happen.

Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener

A strange, unique form for a work of fiction. Is it a series of short stories with a similar setting, or a novel? Some of the characters continue throughout, others are seen only once. The "narrator" is the strangest aspect. We never learn anything about him, yet he sees all and knows all, even when he is not present. He is a character, not just the voice of the author, yet we learn nothing about him. Very strange.

It's also a lot more graphic and realistic than the sanitized musical that we have all seen on TV or sung in High School. Worth a read, but I can't rate it very high among the pulitzers. It takes more than an interesting sequence of stories to make good fiction.