Category Archives: Dog Days (Deadline Book Project)

Thinking About Thinking

I’ve had a chance to do a lot of thinking lately. Okay, technically we think all of the time. I mean creative thinking. After being a bad master for a number of years, I’ve started to walk the dog for a half an hour or so on most days, and having nothing to clutter my [...]

Life in Slow Motion

Yeah, it’s been slow but happy. Maybe these are the salad days. My wife and I are almost empty nesters now, with our son in China and our daughter in college. I’ve started walking the dog and occasionally picking up the guitar again. Meantime, things are slowly gearing up to do something. I’ve been working [...]

Alternatives

Alternative options seem to be the theme recently. Yesterday my wife and I were talking about the Deadline project, and even though she hadn’t yet seen any of it, I’ve discussed some parts of it with her. So she was telling me an idea she had for the way the book should end. It wasn’t [...]

The Process, Part II

Before going on to chronicle the editing process, I want to mention that, to someone who reads this blog, it would appear that like Mark Twain, I write in spurts. This is not quite the case. Twain would abandon manuscripts for months before coming back to them. I might leave something for days or weeks, [...]

Rethinking Deadline

I have said that things were busy at work, slowing down lunch hour progress on Deadline. This was the case to begin with, but there were other issues afoot. Deadline is a project that has a lot of personal meaning to me. There are reasons I wanted to write it now that go beyond career [...]

Circles

Tonight I deliberately stopped writing on And/News in the middle of a paragraph spoken by K. I knew if I went on with it, I would be up half the night writing because her mini-speech started the downhill slide into an action piece. So unfortunately, I held back. If I went all out tonight, I’d [...]

Writing v. Storytelling

I came to a conclusion this weekend thanks to research for a novel that I decided not to write yet. When I was in the throes of obsession with starting up a new writing project, my original idea was to bash out a comic mystery that could be the first novel in a character series. [...]

Mirabile Dictu

Deadline continues its run. I started Chapter Two today without really knowing where it was supposed to go, and before I knew it I had 11 pages – without getting to the whole point of the chapter. Which is good in this case because the lead in took the form of character development. When the [...]

Adieu to Vic and Ray

Now I have all the original ten pages of Deadline entered into the notebook complete with the necessary changes. But now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t start with the second chapter, which is the fortieth birthday of the lead character. I’ll have to see. The chapter I’m working on introduces five characters during its length, [...]

Deadline Redux

As lousy as I felt dragging myself out of bed this morning, I should have just stayed up late and finished the chapter. As it was, I spent 10 to 15 minutes adding notes to the Reconciled Outline this morning. I thought about calling off sick so I could finish the chapter, and maybe the [...]

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