Monthly Archives: November 1996

After Ambrose

Don’t point your finger. We’re all monsters here. The only question is, “What kind of monster are you?”

candidate entry for The Devil’s Dictionary:

Chauvinist (n.) A woman’s term for a man who has put her on the wrong pedestal, i.e. the Untouchable-Virgin pedestal, when she wants to be on the Beautiful-But-Equal Earth-Mother pedestal or the Goddess-Whore pedestal.

 

First Blog, First Post

In one sense, I don’t write these books. They write themselves, or maybe the characters write them. I just type the words. But of course that is true mostly of the first draft. Then come the revisions, the hard part. Kicking all the crap out of the story, the words, and I never get it all. The problem is that I don’t always hear the characters, understand the story they are trying to tell.

Make that stories.

Each character has a different story and each stars in his/her own story. The book comes from the collision of their individual stories. If they were all telling the same story, there either wouldn’t be a book or it would be so dull no one would want to read it.

Forgetting that will screw up a book fast.

Started chapter six of TURK’S PLACE today. Page 166, just under halfway through the first draft. I hope to finish the draft by the new year, but it’s going slowly. Two and a half months on it so far. The problem is the 1970 sequence, finishing the murder and building toward Kent State. Hard years to relive. ‘Nam and drugs. Sex and Rock and Roll. Too much desperation back then. Idealism and naivete, commitment and disenfranchisement. Too much of everything but peace.

But maybe that’s just me.