The Eternity Plague tagged posts

One of the things writer Anne Lamott is famous for is her advice, “Give yourself permission to write a shitty first draft.” To me that’s a kind of liberation theology for writers, but that’s a subject for another time. Today I’m going to continue to pull back the curtain on my writing process, at least as it relates to getting all the scenes in order for the second draft of this book.

So: “Give yourself permission….” Done.

“Write a shitty first draft.” Done.

OK, maybe “shitty” is a relative term, but while my read-through of the first draft got a “not bad” rating, as I wrote last time there were problems with the timeline, that is, the sequence of events in the plot. Timeline is especially critical for this book for two reasons.

• One, it needs to end at a certain time of year in order to t...

OK, sorry, I couldn’t resist. It was either that or borrowing the lines or titles from one of these songs:

• Neil Diamond’s “Stones”
• Queen’s “We Will Rock You”
• Bob Dylan’s “Everybody must get stoned…”
• Of course, The Rolling Stones’ “Only Rock ‘n Roll”

I’m sure there were others I could have named too.

What’s this all about? You may remember sometime back I wrote that when Edith and I had selected granite slabs for counter tops in the house, we had NO idea it would take so long before the house was ready for them. As a result, we didn’t reserve them, and because of that, the suppliers sold the pieces we’d picked. D’oh!

So now that we’re finally ready for the slabs, we had to go back to the suppliers and see what they had. OK, no problem, right?

No. Problem.

One of the suppliers no longer ha...

Yeah, OK, I couldn’t resist the pun, but there’s been some important work on surfaces inside and out this week. Let’s get right to it.

Last weekend Bill asked me if I could come down to the house so we could lay out the final plan for the asphalt part of the driveway, and of course I said yes. You may remember that we’d done this once before, but with all the construction traffic, the lines we’d painted on the dirt were long gone. This time, though, the paving company was going to be out the next day.

This is a very exacting process: “Let’s start here, go straight to about there, curve it around to there, then there, and then straight again to there.”

“Here?”

“No, over to your right a little… yeah, there.”

Put down some rocks to mark the spots, and then paint them.

Anybody who’s been in t...

Image courtesy of Marin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Last night I finished my first complete read-through of the first draft of book #3 (working title, Guardians, although I’m considering Wild Spread as an alternative). (No, that’s not me over there on the right. My ideal reader, maybe. At least her interest level looks right.) I’ve got almost 10 pages of hand-written notes of things to check, fix, delete, etc.

Overall verdict: not bad.

There are some scenes that are way out of position. There’s a place where one of my secondary characters chrysalizes, then a few chapters later appears again in her unchanged, original form, as if the chrysalization never happened. Oops. Well, that’s the sort of thing that happens in a first draft...

The work on the interior “fittings,” if you will, of the house is now underway in earnest. With the cabinets installed in the pantry, kitchen, and bathrooms, one of the next steps is to “template” the counter tops. “Templating” means getting their exact–and I do mean exact–measurements. As George, the installer said, if they get them just wrong, a thousand-dollar slab of granite is ruined and his company ends up doing the job “for free.” Well, not free, exactly, but they don’t make any money on it. This is definitely a “measure twice (or three or four times, cut once” kind of job.

So with interior designer Edith supervising…

…and George measuring down to the 32nd of an inch…

…I was, um, supervising. Yeah, supervising! That’s it! (OK, and taking pictures...

The Cochise Writers’ Group, which I co-founded with Cappy Hanson, has gone through phases of growth and contraction, as every group does. We’ve been as small as four members, and as large as 17! We hit that number about a year ago and it became obvious very quickly that if we didn’t do something, the group was going to be unmanageable. The first thing we did was close the group to new members.

Our only saving grace was that not everyone in the group was submitting work. A lot of the new members did initially, in that burst of enthusiasm that comes with being new at something, but that tapered off over the months. Now we’ve got about half a dozen members who submit work more or less regularly, and that makes things easier to handle, both from a critique standpoint and from a management one.

The interior is beginning to look like a house! Last week, actually starting the week before, the interior got its first two coats of paint. “Agreeable gray” turned out to be an agreeable choice. Not white, exactly, but certainly not dim or dismal. It’s a color that will let others stand out.

The big news, though, is cabinets–in the kitchen, the pantry, the laundry, and the bathrooms. And what a difference they make! The kitchen went from this…

…to this…

…and this…

…and the island looking like this.

Here’s a peek inside the pantry.

And one into the laundry.

And in the master bath…

… those cabinets standing in the door into the closet will be towers on either side of the central mirror.

The lighting in these pictures isn’t so great because I was working only with ambient light...

I’ll write more later this week on what’s happening on the inside of the house but for now it’s time to get caught up on what’s been going on outside.

For starters, the decorative stone work on the short walls at the front is almost done.

I’ve discovered one of stone-mason Ramon’s techniques, however. He doesn’t just grab a stone out of the box and place it on the wall, he plans his work.

Not sure exactly where those stones will all go, exactly (OK, OK, on that wall in the picture) but clearly he lays the stones out so he can see what he has to work with.

Speaking of stones, and moving around to the west and south sides of the house, the gravel and plants continue to go in. A cloudy day week before last lets the differences in color between the larger and smaller stones stand out.

The l...

My writers’/critique group, the Cochise Writers’ Group, has been going through some changes lately and that’s gotten me thinking about critique groups in general: their purpose, size, makeup, and so on. This post starts an occasional series as I collect my thoughts and observations about them.

One of the most argued about questions in writer-dom is whether writers should join critique groups or not. There are some people who are absolutely certain they know what the right answer is for everyone. Multi-published author Dean Wesley Smith is death on writers’ groups. I guess he had a bad experience with one once, but if he did, that’s not a sufficient reason–not a reason at all, really–to declare all groups bad all the time for all writers.

Here’s the thing...

I know it may not seem like a very interesting thing, but putting up the interior doors is one more step to making the house seem complete.

While right now most of the doors are still stacked up, waiting to be installed, like this,

that will start Monday.

While trim carpenter Lonnie or his assistant is doing that, the shelving in the office storage room, all three bedroom closets, the guest closet, linen closet, and another closet will go in as well. (That’s the “stores” in the title of this post–for storage.)

Another kind of storage got sorted out recently too. The original plan was to have an 1,100 gallon rainwater storage tank outside of my office, harvesting the water from the office roof and part of the shed roof.

To be honest, I never liked this option...