Seen Wayne Handcuffed to the Bumper of a State Troopers Ford

SO, I’m working on Avery Cates Exciting Adventure #3, which hopefully won’t be the last Avery Cates Exciting Adventure because the character is a lot of fun and I can see him doing all sorts of damage. But you never know, and if we’re selling worse than Pintos in Mexico this may be it. Time will tell.

As usual, I took a break around what I think is the halfway mark to let a few special folks take a gander at it (agent, wife, etc). This is tough. I hate doing it, in fact, because there’s so much yet to be figured out and massaged. Inevitably you get back questions that will be explained later, or comments you know won’t matter once you finish up. Plus, some people (I won’t name any names) can’t seem to read a first-draft without marking every single typo they find, despite your continual pleas that it’s a first-draft and thus plagued by small errors.

Sigh. I don’t know how you handle it. I drink.

Still, it’s a good exercise, because the other inevitability is that someone will note something about the story that just isn’t sitting right, and it’s usually a moment where I thought shit, this is genius and it turns out it’s simply lazy writing*. Like deciding to skip a big chunk of story and tell it via allusions and interior character monologues. Yep, that seemed like a cool, mysterious way to write it up, until someone actually tried to make sense of it and. . .failed.

Frustrating, but this is why I let people read partial manuscripts, to let me do some course-correcting before I get too deep into it. As painful as it is, I’d rather know I’m fucking up now rather than 50,000 words past now.

So that’s me today. My cats are fighting and we’ve had to separate them for a while in hopes that when we re-introduce them in a week or three they’ll blink their eyes and say Golly, who are you? And start purring and licking each other. This may not happen. In the mean time, most of my energies are being spent keeping cats from fighting each other to the death–which is only a minor exaggeration.

*I believe I have patented this style of writing. Let’s call it Stupidism. I am its master.