It ain't me. Right now, I'm just a twig floating down the Mississippi of life. The characters I channel into various stories have more going on for them than do I.
Jake is pushing me along in OT (that's how I'm referring to "The Vanishing of Owen Taylor" from now on). After working all day I stopped for dinner at Elmwood Taco Stand, which is supposedly Mexican food but is really just some combination of Italian and Spanish. They ain't got no Tex-Mex up here, and I didn't have a chance to hit Marix while I was in LA so I'm jonesing for anything that's stronger than El Patio frozen dinners.
Well, ETS has this thing they call an enchilada that's no excuse for anything...except, it serves to salve my demanding taste buds enough so I can keep going. It's ground beef or beans half-wrapped in a corn tortilla and drowning in taco sauce then smothered in cheese and baked, whereupon a line of sour cream is slopped across the top and then sprinkled with black olives. No rice. I'll have to make my own enchiladas, soon, just to have something decent in the way of Tex-Mex.
Anyway, as I ate, I started putting the plot points of OT onto sheets of scrap paper with notes of what ought to be where. Since this is a mystery, I need to have a good idea of what's going on so it's not as easy to figure out as most of Sue Grafton's books. I figured that's how I'll spend the evening and most of tomorrow.
Except...Jake had other plans. I wound up watching "The Big Sleep" again (the 1946 version with the re-shoots; not that lumpy thing that was initially shot in 1944). Not that I minded; I love the movie. But I've seen it two dozen times...and yet, I got ideas from it...and realized that I need more humor in the story. I was also starting out with Antony in the wrong place in his life and needed to shift that before it became set in the stone of my brain.
In the middle of all this, Brendan popped in to let me know he's almost ready to start pushing on POS, again. And he's open to helping me make it into three full novels that delve deep into his world instead of a long one that skims over it, to an extent. To which I sighed, Okay.
That's when Jake laughed and said, Get to work, because I've got another mystery for you to write. And then he tells me about it -- The Danish government is suspicious about the death of one of His Majesty's soldiers in Afghanistan and want Jake to look into it, quietly, because they don't want to make an issue out of it if the explanation offered by the US Commander who was in charge at the time is correct. And of course, it's not...and all hell threatens to break loose over Jake and Tone.
Dammit, I could stop working right now and still not have enough time to finish all the stories I want to tell. I have an idea for a rock musical set in the near future. I want to update "Anna Karenina" to modern times, with a gay angle and using St. Louis and Kansas City in place of Moscow and St. Petersburg. I'd like to shift "Blood Angel" into a book. Same for the two parts of "Darian's Point" I've already written as scripts and the story that begins the whole mess.
It'd be nice if I could make some money off this, but nobody wants my scripts and none of my books are selling that much, anymore. Not even HTRASG. And LD is just sort of sitting there in Kindle format. But all I have going on for me right now is the writing so I don't know what else to do and...
Oh, for god's sake -- I'm whining, again. Old habits do die hard.
Jake is pushing me along in OT (that's how I'm referring to "The Vanishing of Owen Taylor" from now on). After working all day I stopped for dinner at Elmwood Taco Stand, which is supposedly Mexican food but is really just some combination of Italian and Spanish. They ain't got no Tex-Mex up here, and I didn't have a chance to hit Marix while I was in LA so I'm jonesing for anything that's stronger than El Patio frozen dinners.
Well, ETS has this thing they call an enchilada that's no excuse for anything...except, it serves to salve my demanding taste buds enough so I can keep going. It's ground beef or beans half-wrapped in a corn tortilla and drowning in taco sauce then smothered in cheese and baked, whereupon a line of sour cream is slopped across the top and then sprinkled with black olives. No rice. I'll have to make my own enchiladas, soon, just to have something decent in the way of Tex-Mex.
Anyway, as I ate, I started putting the plot points of OT onto sheets of scrap paper with notes of what ought to be where. Since this is a mystery, I need to have a good idea of what's going on so it's not as easy to figure out as most of Sue Grafton's books. I figured that's how I'll spend the evening and most of tomorrow.
Except...Jake had other plans. I wound up watching "The Big Sleep" again (the 1946 version with the re-shoots; not that lumpy thing that was initially shot in 1944). Not that I minded; I love the movie. But I've seen it two dozen times...and yet, I got ideas from it...and realized that I need more humor in the story. I was also starting out with Antony in the wrong place in his life and needed to shift that before it became set in the stone of my brain.
In the middle of all this, Brendan popped in to let me know he's almost ready to start pushing on POS, again. And he's open to helping me make it into three full novels that delve deep into his world instead of a long one that skims over it, to an extent. To which I sighed, Okay.
That's when Jake laughed and said, Get to work, because I've got another mystery for you to write. And then he tells me about it -- The Danish government is suspicious about the death of one of His Majesty's soldiers in Afghanistan and want Jake to look into it, quietly, because they don't want to make an issue out of it if the explanation offered by the US Commander who was in charge at the time is correct. And of course, it's not...and all hell threatens to break loose over Jake and Tone.
Dammit, I could stop working right now and still not have enough time to finish all the stories I want to tell. I have an idea for a rock musical set in the near future. I want to update "Anna Karenina" to modern times, with a gay angle and using St. Louis and Kansas City in place of Moscow and St. Petersburg. I'd like to shift "Blood Angel" into a book. Same for the two parts of "Darian's Point" I've already written as scripts and the story that begins the whole mess.
It'd be nice if I could make some money off this, but nobody wants my scripts and none of my books are selling that much, anymore. Not even HTRASG. And LD is just sort of sitting there in Kindle format. But all I have going on for me right now is the writing so I don't know what else to do and...
Oh, for god's sake -- I'm whining, again. Old habits do die hard.
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