Rewrite Update…

OK fellow writers—tell me YOUR rewrite stories! Do deadlines help? Do you find yourself talking to the characters and asking THEM why they are dragging the story down with extraneous digressions? Do you read every sentence out loud? I don’t often dwell on process, when I’m in the middle of a “process” but this particular rewrite is making me take a serious look at how, when, why & where I RE-write, as opposed to how, when, why & where I WRITE. It’s different. Writing can be a joyous rush. The words spill out onto the page (or screen); the story
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Morbid? Maybe…

Skeletons, caskets, crypts, graveyards, ruins, funerary images, death masks, death scenes, tombstones, plague doctor masks, and more… Is it all too morbid or is it just a lost part of life? Is death different in the 21st Century? It is not as omnipresent as it was for past generations. It’s not that death has disappeared; it’s more that death is removed, ritualized, and restricted. Modern medicine isolates death and makes it more unusual (good) and more monumental (maybe not so good) as people struggle to face their own mortality and the loss of love ones. It’s confusing. We want to
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Voices in My Head

No, I’m not hearing voices. At least not in the psychotic sense of ‘hearing voices.’ But I do hear echoes of my own words from my fiction, stories people have told me, and an occasional lecture given by one of my characters. The pace, vocabulary, characteristic expressions of my friends & acquaintances—both the real people in my life and the almost real characters I’ve created in my fiction—come back to haunt me. I don’t seek out conversations with them, but they arrive and they talk and they often help me write, so who am I to turn them away? I
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Time & Identity

We scatter tiny virtual breadcrumbs wherever we go on the Internet. It’s a reality we live with unless we are willing to live “off the grid”—a near impossibility for anyone working in the 21st century. I’m sure I’m not alone in fearing identity theft. Most of us simply balance issues of convenience with privacy, and hope that the precautions we take make us less tempting to identity thieves. I was thinking about this while reading a new novel entitled ‘Tangerine’ by Christine Mangan. After hearing the author interviewed on NPR, I treated myself to what promised to be a Patricia
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Don’t Blink

Is it the last vestiges of the virus? Is it Rome? Or some mysterious combination of the two?   As I walk—and cough—my way through this marvelous city my imagination is running on overtime, spinning story fragments out of everything from the pizza I cannot finish (impaired appetite) to the expressions on the faces in art. While crossing the Tiber on the Castel Sant’Angelo bridge the famous angels were just a little too alive. ‘Don’t blink!’ I told myself, as if I were walking through an episode of  Doctor Who, but there’s so much more here. There are stories in
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Bad Book/Good Author

I’m sure this has happened to every reader at one time or another. It could be something as simple as a new book by a long time favorite author that turns out to be a huge disappointment. The story is too close to the previous stories; the principal character hasn’t learned anything from the earlier books in the series or makes a pivotal choice that upends the character you’ve come to know & love; or the author diverges so far from the books you love that it reads like something by an entirely new—and not very interesting—writer. It could also
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