Dear reader, life is too short for crap books.

Monday, July 02, 2007

(Wo)men Without Ties

"Men without ties don’t dress for dinner
Do the Friday night frozen pizza thing"

- Paul Westerberg

Brady has R-U-N-N-O-F-T to Madison, where he'll be spending a week hanging out with our old friends, wrangling free drinks, and playing a reunion/cd release/farewell show with The Super 8s, who sing songs about states. In short, having an A-1 time while I lament the high cost of airfare and curse myself for not going into a field that had summer vacation as a perk.

But I'm not one to mope, so I asked myself, 'What would Paul Westerberg do?' And I decided that the only possible thing I could do was to declare it a "Men Without Ties" week, stock up on frozen foods, and get some writing done.

In the Maureen McHugh process of writing a novel chart*, I'm somewhere around stage 3, which means it's going to get worse. But also that it will eventually get better.

This is not to say that I am writing a novel. I'm not quite ready to admit to that yet. What I will admit to is taking the 100+ pages of notes, sketches, and scenes that I've compiled in fits and starts over the past five years, and putting them into some kind of semi-coherent plot outline.

Most people probably don't need plot outlines, but I do. I can make a bunch of characters talk for pages, and I can write back story till the cows come home, and I can tell you everything that is going on in a character's head at any given moment, but ask me to make someone walk across a room, and I require an outline. But I figure:

1. Once I know where I'm going, maybe I can actually go there.
2. Having a bunch of stupid characters stuck in your head for five years is no way to go through life.
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* link via Shaken & Stirred, always a great source for the how-to stuff

3 comments:

notarysojack said...

Keep at it! And good luck.

Gwen said...

At some point I must insist you finish your YA novel.

I wanted to go back to Madison but I too was foiled in this plan by the high price of flights right now. I thought maybe flying out of Vegas they'd be somewhat cheaper, but they were outrageous.

I want one of those CDs, though.

mary_m said...

Thanks Larry!

And Gwen, Brady promises to bring back CDs. If the dude ever turns on his cell phone, I'll tell him to make sure he gets one for you.