Strange Playground: The Query Process

Is like digging into my own plasma and going for a swim...

I’m going to have a 300 plus printed pages book when I’m done with this. I’ve barely cracked into the editing process, and I’ve already added 4k words to the first chapter, finding it thin and kind of a non-sequitur...not anymore, but it was. I don't know if the other chapters need that. The last third of the book, very likely. Since I already have 280 plus, it won’t be hard to break 300. I have no idea the monster this will turn into. I only know it needs to be better than it is, and I have incredibly high hopes for what the book could be...if I can just bring it there.

The writer I was last year is not the writer I am now. Not by leaps and bounds. However, I for damn sure didn’t suck back then. This book is easy to read, and it takes the reader where I want them to go. Hell, it better, I spent a year agonizing over just what I have now. It is good, the stuff that happens is fucking peach…a fine tale of the street…but the narrative needs more meat because the meat--a real meaty narrative, lean, a bit abstract--it makes the reader stay there. 

That's what I'm really after. Get in, you can't get out.

And I have to whittle the chapters down into a paragraph synopsis. Make a character list. A list of the places where scenes take place, and make notes of anything I think of during the process so I can add it in. I left out a lot of pretty important happenings. Like the Houston freeze. That’s barely in there. I wrote it like a quip, even though the damn freeze almost killed three of us. We had to make a fucking buggy bunker with blankets, and I didn’t even write about that, not over the course of 160k words. WTF, me? That’s a big deal. It’s like I just went ACTION!!! and charged headlong into the dawn. I talked a lot about window washing, a whole lot about drugs, bit of fighting, bit of...what's everyone's favorite thing to say these days, thanks to LeBron James and that goddamn Crypto commercial? Yeah, that.

Most of what’s written here is, to me, thin, and that means it’s a hell of a lot thinner than it needs to be if I want to think of an O. Henry or the like.

I’m only half-kidding. A man can dream, okay. As long as he also shoots. That sounds exactly as dirty as I meant it to be. Shooting, in this case, requires a great deal of masturbation, see. By the time I’m finished with this there will have been two (2) at least years of hours-days-weeks-etc.-long spanking going on, spanking the keyboard until it spurts whole fountains of hot, wriggling letters into the etheric uterus of the page. Also, I have places in mind to shoot for—I won’t say who. One of them is a place who has already accepted my story writing.

I’ll be glad for this to come out and know you all have read it. Speaking of other things coming out, I’ll have something for you all to read coming out in June. And goddammit, my poem is supposed to come out…at some point…with The Perch. I’m pretty proud of the poem. When I was younger, I was much more of a poet than I am now. I thought I’d lost the knack. I’m still not sure I haven’t--it was much easier with a guitar, and I don't play anymore. Other cool things—the first thing I published after my decade-long dry spell just keeps succeeding. If you haven't and want to see it, you can check it out here, and if you want to have it on your bookshelf, you can pick this up. Mine is in there, along with some other damn good ones. You could have me in your house.

Yikes.

I'm also thinking of entering it into a contest. We'll see.

I know I was gone more than a week, but as you see, my time slots are all full. Thanks--

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y'all.