On the personal side, have taken some time away to get caught up on…well, life.  Writing can be like swimming I guess.  You duck into the water, look into the murk below, wrestle around looking for something you can’t quite see, and finally grasp it.  Whatever it is.  Then…after what seems like a very long time…you come up for air. 

And take a long extended breath.  

Meet Mark Simon – Chief Security Officer of the Sun Voyage cruise line.  And introducing Bishop Harris, a formerly impoverished youth from the streets of Chicago, now raising a young family from afar as he starts his new career aside Simon as First Officer.  Glass Dolls – the first Deck Zero novel – should debut around Christmas.  Credits to my family and co-conspirator/critic/web designer/cover designer Brion Sausser for helping me get it this far.

All in all, I liked the way Inbetween turned out.  A little crisper than Denver Nights, although I still like the melancholy the first Alex Carr/Jack Blain novel held.  Will get back to that in time…have a whole series of events in mind…but I’m turning attention to a different project for now.  Deck Zero.

Oh, and the second thing?

Inbetween was structured very methodically to convey a invoke a certain set of feelings.

They go, in order:

Depression, anger, confusion, terror, heartbreak, then more heartbreak, then rejuvenation, and finally redemption.

Will see if that's how it reads.

A couple of things come to mind tonight.

The first is the idea of writing.  And the motivation behind it.

A few years ago when I was first getting to know Denver Nights - and it's not so much a writer creating the narrative as it is the narrative helping create the writer - that I wondered about how people made a living from the craft.

I researched a wide array of tips on how people brought their materials to market.  The one thing that sticks with me today is a post I came across from a poet.  This isn't verbatim, but it went something like this:

"I've put my heart and soul into a collection of poetry reflecting my deepest challenges and struggles.  Now how do I make money out of it?"

Huh.

It was...paradoxical?  The idea that something so compelling and vivid to someone instantly turned into the thought of money.

While the idea of sustaining an existence on writing is appealing (for every writer, I imagine), I think that person had it wrong.

But what do I know...

Inbetween is now finished.  Time to print a few copies and see what people think.

This is the weird time of writing.  You've put the effort into things...and now need to see if any of it makes sense to the folks reading it.

But as I've said before in this blog...

Fuck it.

Mentioned earlier how my brain tackles the writing process.  Looking at it creatively, then technically, etc.

I had a period earlier where everyone was out of the house and I was plucking away at things.  Then Beth came back, a neighbor came over, the TV went on, and the silence I was working in was suddenly gone.  I should mention our place isn't that big so I couldn't just relocate somewhere else.

I initially tried to simply block things out, but that didn't work.  The thought train I'd been riding had bucked me off.

But...I did find that it was a good time to switch to the technical aspect.  Without thinking too much about the story itself, I just ran through the lines looking for overused words, typos, and sentence structure.  I still didn't get a whole lot done, but I was able to go through about five pages and correct a handful of things I'd overlooked.