Jeffrey Ricker's Blog, page 67

When the list overtakes the list items

This is how much I love keeping lists:

I maintain a running log on my blog of books that I've read during the year. I just finished reading Glimmer Train 74 (that's a literary magazine, in case you're not familiar), and even though it was 200-some pages long, I'm peeved that I can't add it to the list because it's not a book. I mean, if I can't list it, it's like I didn't really read it, isn't it?

Comrades

I'm amazed I only came back with five new books. The last time Michael and I went to New Orleans for the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival, I descended upon the book table like a crack whore who'd just been handed a pipe. OK, maybe not really, but you get the idea. Being in the company of so many talented and kind and inspiring writers (so many that it would be impossible for me to list and link them here unless this became the world's longest run-on sentence, and I'm no Faulkner) tends...

Is it time yet…? How about now?

I am wrapping up a few last-minute writing things before our trip to New Orleans on Thursday. I still need to pack. I used to be good at packing. I could spend a month visiting my parents and bring only one suitcase with me. Now my standard operating procedure when it comes to traveling is throw clothes at the open suitcase, see what lands inside, zip it up, and go.

I tend to look rumpled anyway.

Choosing the books to take along with me is always a more careful procedure. Unless I finish

Random thoughts on finishing the third draft

 

60,780 words seems on the short side to me. However, The Great Gatsby is 50,061 words. Another however: I am certainly not F. Scott Fitzgerald.I actually started on the fourth draft before I had finished the third. With feedback from my writing group as well as some of my own revisions, I'm now on chapter seven of the fourth draft.Although I know I'll still be working on this novel for a while, I want to turn my attention to two stories I started rewriting earlier this year.And then there's...

Countdown

The days between now and the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival are simply racing by, but even at warp 9 they wouldn't be moving fast enough. I alternately want to speed them up or slow them down, because between now and May 13 when we get on the plane, there is so freaking much to do. Of course, most of it has nothing to do with the third draft of the novel, but that's the one that looms largest. I'm on chapter 15, the last chapter, and you know how in Dune, Princess Irulan said a beginning ...

Yellow?

A couple of days ago, Becky posted an entry on her blog that was an homage to the color red—my favorite, color, for those who don't know me. It was, well, a meme (which sounds like something your cat might throw up, doesn't it?); someone gives you a color, you list ten things of that color that you love.

What color did I get? Yellow.

After thinking about this for two days, I realize that for the most part, I do not like the color yellow. (I hesitate to say I hate yellow, because I do in fact...

The night the lights went out in Georgia

She'll be terribly missed.

'Designing Women' star Dixie Carter dies' (cnn.com)

The scales

On the one hand, the pain in my ankle and ass kept me awake 'til 3 in the morning.

On the other hand, I finished reading nearly all of the latest New Yorker on the same day it arrived. (That never happens.)

On the one hand, I finally finished revising chapter 12.

On the other hand, I only have three sentences rewritten in chapter 13. And I brought work home this weekend.

On the one hand, Ricky Martin came out.

On the other hand, John Forsythe passed away.

On the one hand, the problem with my...

Twelve down…

…three to go.

The third draft needs to be done by the end of the month. The further I wade into it, the less I'm revising, and the more I'm writing completely new. When I set out on the third draft, I went from third person to first person, and an important event that happened at the end of the book moved to chapter one. Those changes rippled throughout the entire story until I've reached the point I'm at now, where most of what I wrote in the second draft just needs to be tossed out and...

When I think about pain

I've been thinking a lot about pain the last couple of weeks, mainly because I've got a lot of it. (Please note, this is not a desperate plea for sympathy or solicitation for advice on treatment–I really *have* been thinking about this.)

I'm experiencing a recurrence of the leg pain I had back in 2003 when I herniated a disc in my lower back (longtime readers may recall I chronicled that experience on an earlier blog that is thankfully no longer online because, hell, I was wallowing in...