Another draaaaaaaft

Not a bad football game yesterday. Some okay commercials, too, though none that really stood out in my mind. Liked the horror-themed Bud Light one&mdaash;especially the aghast hitchhiker with the axe in the back seat (“…and a chainsaw!”). The Letterman ad invoked a chuckle, but so did the color commentator who noted that the game looked more like Aussie rules at time, given the amount of time the ball spend on the ground being shunted among forests of hands and legs.

I finished the first draft of the story in progress yesterday morning and spent a lot of time editing it. It’s longish, 4700 words at present. During the writing phase it got as long as 4800 words twice before. Both times it got to that point I sliced and slashed and cut back to about 4200 words before continuing on with the tale. I don’t doubt that it will get somewhat shorter before I send it off. I’m going to spend some time rethinking certain elements of the story. My first reader pointed out some potentially weak plot points, one of which I’m completely in agreement with, but I’m not sure where to address the problem. I could go at it a few different ways, so I will cogitate.

After that, I think I’m going to write my Storytellers Unplugged essay. It’s not scheduled for nearly two weeks, but I have the idea in my mind now and I’m not quite ready to start another story yet, so that will make a good project for a couple of mornings.

I picked up a new book last night, sent to me by the publisher to possibly review or blurb. I missed the blurbing deadline due to other commitments. In retrospect, that’s probably a good thing because—though I was interested in the book based on the synopsis—the writing didn’t work for me at all. I read about forty pages of it before the game yesterday and took it back upstairs and put it on the shelf. First, I was irked because the author was coy about doling out the main characters’ names. They were the man and the woman for far too many pages, for no detectable good reason. Then the main guy engaged in some banal conversations that were far too wordy, almost literal transcriptions of real dialog, which rarely works in fiction. Color me disappointed.

Then I grabbed the most recent Caaarl Hiaaaaassen novel, Nature Girl, as a light change from the heavy slogging of Grotesque. So far so good. A tourist killed by a swamp snake and later dumped into the swamp (that was just page one), and a woman on a crusade to report her bad treatment at the hands of a telemarketer (who works for a company aptly named Relentless Marketing). The guy snapped after she handed the phone off to her 12-year-old son for a while and called her a skank. She has a history of over-reacting to things, so fireworks beckon. I’ve only read two other of Hiaaaaaaaaaaaaassen’s books, but I haven’t been disappointed yet.