Writing, Goals, Planning

  It has been foggy in the mornings, rather gloomy for summer. Carson returns home Friday night. We have tickets to see the Decemberists at the Greek the same evening. I will drive five hours up north to pick him up then we’ll bring a picnic to the concert. Hopefully I can stay awake to make the drive home. It has been an intense summer. My flash fiction Entropy will be in Scapegoat Review Magazine September. I have the contract for the short stories to be written as screenplays. One first draft I completed in July the other I will start in two weeks. Scheduling everything I do these days. I function my finest when I have the most demands. With working full time, writing full time and caring for my family is a balancing trick. Plan my goals.

  I have some writing projects to organize. What better method than to list of goals.

  The Lucky Boy in final editing with Neal Hock, it emerges from that stage on Wednesday. I have to write an essay for him about what I want the reader to take away.

  I am writing two new novels at the same time. This seems as overload; but is working well. The characters in Pump are ones I already know. I have a story board in the downstairs bedroom and photographs completed. The other novel, Cumaean (clunky working title) is a chapter one I started online as a short fiction about an eco-terrorist but have decided to run with it as a full length thriller. I ran some ideas by an FBI agent to check my story and the plot motivates me to make it full length.

  On the advice of the poetry publisher, I met with their attorney about using the autobiographical elements. I have sixty some poems, flash pieces and photographs we are compiling. The stories range from natural world, literary, dark, and personal. The difficult angle is having it be fiction not memoir. A great number of authors write about themselves or what they know, but in this, I open a door about some negatives in my life.

  Rather than follow the legal advice to file, I asked him to prepare “model release letters” or something saying they would “hold me harmless”. The concern is some person may come back and want a piece of the royalty. Poetry makes no profit but ...

 The First Amendment protects writers but I have known some litigious personalities, so better to avoid the problem. Nineteen letters were sent, the strange thing, those who I thought would protest the most were encouraging and full of praise.

  Next project is taking photographs and short videos for the books. I plan to include links for the digital books that loop to my content and swing back each chapter for more savvy online readers. I completed considerable research about interactive reading and am progressing with our secret project but the technology I want is not yet written. We have conference calls three days a week and the computer gentlemen on the team are the most animated not the comedian or the musician team members. I told them last week we are all geeks and they sent me these weird and wonderful leucandendrons.

It is an exciting time in publishing. I only wish I had 44 hours a day to write.