The Little Things

It's TLT that make life interesting. I've been fighting with my mouse (computer variety, no hair included) for so long, it's crankiness no longer registered on my annoyance chart. Until one day, I said "Self, this is silly. The World of Mouse has progressed since you bought this creaky, cranky critter. Go shopping." I'm proud to say a cool little mouse with all sorts of tricks up its roller ball (is that what it's called?), wireless to boot, works its little guts out for me. I love it! Why did I stick by my old standby for so long?

I think, in over analyzing it, it's because I want the same work environment. Even the chaos scattered around me has a method to it. Shuffle the order of one pile, and I'm instantly clueless. Shift another stack, and my favorite pen disappears. Lord help me, if I can't find my favorite pen. Forty others, all perfectly respectable and ink-filled, stick their noses out of the Mark Martin cup to my left, but that trusty good one, the one I trust, must be readily available to my right, just in front of the printer, hooked to its notebook filled with pages of ideas and plotting notes. Searching for something, anything, jerks me out of the writing frame of mind.

I must now switch topics and eat my words about COT racing. Yesterday's bloodbath at Dover was incredible. I don't know who or what went haywire (although Kyle Petty blames Denny Hamlin, without a doubt), but cars were bouncing around and off each other like crazy. Those who survived must feel like gladiators who lived to fight another day. Even pit row guys got carted to the hospital - the 55 gas can man was lucky that the tire that hit him didn't take his head off. I'll bet there'll be a lot of overtime for the fabricators, who have to put bodies back on the wounded Car of Tomorrow. BTW, when will they be the COT, Car of Today?

The Chase Begins!

The Richmond race was spectacular - only way to describe the whole evening. Montoya's engine on fire, Carl and Junior's engines blowing up with spectacular white contrails, Gordon fighting for the lead. Johnson's charge from "what happened to Jimmie?" to the fore. Loved it. The COT still isn't my favorite race, but at least it was under the lights with all its attendant magic.

The Busch race the night before was a snoozer - it's never a lot of fun when all the Cup guys raid the Busch ranks and play to win. In fact, Kyle Busch dominated the night, so much so, we called it an early evening and got out of the parking lot before the hoards descended.

Met a lot of nice people - the guys parked next to us Saturday in the lot, the couple running Ward Burton's merchandise trailer. Despite the heat and humidity, we survived.

My daughter gave me a new iPod Shuffle to wear when I walk in the mornings. I'm a convert, I must admit. Listening to Buddy Guy sing "Lay, Lady, Lay" as I chug along makes me smile. I just hope no one hears me singing harmony. Sad, really sad.

Racin' the Way it Should Be!

We're off to the Richmond race - the one that'll cinch the Chase. Junior fans abound, and it'll be interesting to see if he can pull off a win. Even if he does, Harvick has to DNF. Long odds . . .

At least it won't be raining, thank goodness. The college crowd is descending for the race (all Kasey Kahne fans, of course), and I've planned enough food to feed an army. Or college sophomores. That's half the fun of the race - the tailgating parties at Richmond. Everyone is friendly, and chatting about drivers and races helps pass the time until the night race.

I'll have lots of good pictures to upload, I hope. Taking some reading I've meant to get to - Thirteen Bags Full came highly recommended. My work on "voice" for a talk at the VRW meeting next week has made me highly conscious of how other authors achieve it. It'll be interesting to see if voice translates well from another language.

Picture from Indy

I realized I never posted anything from the Indy 400! Here's a picture from our seats by the Tower.

September is the new New Year

Perhaps it's because the neighborhood kids are trudging down the street outside my window, dragging backpacks as if they're filled with time bombs, that I've decided my new year is really September. I remember, every Tuesday after Labor Day, checking out my stacks of new textbooks, wondering how on earth I was going to learn everything, panicking, until I was old enough to realize that someone was going to actually teach me. Every September was a new beginning, a new adventure in knowledge, with books at its core.

So here I go, starting a new book. I've been playing around with several plots that I've thrown onto the screen, practicing getting into different heads, under chimerical skins. One is calling me more insistently than the others, so I'll give it a go and see if it still amuses me after the first forty pages. Although I've tried, in vain, to change my process, those first forty pages are necessary. They'll end up in the trash, but until I work through them, I won't know for sure if I like these people enough to live with them in my head for the next months.

The Big Race is the weekend after Labor Day - I need to gather all the tailgating supplies and shop for two days of food that'll work on a grill. Can't wait. While I'm not a big fan of the COT, I'll be happy to see a night race again. The spring race on Sunday afternoon was a bummer. No mystery, no glamour, no sparks flying in the darkness.

If you want to read a good western romance, check out Donna Dalton's THE CAVALRY WIFE at Wild Rose Press. It's available as a download now, paperback due in December. It's set during my favorite time in U.S. military history, when the black troops of the 9th and 10th Cavalry did yeoman's duty on the Plains.

Editing Yourself

I'm a terrible self-editor. No matter how often I've worked on a project, when it comes time to bite the bullet and read the work for accuracy, I'm hopeless. Falling into the story wipes out all attempts to be brutal with my grammar, word choices, and sentence fragments. I'm terribly fond of the whole thing by that stage. Probably, there's a part of me that worries that fooling around with the last draft will shift the stars and disrupt the magic that made it in the first place. Hence, my self-editing is really just another chance to fall into the story again.

Recently, I picked up EDIT YOURSELF by Bruce Ross-Larson, which is charmingly dedicated to "Goddard Winterbottom." Anyone with a friend of that delightful name must know what he's doing, I decided. And Ross-Larson does. He lists "overweight prepositions," ( the bailiwick of most lawyers, without a doubt), weak modifiers, and wonderful tips like "you should examine a noun ending in 'ion' to see whether it can be replaced by a concrete word." (p.9) For example, instead of "motivation," try to use the word "drive." For "origination," use "source." Ross-Larson seems dedicated to clearing up muddy writing and making sure subjects and verbs agree. I particularly like his advice to avoid the "ugly" words like "electricitywise and prioritize." I smell Christmas gifts in the offing....

Last week and this have been swallowed up in the flurry of shopping and packing it seems to take to get two girls back to their respective schools. One starts a week before the other, so at least the sweaty, time-sucking work is spread out. Wait, is that a good thing? Oh well - it's August. What more is there to say?

Writing with "Voice"

I've been thinking about what constitutes "voice," and while I know it when I read it (think J.K. Rowling, T.S. Eliot, Dick Francis), I've never considered the issue of whether you can learn to write with it, or if it's embedded in your DNA. While browsing the bookstore the other day, I picked up a book that had an intriguing title, opened the first page, read it, and immediately, the author's voice came through loud and clear. Ah ha, I thought, and bought the book. Sharyn McCrumb's voice - sassy, sad, or outright funny - comes through as uniquely hers. All the authors on my "keeper shelf" have that certain way of telling a story that makes it uniquely hers or his. I may not like the story, but I sure liked the way it was told!

So, the question is, can you learn "voice," or are you born with it? It's probably half-and-half. The more you write, the more your own voice will evolve, if you're beyond the stage of trying to write like someone else. When you find the right fit of story and voice, the book will take off so fast, it's hard to stop writing it. Those days when twenty pages or more spring to life and your wrists are about to break off, you're writing so fast, are the days all writers crave. When I read a book with voice, it's almost as if there's this disembodied entity, whispering the story in my brain, and I'm there, in the moment, along for the ride as it happens. Those are the page-turners we tell our friends to buy, and we never lend them out because we're afraid they'll get lost. (SEP's Ain't She Sweet - keep your hands off my copy!)

How do we find our own voice? Write. Write some more. Drag your voice out from wherever it's been hiding, and tell it to get a life of its own. It will, if you care passionately about the work.