Not Talking about It

Cheating, the encore. I started to rant and rave about the governor of New York and his poor, beaten-looking wife ("Honey, I need you to put on your sincere suit and your good pearls and back me up when I confess, because I got caught by the Feds, to paying for high-priced hookers."), but it's just too ugly. Too sad. I hope spouses everywhere learned a lesson from this. You can't hide evil. It will be exposed.

I'm working on something new, while I still fiddle with rewrites on LOLA and DARKROOM. For once, I'm working off a theme and not the characters. It's a futuristic story and in it, lawyers are hired gladiators. Reaching age 30 is unheard-of. The characters came to me fully clothed, living, and breathing, but the theme spoke even more clearly. I've always been impressed by Barbara Kingsolver's approach to her books - she starts with the theme and builds a story around it. Never was able to do that myself. But I'm writing that way now, and it's happening. The proof, as they say, will be in the pudding, if I can sustain the story this way. It's fun so far.

The Golden Oars mystery, the first in a series my good friend Kat Jorgensen and I are writing, is drawing to a close. We have way too many pages, a ton of good stuff we'll have to cut, but that's the nice part about planning a series. We can use the goodies in another book. The four crime-fighting middle-aged to octogenarian members of an all-women crew team turned out to be both funny and poignant. We love them, and hope to find them a good home. (As in publishing house, not retirement, LOL.)