January 10: The reward for writing a novel

January 10, 2022January 11, 2022 Paul CervantesCottonwood, Dedications, Editing, Flexibility, Forewords, Formatting, Front matter, J.K. Rowling, Loose Change, Olivia Chaney, Plans, Rewards for writing, Stephen King, The Longest River, Writing soundtrackLeave a comment

Oh sure, you might get rich. You may be another Stephen King or J.K. Rowling but before you are you will to do some of the most hateful work imaginable, and I don’t mean you’ll write your novel.

No, you will edit and proof your novel and you will hate the process, as we all do.

Today I excised 49 scene headings. While I did I made sure their removal didn’t make the overall line flow get screwy. It did in many instances but overall the process was less onerous than I anticipated. And, less onerous is always a big win when it comes to this kind of thing.

My next task was to create the front matter. This was relatively painless since I have decided not to have a foreword and a dedication in Cottonwood…just more stuff to write and edit, don’t you know. Really, though, I simply don’t have anyone in mind for the dedications beyond myself for being silly enough to launch into this book so soon after my first novel was up for sale. Those 49 scene heading were used to help me stay aware of where I was in the book relative to its sequencing and also when it came to editing and being aware of my proximity to other elements of the plot. They were replaced by four sections entitled I Spring, II Summer, III Fall & IV Winter. I can’t really tell you why other than the nature of the story causes it to move through the four seasons almost exactly. That was not by design, but it works or at least I think it does.

The only lesson here is to plan as much as possible and then be willing to abandon your plans as your book demands. The moment you worship the what you plan to do it over what the story and your characters need all of you are doomed. Plan away, by all means. Figure out systems that make your project make sense and seem manageable. Just be ready to be flexible because you surely will have to be if your loyalty remains where it belongs.

Today and tonight’s writing soundtrack is Olivia Chaney’s The Longest River from 2015. You’ll note the last two evenings have found me listening to two vocalists, last night Tim Curry and Chaney tonight. I can explain it like this. I wasn’t really writing yesterday or today. I was editing and that process seems to shift my brain’s gears in a way that makes it possible to divide my attention to the words Chaney sings in Loose Change without losing my sense of what I’m trying to accomplish. Also, vocals do their part to keep me company while I’me doing something that’s even more lonely than writing creatively. Anyway, Chaney has a lovely voice and the arrangements are very elegant. Some of the tracks on The Longest River are among the most beautiful I’ve ever heard.

Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow.

January 1, 2022

January 1, 2022January 1, 2022 Paul CervantesAmazon, B.B. King, CDs, Cottonwood, Elvis, Joe Friday, LPs, Music collection, Nostalgia, Paul Simon, Sinatra, WritingLeave a comment

Seriously, I have to write more already?

Overnight I realized that this whole one year journal idea meant writing on something like a schedule, like other writers do. I read that Shelby Foote started each day writing 500 words, using a quill pen no less. I think I realized this in the back of my mind. As some of you might know, I finished my second novel, Cottonwood, a month or so back. I’m now waiting for my faithful formatter and cover artist to be available so I can get the book up on Amazon where it’s sure to make big bucks. I have a handful of ideas for my next book and I figured that writing everyday would keep me sharp in case any of those ideas suddenly grew from acorn to seedling. That fit in nicely with the one-year countdown to the end of my job at the law firm. Anyway, here I am on the first day of the year. To paraphrase Joe Friday, it’s breezy and cool in Los Angeles today. The high is supposed to hit 57…a tad chilly for me.

A while back I heard an interview with Paul Simon. In it, he was asked what music he was listening to these days. He mentioned that he’d been listening to the Elvis station (disappointed), along with B.B. King and Sinatra. He went on to say that he didn’t really listen to any contemporary music. I thought to myself, what the hell and I’m not totally surprised. Paul Simon’s a somewhat prickly old guy but I would emphasize old more the prickly. It struck me that he had either lost the energy he once had to sift through the crap that is most of everything to find the contemporary music that had worth or that he was simply more comfortable with music that was contemporaneous with his early life and what came before it. That gets me to the word nostalgic. I’ve been thinking about the word off and on and I’ll have more to say about it later. Anyway, I’m glad I haven’t thrown in the towel when it comes to contemporary music. There is some very good new music out there. Is it harder to find than it was in days gone by? I suppose that’s possible, but so what? If you love music you have to take the time to seek it out.

Drop by tomorrow if you’d like to hear more about my efforts to simultaneously organize, preserve and grow my music collection.

I’m 168,000 words into my novel, Cottonwood

September 1, 2021 Paul CervantesCottonwood, Golf, Inspiration, JJM, Novel, Writing1 Comment

I really regret not keeping up with progress reports on Cottonwood over the time I’ve been working on it. The funny thing is that I until I checked I couldn’t even remember how long I’ve been working on the book. Now that I have checked I see it’s been a good long time since my first novel, John J. McDermott & the 1971 U.S. Open came out in April of 2019.

Cottonwood is a sequel of sorts. No, I guess it’s just a plain old sequel. It takes the lives of the two main characters from the early 1970s in Pennsylvania all the way to the desert of California and the late 1970s. I didn’t really have another book with the same characters, or at least some of them, in mind when I was putting the finishing touches on JJM. But suddenly, when I was totally done with it, I realized that I wasn’t totally done with it.

I imagined the book continuing into the future, the future being nearly a decade later. I saw the book continuing into my own time and closer to some of my own places. So much of the first book was an educated guess. Oh sure, I’d been to Pennsylvania when I was a kid but I didn’t have any real memories of it, other than staying with my mom’s cousin in an ancient row house in Reading, Pennsylvania one summer when I was about 12. Worse, I’d never been to Wales or anywhere in Europe for that matter (still haven’t, in fact). That was a huge problem. I spent hours looking at maps, imagining how the sun rose and set in various parts of the country. I read about how much it cost to take a ship from New York to Wales and how long the voyage took. I came to know some of that stuff, as we know facts that are printed on the page, but I couldn’t know them as experiences.

They say to write what you know. It makes a kind of intuitive sense but the need to know breaks down quickly when you start to write. The important thing for me has been to know and understand my characters. From there, my book is only a measure of how well I can bring my imagination and my relationship with my characters together. I think that Cottonwood will be a better book than JJM, or at least I hope it will be. It’s certainly a longer one and it’s not quite done yet. I wanted Cottonwood to have a more leisurely quality than JJM but life over the last two and a half years got in the way, both for me and the main characters. Life up and took away some of the meandering feel that I had hoped for the book and replaced it with something more intense, and I guess that’s Ok. We all write, partly, to make a character come to life. I hope that Cottonwood will do more than keep the characters from JJM alive. I hope it will show them as they change and meet challenges in the world they exist in much as I try to do in my own.

Anyway, it’s been a long effort and I happy to have made as much progress as I have. I can see the end of Cottonwood coming and also the beginning that will follow it close behind.

Looking down on the setting for Cottonwood

Best writing advice ever!

June 10, 2019June 11, 2019 Paul CervantesCalifornia Typewriter, Cottonwood, Craft Beer, Creative Writing, Doug Nichols, Hiking, IPA, Robert Pirsig, Sam Shepard, Writer's block, Writing, Writing adviceLeave a comment

I’m in deep into the sequel to my first novel, John J. McDermott & the 1971 U.S. Open.

The working title (and my bet the final title) of the sequel is Cottonwood.

I am dedicated to moving the narrative along at a rapid clip. I hike fast. I play golf fast. I speak fast and I write fast, until I take a break, which I did too often with JJM.

That’s a mistake I will not make again. In fact, I’ve put a serious time limit on writing the narrative to the sequel. I want to finish the narrative by the end of 2019. It’ll take another three to five months to edit and format the dang thing, so it’s really not all that fast compared to other writers.

Anyway, I wanted to pass along the best writing advice I ever heard. The advice is in Doug Nichol’s 2016 film, California Typewriter and it came from the late Sam Shepard.

I’ll paraphrase the advice:

Never quit when you’re stuck. When you start up again you’ll still be stuck.

Now the funny thing is that I rarely consider myself to be struck. If I fail to work on my book it’s nearly always because I’ve been distracted by lesser things like work. But, there’s still a lot of wisdom and usefulness to what Shepard said. Since I heard his admonition I try to quit when I’m on a roll I know I can keep it going later. In fact, a lot of times the momentum of the roll is actually enhanced by the renewed energy that comes from taking a break to go on a hike or drink a fine IPA.

When I do nudge up against stuckness (to borrow a word made up by Robert Pirsig) I dedicate myself to the kind of written thrashing about that, if I’m lucky, gets a few more words and hopefully good ideas onto the page. The small success of getting those kinds of difficult words down blunts the sharpness of feeling a little stuck and replaces it with the confidence that a way forward can be found with a bit more effort.

Anyway, think about what Sam said the next time you find yourself stuck.