My wife and I are bad patients because we find that being sick (and awake) is exceptionally boring. Falling asleep, while necessary and preferable to staring at the ceiling, still rubs us the wrong way, for when we wake up, it's always "Oh crap, I'm still sick and I had a full plate of stuff I needed to do before this happened."
My wife had the flu during the week leading up to Valentine's Day. Fortunately, she got rid of 80% of the symptoms in time for us to go to a Gordon Lightfoot concert February 15. We had fun, heard some good songs, and enjoyed the crowd. My wife's memory is that the wine we drank while waiting for the concert to begin was really lousy and my memory is that it was okay, though overpriced at $8 for a modest glass.
The following week, I had the flu and probably wouldn't have thought the wine was all that great either.
So, February was a somewhat frustrating month...coughing, sneezing, foul tasting wine and foul testing meds, frutration and boredom. With the writer's strike, we couldn't even watch quality TV programs such as Desperate Housewives.
Now, she's a couple of weeks behind where she hoped to be with her museum consulting work and I'm equally far behind tweaking Garden of Heaven.
Our cats simply wrote the month off as "humans acting weird."
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Friday, February 15, 2008
Fine Tuning "Garden of Heaven"
The Garden of Heaven is a 240,000-word novel in manuscript form about a man looking back on the impact an ill-fated love affair had on his life.
While the real-time action of the novel takes place within a single year, 1983 to 1984, the memories and journals explored between two springtimes cover a primary time period of some 20 years.
The novel uses my favourite styles, magical realism and stream of consciousness. This, and the fact that the story is not told in chronological order, necessitates a very careful look at the book's continuity while preparing an outline, synopsis and query letter for prospective agents and publishers.
While I believe that intuition and imagination are the shortest routes to one's dreams, I'm not 100% skilled in such processes. This means that page 234 of the book might say Zeke fell off a mountain in 1968 and page 432 might say he fell in 1969.
Some people write detailed outlines before they begin working a manuscript; this would make me tongue tied. So now I'm shining a bright light on everything while peering through a microscope to clean up an "oops" here and an "oops" there.
While potentially tedious, this exercise has proven to be liberating and enjoyable as the novel is transformed from an idea into a polished manuscript.
I invite you to visit the book's web page and sign up for my newsletter and come a long for the ride.
While the real-time action of the novel takes place within a single year, 1983 to 1984, the memories and journals explored between two springtimes cover a primary time period of some 20 years.
The novel uses my favourite styles, magical realism and stream of consciousness. This, and the fact that the story is not told in chronological order, necessitates a very careful look at the book's continuity while preparing an outline, synopsis and query letter for prospective agents and publishers.
While I believe that intuition and imagination are the shortest routes to one's dreams, I'm not 100% skilled in such processes. This means that page 234 of the book might say Zeke fell off a mountain in 1968 and page 432 might say he fell in 1969.
Some people write detailed outlines before they begin working a manuscript; this would make me tongue tied. So now I'm shining a bright light on everything while peering through a microscope to clean up an "oops" here and an "oops" there.
While potentially tedious, this exercise has proven to be liberating and enjoyable as the novel is transformed from an idea into a polished manuscript.
I invite you to visit the book's web page and sign up for my newsletter and come a long for the ride.
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