A New Emphasis On Acceptence

In anticipation of my novel's publication, 26 Women, I'm trying to get more people to open and read my blog. I find a difference between people who open my email and those that click the link and go to the Blog entry. I need to increase both data points.

So with that in mind, I'll open this week with a pet photo. This not my cat, but the shot is cute, and I'm determined to widen my audience.

Instagram Photo from South Korea

This week I've had long conversations with family members. My oldest daughter and I marveled over our good fortune to have such cute littles in the clan: her grandchildren, my great-grandchildren.

Boden Hatampa

Brixton Sieve

Ledger & Jonny Sieve

Enough pandering with surefire attention-getters.

Coming soon to this space:

Shortly I will be sharing with you a project I'm working on that evolved from an observation from one person and kind of a challenge from another.

My editor, Pam Frautschi, mentioned to me as we were taking the rough edges off of my novel that I was writing like it was a stage play rather than a novel. By that, she meant I included a lot of stage directions in my story.

As an exercise, I took a piece I've been working on, copied, and pasted it into a formatting program for writing screen and stage plays. I proceeded to format the dialogue, the stage directions, and cut the rest of it. Without getting into the weeds about how much 'he said - she said' got cut, and how scene-setting absorbed a lot of the stunningly poetic language of my prose, I was amazed how little I completely cut.

Given the limits of a stage play, my script is too long by about 15-20 pages. And to be completely fair, I did revamp a couple of elements of the story to simplify the sets and costume requirements. The other revelation is, I think the story is better as a play.

Correction: In last week's blog, I misspelled the last name of Pam Frautschi. As both a friend and editor, Pam deserves better.

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