Hot town, summer is a pity
Well, well, well. So many things to catch up on now that I’m back from my trip (one of them being your poll responses!), but it’s some 95 — scratch that, 96 ... 97 degrees outside, and my snug little pad has no cooling. I tell ya, I miss the West Coast more each day. But then, travel’s always been one of my favorite escapes when things heat up. And sometimes so too is fiction.
Last night, for example, I picked up this Mary Higgins Clark book a friend gave me to ship out to my sis, but which looked good enough I decided to read it myself first. It was indeed a page-turner, but in retrospect I wonder if that had more to do with the vaguely fan-like quality of said pages, the faster I turned them. Alas, the plot held few surprises and the heroine was a fairly one-dimensional figure who seemed obliged to fall for the one man on the periphery of her life and wed him as soon as the conflict resolved.
That was another problem I had with the book: the ending. Blogyenta tells me most stories involve a character with an external conflict, like finding a date for a wedding, which challenge begins to expose the larger, deeper, internal conflict — usually being accepted for who he/she is. In this case the external conflict was getting justice in her sister’s murder, but the internal conflict seemed to be realizing she was not to blame for what happened. Rather than dealing with that core issue, however, the story resolved itself mostly because the circumstances did.
Well, enough ranting. Last thing I need is to ratchet up my temperature! Ugh. I guess the reason I notice these things is that story is such a big part of writing the book, which I’m sure I’ll probably start dreaming about again soon. In my case, because I’m just sketching my sense of the larger story that God’s slowly weaving me into, there will be less of a change externally and more of a change internally. That’s just how God often works: bringing us to a place where we are content is often more important than changing the thing that’s bugging us — which He may well do eventually, just not always on our time schedule.
Anyway, because all this writing and story development is taking so much of whatever energy hasn’t been sapped by the heat (!@#$!@%@), I have to confess concerns about my ability to keep churning out fresh blog posts each week. One thought I’ve had is that, since most of you have been reading under a year or so, I could take two months to re-post some of the “classic” (at least I like to think so) posts from the first year of blogging. Thoughts on this? If I meet my deadline, come October things should smooth out and I’ll return to brand-new entries.
Which reminds me: if this entry was less than you hoped for, check out my interview with the Blogreader guy. Tata ...
Recommended tunes
Last night, for example, I picked up this Mary Higgins Clark book a friend gave me to ship out to my sis, but which looked good enough I decided to read it myself first. It was indeed a page-turner, but in retrospect I wonder if that had more to do with the vaguely fan-like quality of said pages, the faster I turned them. Alas, the plot held few surprises and the heroine was a fairly one-dimensional figure who seemed obliged to fall for the one man on the periphery of her life and wed him as soon as the conflict resolved.
That was another problem I had with the book: the ending. Blogyenta tells me most stories involve a character with an external conflict, like finding a date for a wedding, which challenge begins to expose the larger, deeper, internal conflict — usually being accepted for who he/she is. In this case the external conflict was getting justice in her sister’s murder, but the internal conflict seemed to be realizing she was not to blame for what happened. Rather than dealing with that core issue, however, the story resolved itself mostly because the circumstances did.
Well, enough ranting. Last thing I need is to ratchet up my temperature! Ugh. I guess the reason I notice these things is that story is such a big part of writing the book, which I’m sure I’ll probably start dreaming about again soon. In my case, because I’m just sketching my sense of the larger story that God’s slowly weaving me into, there will be less of a change externally and more of a change internally. That’s just how God often works: bringing us to a place where we are content is often more important than changing the thing that’s bugging us — which He may well do eventually, just not always on our time schedule.
Anyway, because all this writing and story development is taking so much of whatever energy hasn’t been sapped by the heat (!@#$!@%@), I have to confess concerns about my ability to keep churning out fresh blog posts each week. One thought I’ve had is that, since most of you have been reading under a year or so, I could take two months to re-post some of the “classic” (at least I like to think so) posts from the first year of blogging. Thoughts on this? If I meet my deadline, come October things should smooth out and I’ll return to brand-new entries.
Which reminds me: if this entry was less than you hoped for, check out my interview with the Blogreader guy. Tata ...
Recommended tunes
| Lovin’ Spoonful, “Summer in the City” |  |
| Peggy Lee, “Fever” | |
| James Brown, “Cold Sweat” | |
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