Checking In

The revision’s going well. My plan is to get a chapter done a night, which means I’ll probably be done in a month. Very strange to be revisiting this novel which I haven’t read in over a year. It’s an L.A. novel which I wrote in New York and North Carolina, so it’s strange to be rewriting it now that I’m living here. I work on it after the daughter goes to sleep, or at the Beverly Hills library, heart of wealthy L.A., and the novel’s in part about wealth. I always hoped to work on this thing again with an editor, but I’m happy to be my own. It’s fun work to sit down with this novel every night--easier work than writing a novel from scratch but still satisfying because I know it has a purpose. Glad to find that the book doesn’t suck either. It needs to be filled out more than rewritten, for the most part.

Feels great to put my two books side by side. Makes me feel like an actual writer. I felt the same way after I put out my CD. I was feeling down because everyone else was putting out records but me. So I went out and bought a digital 8-track and a CD burner and made it myself. All of 25 people have probably heard the CD, but it doesn’t matter, it’s out there. I feel the same way about this book. It probably won’t get a hell of a lot of readers, but I’m doing something about it, rather than waiting for someone to discover me which may never happen.

So I’m writing this novel about Hollywood while Hollywood goes nuts. I wrote the first draft of this novel the week that Princess Di was killed, chased by paparazzi. This week Michael Jackson gets off and Tom Cruise acts demented in public. Actually, I think he’s just being himself and people are finally realizing that he’s creepy. Saw a preview for "War of the Worlds" (before "Revenge of the Sith" which, amazingly, I liked all right because I wasn’t expecting anything. The last half hour spoke to the kid who had a lot of action figures and the Death Star.) My prediction for "War of the Worlds" is that people are going to call it "unpleasant." Looks like the realism of "Saving Private Ryan" meets "Independence Day": i.e. a realistic apocalypse, watching people die repeatedly. I always thought it was weird that in "Titanic" you watch people die for two hours. People like that for some reason, touches something…I’ve got an interest in this because my next novel is apocalyptic, UFO-inspired. One of these days, I’ll get back to that novel. Now that I know I can publish myself, I’m less daunted about writing a part sci-fi novel which is probably going to confuse people.

That’s where I’m at. I probably won’t be writing any in depth blog posts for a while. Instead, I think I’ll put up pictures or links I find interesting. I don’t want to abandon this place altogether.