Chez Shaffner
virtual home of jason shaffner: novelist, blogger, consultant
Chez Shaffner
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
How Long It Takes
If you were to ask a panel of average persons how long they think it takes to write a novel, the median estimate would probably come in somewhere between five and eight months. That’s pure conjecture, but I’d gamble $10 that it’s close to the mark. I can tell you with some certainty they wouldn’t think in terms of years… but they should.
Once upon a time…I, too, thought six months was in the neighborhood. Even after I began work on my first novel—200 pages cranked out in seven weeks—I thought I would have a finished product, ready for agents and auctions and galleys and gala release parties and book tours with nary a word changed by an intrusive editor… That book, which I’ve spoken of before in the blog, has been dead since early 2004.
Monday night I attended a meeting of a local writers’ group and when I announced that I finished my first novel over the holidays, everyone applauded. Within a few minutes, I had orally delivered my sharpened pitch (available over at Publishers Marketplace) and expanded on a few questions. I fended off attempts to paint the novel as autobiographical (perhaps I should have Billy re-matriculate at Princeton). And then someone asked the question prompting this blog: “how long did you work on it?”
The files have moved around from computer to computer, so those dates aren’t reliable. But I posted the first piece of the novel to an online workshop (Zoetrope) on 6/19/2004, one day before my 27th birthday. By then, I had to have been working on it for at least two months (probably more). One file, containing a mere scrap (too lousy to publish here), entitled “Paper Mill Murders,” bears a last modified date of 9/23/2003.
I mailed my first query letter on 1/7/2007.
A conservative estimate pegs this project at THREE YEARS from conception to representation. (That's assuming I find an agent in the next 2-3 months, hardly a certainty!)
Now, for all those non-writers out there, here's another dose of reality. Tack on an optimistic 3-6 months for an agent to sell my manuscript, and 18 months from publisher acceptance to publication, and you’re talking about FIVE YEARS from scribbling my first notes until my book finds space on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. (Actually, where I want to see that hardcover is in the greeting area of Trident, the coffee shop and bookstore where I edited half of it!)
What takes so long? A few friends have asked me this question over the last two years, prompted, no doubt, by how far apart in time they heard me say “I’ve almost finished!” The answer is that you have to travel a good distance between the first draft and anything worthy of sharing. The shape of the story may remain, but wordsmithing takes hours and hours. My favorite quote on the challenge of a novel (and the difference between writing styles comes from A Moveable Feast. There, Hemingway is talking about Scott Fitzgerald (who wrote quickly) and says:
- "Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do. But it was very difficult, and I did not know how I would ever write anything as long as a novel. It often took me a full morning of work to write a paragraph." – Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
I wish I had the kind of discipline to get every word right the first time through (I have to believe the computer has all but eradicated that style of craft). But the reality is that I have gone over some chapters of my novel, red pen in hand, one hundred times. I know I’ve talked about this before on the old version of my blog, but it bears repeating. ONE HUNDRED TIMES. Just the other day, I deleted an entire chapter that contained sentences I wrote back at the beginning. That’s editing. (And I’m far from finished with that task!)
This has been a meandering entry, but it’s a topic that has been on my mind for a while now. Now I’ll go back to fidgeting over what a certain agent thinks of my manuscript…
Labels: Writing
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Where Does It Go?
That’s what I want to know. Where does the time vanish to? I’ve been at work for a little over an hour already, and Outlook tells me it’s time to move on from my new writing project to do some real (paid) work. It doesn’t seem like my morning writing hour can be over so quickly. Yet there’s the clock telling me it’s 9:05am and Outlook saying that I’m five minutes overdue to start the next task in my daily agenda.
It seems that every day zips past like a rogue express train and leaves me standing on the platform. Take yesterday, for example. According to this nifty gadget in my Google Desktop Sidebar, I worked 3.0 hours for my part-time employer and worked on fiction for 3.0 hours, too. Add to that an hour and a half for the gym, half an hour for lunch, half an hour for showers and other bathroom trips, thirty minutes of Spanish lessons on CD-ROM, one hour blogging, and I still can’t explain why I felt so BUSY yesterday from 8:00am to 1:15am and fell asleep on the couch obsessing over how little I’d accomplished…
I’m hardly the first person to notice the acceleration of time with age, but lately it has seemed so damn acute. Feels like I work more hours on my work now than I ever could during my years on the road, yet I don’t feel as if I accomplish any more than before! That’s a debilitating feeling.
Well, I’ve gone and done it now. Another ten minutes down the tubes. Outlook is pissed; I’d best appease her before she chooses to punish me by purging all those hard-won Contacts…
Labels: Miscellany, Writing
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
A Fun Lunchtime Diversion
Reporting back on yesterday’s workshop. Rather than forty-five minutes of free writing, the session had a big more structure, as the instructor came with handouts. The handouts suggested ways of turning every day’s lunch hour into a writing exercise. For example:
- Choose two people in the cafeteria or restaurant and imagine their conversation.
- Describe your sandwich.
- Close your eyes and observe the lunchroom through the sounds.
- Repeat, using the aromas in the room.
These may sound kind of cheesy, but her central thesis was that by forcing yourself to write from some pretty mundane prompts, you’re bound to stumble across something good. In other words, you’re bound to find a seed somewhere along the line, and if you plant that seed you might end up with a short story (or whatever it is that you write).
With fifteen minutes remaining, she asked us to write about breakfast. For ten minutes, fifteen writers scrawled as quickly as they could. And then she made us read. Not an option. Around the room (counter-clockwise, which seemed wrong), each of us read our first and last sentences. It wasn’t that awful after all.
I promise something more interesting tomorrow… Tying up loose ends in my novel’s ending is sucking the life out of me…
Just for the hell of it, here’s what I produced in that ten minutes yesterday… Ain’t pretty.
- When Keryn sits beside me on the edge of the bed, it’s my cue to wake. I have been varying degrees of awake since her alarm sounded an hour ago. She has showered and dressed, consumed her daily bowl of cereal with soy milk, and applied her makeup at the coffee table while watching Sex and the City on DVD. I haven’t moved from my pillow. It’s still too early for my taste, quarter to eight. She has to leave now, walk to the garage, and drive to Waltham. My commute is somewhat less arduous—soon I must move from the bedroom to the dining room table, my makeshift workspace. She kisses me good-bye and I wish she could stay ten minutes more. But she can’t. She’s already running late.
I’m never hungry so soon after waking, but my stomach grumbles for tea and caffeine. A year ago, before I met her, I had never sipped hot tea. (Impossible! you protest. But true.) Now a dozen varieties are arranged neatly in a flip-top chest on our counter. I set the water to boil and drop a tea bag in an empty cup. A year ago the word “bergamot” was not in my vocabulary, never mind its scent one I could recognize from across a crowded restaurant.
That’s what you get in ten minutes without editing…
Labels: Writing
Monday, January 08, 2007
Brown Bag Lunch
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Above: Portrait of the artist when called on during group discussion or writing workshop…
Tomorrow I’m going to an event around the corner at Grub Street. As their weekly newsletter, the Grub Street Rag, puts it: “Bring your lunch and come on over to Grub Street for a Brown Bag Writing Workshop. In 45 jam-packed minutes, you’ll meet fellow writers and get your creative juices flowing with some great writing exercises.”
I’m kind of a novice when it comes to these kinds of events. Although the binder on the desk contains 400 manuscript pages, writing workshops terrify me.
If I had to guess, I’d say that my friends, family, and former colleagues would characterize me as talkative, loud, and sometimes overbearing. But in a classroom situation I freeze. Several weeks ago, while sorting through old boxes in my basement, I unearthed a cache of papers from college. In the comments on a paper about Dreiser I found the following: “Great ideas, wish you’d express them more often in class.” Similar comments peppered my weekly response papers across the spectrum of disciplines, from sociology to economics to literature. In fact, when I examined syllabi for potential classes, I eliminated any that weighted class participation more than 5%. For four years in Cambridge, whenever I did conceive something insightful, sweat erupted from my palms. By the time I spat my brilliance into the air, it came out so mangled that it seldom (never) prompted the oohs and ahhs I desired. I retreated into terrapin ritual.
In May 2006, my first week as a consultant, one of the clients wondered to a colleague whether I was capable of speaking. By the time I parted ways with that client three years later, she could not believe she could ever said such a thing. It has never been a problem at work in seven years. As a result, until recently I thought myself cured of stage fright. If only I could go back to college now, what a sparkling contributor I’d be!
And then I went to the Grub Street Brown Bag lunch in December.
The exercises were fun enough (hey, I’m going back, aren’t I?). There was an opening line (I couldn’t believe what I saw) and every two minutes she gave us a word we had to use (e.g., black, hose). It was liberating to let my pencil fly, especially since I’m so accustomed to composing on the computer. After twenty minutes, she switched us over to another exercise. Basically, start with “I remember” and run with it. She endorsed it as an effective block-breaker, and I might even use it that way if the need arises.
But then she wanted us to read. I never know whether it’s better to make gratuitous eye contact or to exaggeratedly avoid eye contact. Seems like different instructors respond differently. I chose to make eye contact, and when she asked me to read, I said no. The shock on her face was worth the price of admission (that’s $0, in case I failed to mention it). “No?” I gave in, reading four lines of unedited crap.
Tomorrow I hope to read the nerve to recite five lines. Ought to conquer that fear sooner or later, don’t you think?
Labels: Writing
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Learning What “Freelance” Means
Two weeks ago I came across a freelance writer looking to meet others of his kind here in the Boston area.I monitor the “writing gigs” at Craigslist every few days, on the off chance something catches my eye. That’s how I first hooked up with Being There Magazine, who published two of my album reviews last week. Unfortunately, most postings sit on the edges of legitimacy. Craigslist has proven immensely useful to me through the years, but it pays to have a cynic’s eye when perusing the listings…
This particular fellow seemed sincere. “The best part about being a freelance writer is that you don’t have a boss,” he said, “but the worst part is that you don’t have any co-workers.” Since I’ve barely started down this road, I had not reached that conclusion on my own, but it seemed sage. And sad.
A seasoned freelancer new to Massachusetts, the organizer was interested in learning about affordable health insurance here. Since I'm a newbie, I was intrigued to hear how other freelancers got started. I have taken the opportunity to “talk shop” once before, but my friend Ezra's path to freelance success is anything but typical.
The organizer suggested we meet at a pub in Harvard Square. I sighed with relief, since the cynical side of me half-expected him to suggest his living room, which would have confirmed suspicions that he was a skeevy death-cult recruiter with a chillingly sincere voice.
When I stepped into Tommy Doyle’s (where the House of Blues used to be--another Harvard Square departure, Ferranti-Dege and Tower Records are next...) I found the eclectic group with pint glasses on coasters. As the minutes passed, more writers came, until ten of us sat shoulder-to-shoulder around a table designed for six. It was a fascinating two hours, and I learned so much more there than I ever could have from online forums or bulletin boards. Most of us departed hoping to make such meetings more regular affairs.
As strangers recounted how they make their living, I realized that I had never understood the role writers play outside traditional markets. To a great extent, my view of “writing” has always been myopic. When I was growing up, I wanted to write a novel. My daydreams always culminated in a hardcover book bearing my name on the cover and spine. A thousand times, I imagined walking into a random bookstore, going to “S” in the fiction section, and plucking a copy of my bestseller from the shelf.
To me, that was writing. The Great American Novel remains my dream, but what about campaign letters from charities? Solicitations from credit card companies? (The twenty of those I shred each week probably written by twenty different freelance writers!) Corporate websites and newsletters? Grant applications? Marketing collateral? The “legitimate spam” I delete every day from my Inbox? Someone has to sit down and write all those words.
Until my newfound friends described their efforts in arenas other than magazines, newspapers, and books, I had not reconsidered the universe of freelance opportunities. It’s a broad market, peopled with thousands upon thousands of writers paying their rent with words, and without ever drafting a novel...
Somehow that makes trying to crack into this wacky business both more and less intimidating.
While I sipped another pint of Stella, I realized that I’ve been a paid writer for years. During the last eighteen months, I crafted corporate newsletters, technical specifications for custom software solutions employing varied technologies, user guides and manuals targeted to multiple audiences, and detailed proposals for complex multi-year projects. Through all those tasks, I never once realized that I was writing. Hmm. How imperceptive and narrow-minded...
Now off to pen a dozen query letters...
Labels: Writing
Monday, November 06, 2006
Album Reviews Live
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Gabriel & Dresden, Gabriel & Dresden
Game Theory, The Roots
Both albums are fantastic, and I hope the reviews are enjoyable!
Check out the rest of Being There Magazine, while you’re at it. They publish a full magazine every other month, complete with interesting features. Some CD and DVD reviews are added every month. The November/December issue went live over the weekend (including my two reviews!)
Let me know what you think!
Labels: Music/Shows, Writing
Sunday, October 15, 2006
"Pink Tutu and Hillbilly Teeth"
I was very excited this morning to learn my flash fiction story “Pink Tutu and Hillbilly Teeth” placed in the 1st Annual 666 Flash Fiction Contest over at edifice WRECKED. This was a fun contest, its rules described here.Without further ado, here’s the story.
Writing it was a blast, and it’s exciting to know I’m going to get paid ($11) for this. That may not sound like a lot, but it’s better than contributor’s copies.
For whatever reason, when I read the list of required words (rainbow, brackish, baby lotion, Rastafarian, sunflower, and buttercup) and the theme (Halloween), the very first thing that jumped into my mind was Rainbow Brite. I don’t know why; I couldn't even have described her. I certainly had no clue hers is a popular retro get-up for women my age or that throngs of dedicated fans gathered in various Internet sites (these facts emerged during my cursory research).
Anyway, the story turned out reasonably well, I think. It’s a fun (and brief) trifle, and I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to post your comments below or email me.
Labels: Writing
Monday, October 09, 2006
Remember, Ma, It’s Fiction
When I was in high school, I wrote a lot of bad fiction. (Bad poetry, too, but let us pretend that never happened, all right?) Many stories featured characters who were thinly veiled facsimiles of my classmates. A girl I liked at the time, an opponent from a neighboring high school, a dorky freshman, an unpopular classmate. Sometimes, but not always, the protagonist bore some resemblance to an idealized version of myself. My lone reader (not counting the poor sods at various journals I submitted to) was my best friend, Don. He spent a lot of time figuring out who was who, putting real names with fictional faces. He wasn’t always right, and when I told him a given character wasn’t actually modeled on someone, I don’t think he bought it.Now that I’m writing every day, submitting constantly, and gaining confidence that I’ll add a few more credits to my resume by year end, I’ve been thinking about this problem more and more…
I suppose all fiction writers face this at some point.
- Your first-person narrator says something controversial and a reader presumes that you share the narrator’s point-of-view.
- A character happens to have a certain physical characteristic (a gap in her smile, a scar on her hand, a speech pattern) and suddenly a friend is convinced the story is about his girlfriend.
- A story features a character doing something awful and a friend emails to say “did so-and-so really do that to you?” Um, no.
That I needed such a disclaimer was not obvious until I gave the first selection of pages to Don, the same man who read all my juvenile stuff fifteen years ago. He immediately came back with guesses on real identities. No, really, I said. You might find a few recognizable sites, and maybe we once knew somebody who did X or Y or had quirk A or B, but none of this is real. Uh huh, he said, with a wink and a smile. No, really, I’m telling you! I reinforced it a few times, and I think he might believe me now… A little bit…
The issue came up again in a discussion with my Mom last week. This project was a secret for a while, for reasons I cannot recall. I described the story using my two-minute “jacket blurb” (or “agent pitch”), and she immediately latched onto one element of the story that bears a thin resemblance to my recent reunion with Keryn.
“There’s no connection,” I said. “I wrote the first draft of this story two years ago.”
That seemed to placate her, but I felt the urge to go on:
“It’s fiction. Sure, I might take a piece of a real person here, a snippet of real conversation overheard in a coffee shop there, I might have my characters dine in some restaurant I know, and I might make my protagonist’s favorite food the same as mine. But for every one real detail, I have ten I’ve pulled from thin air. It’s fiction.”
In a story with familiar elements, this problem is one thing. It takes on another life when stories are violent, feature unscrupulous characters, or otherwise make readers consider for a moment there might be something a little off about somebody who could come up with such ideas...
On more than one occasion, after explaining that a story is honestly, truly, swear-to-God not about me or anyone I know or have known, the inquiring mind has asked: “Then how did you come up with it?”
To that question, I can only grin and shrug.
Labels: Writing
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Writing Contests and Powerpuff Girls
As those of you who have read my biography know, I have been in and out of the writing world the last few years. My re-introduction has been very pleasant so far, with one of my pieces appearing two weeks ago in The Beat and a slew of pieces going out for consideration in the last two weeks. My fingers are crossed.
I have also been looking into a variety of contests. It may not be surprising that the deadlines are fast and furious through the fall, especially when you include those publications staffed primarily by students.
Many contests are straight-forward, their guidelines providing little more than a general format (fiction, creative non-fiction) and word count (500, 1000, 5000). But I recently came across a fun one, which I just have to post here. Not because I want to encourage competition, of course, but because it's FUN.
edifice WRECKED is a fantastic publication, very professional in layout and content, and typically playing host to a wonderful selection of short stories, flash fiction, and poetry from many brilliant authors, some of whom I've had the good fortune to work with through various online workshops, including Zoetrope Virtual Studio.
Here are the basics... For full details, check out the official contest guidelines.
Due Date: Sept 30th
Word Count: 600 words
Theme: Halloween
The Catch: You have to use the following six phrases (in no particular order) as seven of those six hundred words...
- Buttercup
- Rainbow
- Baby Lotion
- Sunflower
- Rastafarian
- Brackish
How about that selection of words? Hot damn, got to assemble some incredibly random ideas to pull those together.
I am ashamed to admit that upon reading the list, I immediately thought of the Powerpuff Girls. Last week, I was roped into a game of Cranium with my girlfriend's sisters. Ker and I cleaned up, despite our (my) weakness at charades. Enter "Cadoo," a free throw-in from the KB Toys dude at the mall. A Cranium clone, targeted to a younger audience. Against our better judgment, we opted to try it.
The questions were easy. The three ladies got questions such as: "Spell this word backwards -- morning." The turn passed to me, and I drew a trivia question: "Which is the smartest Powerpuff Girl?" Huh?!? Who the hell are Powerpuff Girls? The choices were Blossom, Buttercup, and Bubbles. I guessed Buttercup, which was wrong (the answer, for those of you who may need this datum in the future, is Blossom).
But I digress... I am looking forward to writing this contest entry! And I'm pretty sure it won't have anything to do with children's cartoons...
Labels: Writing
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
On Revising.. and revising.. and revising again...
For six hours yesterday, I revised something whose oldest draft has three years' dust on its pages. Some sentences in that piece have been re-written twenty times, and none have escaped the red pen. If any sentences today resemble their first-draft form, it is the result of being revised and re-revised into that state.
I thought I had trimmed every darling, slashed all extraneous words, tightened my phrasing, and sharpened my adjectives. Ha!
Again and again, I have fleshed out my characters, added details to stengthen thin scenes, subtracted details to make long scenes read more smoothly, until I was sure I was done. Nope.
I have run the spell-check two dozen times, at a minimum, and chosen to "ignore once" the same incidences of poetic license forty times over. Those squiggly green lines in Microsoft Word drive me crazy.
Entire characters have been deleted and new ones added in their stead. The antagonist's name has changed four times. Thanks to my indecision on that key point, I have learned find & replace is far from fool-proof; I'm still redacting references to his former monikers.
Two reams of multi-purpose paper have been recycled on account of these measly 7,000 words.
The story has been revised to stand alone, revised to be a novel chapter, and revised again to stand alone.
In its pages, my humble protagonist, has eaten lunch. No--breakfast. No--lunch. No--breakfast AND lunch. No--breakfast. No--cut the eating. Who wants to read about scrambled eggs, anyway.
The story has worn five different titles.
In older forms, it was workshopped, submitted, and rejected. The Playboy rejection slip, approximately the size of a postcard, is my favorite.
Three years after its first incarnation, I think it's close to done. Or, perhaps more precisely, I'm ready to set it aside for a while..at least two weeks.
You know it's bad when Nature taunts you, as she did yesterday afternoon. As summer spat its last gasps, we were blessed with Mostly Sunny, Eighty Degrees. Down to the swimming pool I went, a pile of drafts in tow. This story, marred already by a first round of edits in red ink, sat atop the stack.
Being a Tuesday in September and all, the pool was empty. I selected my deck chair, laid beach towels across the vinyl, shed my flips, and pulled the papers from my messenger bag. I donned ear-buds and scrolled through the iPod menu. Música... Álbumes... I chose Sea Change by Beck, which I haven't heard in about a year.
At that instant, a gust of wind swirled through the courtyard. The loose pages of my draft riffled away, across the patio, toward the pool. I stomped three sheets, secured the pile.
Reluctantly, I peered over my shoulder toward the swimming pool. Atop the turqouise water floated twenty pages. Whether I had planned an afternoon swim or not, I was going in the water.
Fortunately, and somewhat to my surprise, the toner held up to chlorinated water. I stuck the damp pages to a vacant deck chair and laid one of my beach towels across them. An hour later, they were crispy, misshapen, but readable. Even those red marks from the prior round of edits remained.
I took them in my hands, gripping tightly, and read through again, each sentence twice, redlining anything that made me stumble, scratch my chin, or look toward the sky. Last night, those nits and redactions flowed through my fingers. Once more, I printed those pages, and loaded them into the binder labeled "final draft." It's about time.
If I think too long about how many hours I have spent on these 7,000 words alone, the word "depressing" comes to mind. But that's the nature of the craft. Is the story better today than it was yesterday? Yes. Is it better than it was 30 months ago (!) when it first fell victim to reviewers critique? Hell yes. Is it Playboy material? Unlikely. Perhaps another round of revisions is necessary...
For now, that next round will have to wait. I rose this morning at 7:45am and sat down to my keyboard to write the next revision-worthy episode.
For any writers out there, while I was adding links to key pieces of the above rant, I came across the following interesting blog about "killing your darlings". She makes some great points!
Labels: Writing
Saturday, September 09, 2006
Flash Fiction Live @ The Beat
Some exciting news today: my flash fiction story "A Friendly Game of I-Never" went live this morning at The Beat!The editors at The Beat accepted my piece back on January 5, 2005. At the time, they were revamping the look and feel of the site and migrating to new servers... Sadly, my story was lost in the shuffle. My bio was added to the Contributors page, but the story was never posted.
21 months later, I realized I should follow up with the editors.
The Beat has a great site, and I'm very proud to be listed alongside so many great writers. Check it out and make sure to add your comments (there or here).
Labels: Writing
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Today's Steady Progress
Today has been productive.It would be fair to say that the reality of my situation did not strike me until today. After a morning hard at writing and lunch break at the gym, I looked at my cell phone to see whether messages awaited: someone from the office asking about an upcoming meeting, a client wondering about a presentation, a boss wanting a comprehensive update on the budgetary situation…. Instead my cell phone told me the time and date.
The feeling of true freedom is confusing. I don’t know that I’ve ever known it before today.
Normally there is at least the potential of something to keep you in line, but for me there is no one but myself. Of course, Keryn is there to keep me in check, but only if I get out of control. She is not concerned with my daily comings and goings…
I awoke at 7:30am and was seated at my desk soon thereafter. For two hours I updated my blogs. Then I headed to the gym. The 10:30am crowd is interesting: mostly retirees, trust fund babies, and college students. I wish the trainers made themselves more accessible; I find it difficult to request a spot.
Through the afternoon I worked on an essay I’ve been writing about my relationship with Keryn. I’m planning to submit it to a few contests this month. It is hard to write about myself so truthfully; thinly veiled fiction presents no challenge at all.
After several cups of tea I switch to my novel. This chapter has been revised twenty times before today, but the red-lined changes are valid and true. I am weary of this chapter although I know it to be one of the keys to my novel’s success. My frustration stems from a conception of the chapter’s perfection when it was an early draft. Though I pare it down and build it up each time readers comment, it remains a tragedy for my internal editor, who still believes the very first version was perfect.
In the evening I switch back to the essay. “Revisiting Histories,” it’s called. I emailed my final draft to Keryn this evening and she read it within the hour. She told me she almost cried, and this is a compliment I can hardly take. I think through the difficult words of the essay and smile.
“Is it good? Is it really?”
I cannot repeat it here, but I will tell you how it begins…
“From Boston we follow Route 1 through Lynn and Saugus and connect with I-95 a few exits before much of the traffic cuts toward Gloucester. Thirty minutes later, we pass the New Hampshire liquor and lottery warehouses and the infamous Hampton Tolls; traffic is blessedly thin, and I’m glad we left when we did.”
Tomorrow I am planning another full day. Instead of weights I will run along the Charles River. And I will finish revising a chapter of my novel. With luck I will accomplish more. Doubtless, I will spend too many hours at the keyboard.
Labels: Writing
Recent News
01-15-2007: Contacted first agent with my novel.
01-06-2007: Revamped home page launched!
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- Shaffner’s Game One Blog
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- Across the Car
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- A Blog in Need of Renaming
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- Going to the Prom! (Seriously)
- Parkour and Me
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