Google Analytics

Friday, May 4, 2012

Spooky Honeysuckles



There is a new food column at Barbara Bretton’s website. We’ve been trying to work around some technical issues with the site and decided to run the column in the blog section and will archive later. I wax poetic about a cup of hummus and the myriad of ways you can enhance a piece of fish.

Another round of royalties rained on me in the last couple of weeks to cover the first quarter and while I cannot say that it will cover the rent for the next six months, it will keep me in Netflix for a while. To me Netflix is secondary research. Don’t get all judgmental, I’ll have you know Joseph Campbell’s Mythos and The Hero’s Journey are in my queue.

I’ve added a couple of chapters to Poetic Justice in which the investigation of a series of crimes starts to take shape in a very hands-on way. As I write it, I am left with a dilemma of whether to focus on the action or extend the dramatic political landscape.

On the one hand, it may not advance the story, but it can hinder the progress of the investigation, thereby serving as a conceptual antagonist. On the other hand, without a context that connects the stories, even if it’s just institutional racism, I’m not sure it’s worth detailing it. Besides, it is a daunting project to make sure you get it just right. The crime and its investigation (and eventual resolution) seems the easiest way to go.

Of course, I rarely take the easy road…

I’ve put Cocina Latina in the back burner for the moment. We have a few very lean months coming up and any activity that requires spending additional cash needs to be halted for a short time. Of course, this saddens me a bit but it also gives me something wonderful to look forward to when I can sink into it with gusto.

The plan is to combine all the cookbooks into one large volume once this next version is completed.

In the meantime I started writing a ghost story to amuse myself. It did not start that way, mind you. I just wanted to write about living in a modern day lighthouse. There was absolutely no supernatural element in the beginning, but it just lent itself for creepy spookiness.

The main characters have been established and I have a pretty good idea what comes next (though not entirely how it ends). The end is not entirely up to me, you understand. I believe there is going to be a couple of twists deep in the story of The Scent of Honeysuckle but not all has been revealed to the author yet.

That story seems like a good early fall release. Unless it scares the daylights of me and I end up burying the notebook in the backyard.

I’ve been toying with the idea to write something in Spanish (not a translation). The idea is a little scary because it simply cannot be something trite and whenever I sit to think about it, my mind immediately wanders to the most ridiculous thoughts as if desperately running away from the idea. I wasn’t expecting my brain to turn down the challenge in such a passive-aggressive way, hey look, unicorn!

No comments:

Post a Comment