HE WROTE: Blog

Jenny wrote that she had posted three times while I was AWOL. I knew I'd written a blog entry on the plane and it was somewhere on my computer. I just found it. So, psshhww. This is out of time sequence, sort of like a prologue:

I’m in the air somewhere over the Eastern United States on my way to Tucson. I just started the first page of notes on my next book. I’d had a bunch of stuff on it, but it disappeared, probably on the laptop that got swiped in Vancouver when I did that conference. Which is probably just as well because sometimes you just got to start over.
So I know who my protagonist is. Got him down after many days of working on him. But now I’m working on POV characters and the antagonist. And, oh yeah, the plot. I used to always lead with plot. Now I’m leading with character. We get older, we get wiser. The big thing I finally figured out after about two weeks of anguish was the tone I wanted. That’s something that’s rarely talked about in writing. But tone goes hand in hand with point of view. Most of my early books had a rather grim, dark, the world is doomed tone. I’m going lighter in my new books with some humor levied in. Still, it’s going to be hard to connect humor with action. So that’s going to take some work.
Last weekend in Cocoa Beach I did an hour-long session where people gave me their one sentence log line for their book. Their idea in 25 words or less. I put it up on the screen and then dissected it. Sometimes it was vivisection with lots of screaming involved. Tomorrow morning I do the same thing as I take an hour worth of pitches in a group session. I tend to be very honest which might hurt some people’s feelings. But there’s no crying in writing, damn it, as I tell Jenny all the time. Well, actually there is.
Sometimes I feel like Tom Hanks in BIG. When he says: “I don’t get it.”
I think authors sometimes forget our job is to communicate. And what communication does is evoke a response—emotional and intellectual—in those we communicate to. And we don’t want the “I don’t get it” response.
So I was in the Savannah airport waiting for my flight. And I went up to Starbucks because I had a gift coupon my friend Sally had gotten me just before Xmas. I ordered a latte—I don’t know what a latte is, but it sounds cooler to order one than just plain coffee, and I always get mine shaken not stirred—and an apple Danish. And I’m sitting there and who do I see: Sally. On the same flight to Atlanta on her way to Pittsburgh to do some work with CBS reference the Super Bowl which her husband is going to play in. I told her I read the local paper this morning and there was a front-page interview with him about the game. She said she hadn’t seen it yet. I told her that her husband was quoted as saying he had spent a lot of time taking care of the logistical details of tickets, and hotels, and transportation for all the people going there. Apparently, given Sally’s reaction, that wasn’t quite true. So much for truth in the press.
Where was I?
Oh, after we got in Atlanta—Sally in first class, me in one of the jump seats for flight attendants—we walked to our next gates, which were next to each other. Sally took me into the Crown Club or whatever that place is. Which I’d never been in, although Delta did move me up to Medallion last week because I flew a lot last year. So we went in and she flashed her ticket and said “He’s with me” and we went upstairs. I thought “So the rich are different than her and I” as we sat there. Her being whoever as I just wrote that to tick off Jenny.
Where was I?”