willwriteforfood

Blurring the line between novelist and blogger since 2016

Month: June 2016

Shakedown Cruise

June 28, 2016 / / 1 Comment

Beach

 

Got to live another cliché on Sunday.

My dad had the boatyard near the causeway to West Island bottom paint his little sailboat and put it in the water for him again this year. After several successive years of trying to step the mast ourselves while the boat was on the beach, this is a decision I applaud with great verve.

A metal mast for a 16 foot boat is not terribly heavy, until you try and slowly raise it from parallel to the ground to perpendicular to the ground and thread it through a hole juuuuuuust big enough for it to fit. With exactly no margin for error.

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Cue the Rocky Theme

June 2, 2016 / / 2 Comments

The house is quiet.

And I’ve finished The Splendid Children.

I finished the initial draft and put the manuscript to rest on June 3, 2015. Between the rest periods and the flurries of active editing, it took almost exactly a year to have it ready to ship to an editor or agent. I reached that point just about midnight as June 1 became June 2, 2016.

When I started running again in my mid -20s, I did not go far and I did not go fast. But every time I finished a run, I put my arms in the air as if I was breaking the tape at the Pru on President’s Day.  Even if a two mile run is a joke to someone in actual shape, it was a big deal to me.

In my head, I would cue the Rocky Theme, and sometimes whistle, hum or dah-dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah-dah-dah a few bars. Did it again last night.

Rocky

 

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Writing, eating, singing, playing

This modest little blog is going to be about a lot of things. It will be about the big scary task of moving my my first novel, The Splendid Children, out into the world. But it will also be about the circuitous route that has me writing fiction in my 40s, and eventually the progress of my second novel, which may be titled Postmarked in Paris. Because I cannot help myself, it will also, from time to time, be about the sound of my daughter laughing, the way my heart dances a little when my wife smiles at me, maybe even my cat who snores and purrs at the same time. As a newspaper columnist, I took a lot of joy in finding the story and the magic in the clutter of everyday life. I’ll try to do a little of that here. Poke through the posts as they trickle in. Comment and tell me where I’m right and wrong. Share what you like, and if you write too, tell me where to find it. The world works better when we know each other.

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