Saturday, July 6, 2019

Year of an Indie Writer: Week 27

by
Scott D. Parker

A short week at the day job proves timely for the writing job.  It a lot happened this week so this’ll be short.

The new book goes well. I started on Monday, 1 July, and I’ve written every day so far. Up to 8,553 so far. With this book not being a western or mystery/Thriller—it’s a slice-of-life tale—I’m having to rely on different muscles, namely the writing kind. When you’re writing a mystery, sometimes you can skate through the story as long as you have a Crime and a detective. Doesn’t mean it’s easier or that it can’t have character. It just means there’s a given narrative thread to follow.

Not necessarily so with this book. So far. I’ve already realized there is some tension between my lead characters and it’s already reared it’s head. Good. A little tension isn’t a bad thing.

Best thing is the excitement. It’s always fun starting a book. Just got to maintain the excitement through the rest of the month as the story progresses.

New Book, New Technique


For as many writers there are, there’s are that many ways to write. Many authors I’ve read about use the following method. Write a set number of words, the go back and review what’s been written, fixing words and things along the way. Then, when they reach the place where they stopped, they keep going from there. Repeat as needed. The theory is you keep going over your words in your Creative voice, and, by the end, you’ve got a pretty clean first draft. You’ll still have to edit it, but all the nit picky work will have been done.

I’m trying that way this time. It’s new for me. We’ll see how it goes.

I also read my chapter aloud and pick up a lot that way, especially with dialogue.

Fishing and Gunfire


The wife loves to fish but we don’t do it very often. Yesterday, we did. Out in west Houston, there are some stocked ponds. We went out there yesterday afternoon and spent the day fishing. Well, she fished and caught fish. I think she caught something like ten little fish. I fed worms to the fish.

Funny thing is the spot is within earshot if the gun range. So the “fireworks” continued on into yesterday afternoon.

Kinda funny.

Spider-Man: Far From Home Gets It


I enjoyed most of the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies. I saw neither of the Andrew Garfield ones. But I love Tom Holland's two movies not for the super-heroics--which are, nonetheless, awesome!--but for the Peter Parker parts.

Homecoming was basically a John Hughes film if Hughes did a high school super-hero movie. Far From Home is like when your favorite sitcom blows up in the ratings and they take a trip to Europe. I'm looking at you Family Ties Goes to London (or whatever it was called).

Far From Home is a hilarious romp of a film with super-hero stuff thrown in. All the razzle dazzle stuff is what you'd expect. But its the Parker stuff that really counts and has meaning. I went with my teenager and he really enjoyed it. I suspect he sees his own high school in the scenes because I certainly saw mine.

Character, character, character. It goes a long way to grounding a film and keeping the audience invested.



Well, like I said, this was going to be a short post. In the next few posts, I will discuss new marketing ideas I plan to try, and a new outlook for the second half of 2019.

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