Sunday, July 23
Floyd wins
Thursday, July 20
Christopher Moore on writing...
Describe your typical writing day.
I usually get up about 6:30, make coffee, then go down to my office. I write until 11:00, then I answer mail, make phone calls, pay bills, stuff like that until about 2:00 when I go to the gym. I goof off for a few hours, eat dinner, then I read research and work on notes in the evening. If I'm lucky, I'll figure out what I'll be writing the next morning. I've tried working longer hours, but it seems that I can't be funny that many hours of the day. I'm a little envious of authors who can crank out ten or twenty pages a day. I've done it, but I end up throwing most of it out the next day.
How long does it take you to write a book?
It takes me 12 months to do the actual writing of the manuscript, and another six to research it. I've written books in less time, and taken more time on others, but the average is 12 months.
Do you do a lot of rewriting?
Almost none, and I've been fortunate that my editors have liked what I turned in. I did rewrite some of the beginning of Love Nun and Coyote Blue because the main characters were sort of harsh. These are both redemption stories where the main character would go through a major change as the story went on, I tended to overwrite the negative, which made the characters hard to sympathize with in the beginning. With the exception of copy editing (spelling and stuff) most of my books have gone into print almost as the first draft. My editors have asked me to change perhaps four lines per book. I think this is due to the fact that I write so slowly. If I were writing a first draft in a month like some authors do, I'd be doing a ton of rewriting. Method has a lot to do with my lack of rewriting -- and what's a draft anymore anyway? With word processing you back out so many phrases that might have ended up in a draft in the days of type writers.
Do you outline?
I usually know where the story starts and where it ends before I start, but I don't usually know "how" I'm going to get to the ending. I try to stay about five scenes ahead of where I am currently writing (this is the work I do in the evening). I have some scenes finished before I start the book and they just plug in at a certain point. I did outline the last half of Lust Lizard because I had a really tight deadline and I couldn't afford to miss a day if I got stuck.
Pynchon returns?
Monday, July 17
Butterflies flutter by
I don't see butterflies anymore, it seems. Sometimes I'll spy a thumbnail-sized white one down in the prairie grass along the river, and sometimes I'll see even smaller blue-winged ones when we're up on a mountain trail. Down here, though, on The Edge of Nowhere, they're rare enough that seeing a large orange one flitting around above the corporate grass sends my mind down a trail of thoughts across the blacktop of the parking lot. It seems the butterfly effect -- more specifically, sensitive dependence on initial conditions -- is a good summary of my life. The trick is to manage the initial conditions to better drive the dependence sensations.
Or something like that.
Wednesday, July 12
Flickers and blue jays
Then I spent the rest of the night backing up my laptop files and novels and stories and poems and music and photos and family history files, then rebooted and reloaded the whole frickin thing to (hopefully) wipe out whatever virus or bug or bird flu is making it weird out. So I've been reloading it since about 9, and while my novels are all fine, I clicked the wrong button when I reattached my iPod and wiped out all my music. Sigh.
Tuesday, July 11
Trumpets and bagpipes
So we went and camped out on a blanket with some good friends who are about to move away from the Edge of Nowhere for a new teaching assignment down at Colorado College in The Springs, and with some new friends, and enjoyed the music from the Denver Brass and their guest, the Colorado Celtic Pipe and Drum band. A fine summer evening...
Monday, July 10
Sunshine and bike rides
Fantasy camps for everyone
We need a road-pavers fantasy camp, where office workers can shed their ties and loafers to spend a week in the hot sun raking tar or directing traffic in glamorous orange reflective gear. Or we need a steel-workers fantasy camp, where artists types can spend a week in the shoes of their blue collar brethren, slogging iron ore or pouring glowing globs of molten metal.
The thought came to me when we were in Washington last month, helping out at the theater camp for special needs people, culminating in the two performances of Peter Pan. I got to be on stage in front of a large live audience and experience first hand the joys of acting and the behind-the-scenes of staging a play, even though I can't remember a line or sing in tune. It was a great experience, and I thought, wouldn't it be great if people everywhere could have the chance to be in a musical, even if they'd couldn't dance or hold a note? Can you imagine West Side Story or The Music Man put on by bad actors, singers, and dancers? I can!
And why stop there?
Just think how many secret dreams of work-a-day lives could be fulfilled if we started a string of fantasy camps for things like lumberjacking, or hotel management, or roofing, or life guarding, or accounting, or middle management, or nursing? We could let waiters live out their dreams as English professors for a week, or let fast-food franchise managers drive semi-trucks. Ballet dancers could navigate tugboats. Archaeologists could teach at day care centers. Drummers could deliver pizza and poets could serve mocha lattes. Oh, wait. Those last two already happen. Nevermind.
Thursday, July 6
The Origami Master
Oh, and his son, my nephew, has started his summer internship at an NYC literary agency. His job so far: reading the slush pile. This fact tempts me to send a query and 50 pages of Messiah's Sneaker to them...
Wednesday, July 5
Home again again
