I’m doing lots of thinking and not much posting so here’s a quick update on my writing life. I think I have new names for the two major characters. I’ve been living with them for a few days and they feel pretty good. I have no doubt anymore that the MC is male and not female. I spent a lot of time (that I should have been writing) looking for pictures that might represent my MC and his world with the intent to make a collage. I still might do that but then I realized (after a frustrating number of hours going nowhere) that I am more auditory than visual so I don’t know that it would help.

I am struggling with too much thinking on this project.  I am thinking in terms of story arc more than I did at this stage with HTR. When I started HTR it was a novel, then it was verse but this is verse yet I can’t not think about plot. Sigh. No two projects are birthed the same, that is a simple fact. I am most struggling with the idea that I have not yet hit upon the proper unique factor. In HTR the father/daughter relationship was unique. In MTLB, so far everything sounds ordinary. Kids grow up in bad familes, families have money issues, violence issues, addiction issues. Sigh. Perhaps later, working in the yard, I will be able to find that angle.

In the very happy news department I got the book jacket for HTR yesterday and it is lovely, simply perfect. I love the flap copy. I love my bio. I even don’t hate my photo. And on the back of the jacket, set off alone in the middle of the page, is a single blurb. A beautiful blurb. A blurb that made me cry. I can’t post it for public knowledge yet but the “wow” factor is major!