Buried Treasure

Perhaps I should be ashamed to admit this, but I like my own writing.

Well, the fiction, anyway. I loathe writing non-fiction and dismiss it from my mind as soon as it's done, whether the Teachers' Handbook I wrote when I was administering an educational program or a travelogue for the Piker Press about taking a walk in San Francisco. Yuck. Poo. I like making up long, elaborate lies much, much more.

Maybe I like my fiction because the characters have been running around in my head for a long time and it's nice to meet them "in person" on the printed page. The easiest book I've written was Character Assassin, in which I (as Sand Pilarski) meet the characters about whom I write, including ... uh ... myself as "Aser." The book was written in less than a month as my 2003 National Novel Writing Month challenge (www.nanowrimo.org). When I started, I knew the beginning (I would be taken hostage by my fictional characters) and I knew the ending (I win, of course) and I knew there would be 25 chapters, so I just assigned characters to each chapter number and off I went, thinking it was the cheapest word-count I'd ever see in my life. (NaNoWriMo's goal is 50,000 words in November.)

What I found was that imagining meeting those characters brought out a depth in them I didn't know existed. As a result of visiting in Character Assassin with Sully Ambris and her sister Jesse, I was able to pick up the dud novel Dreamer, and rewrite and finish the thing. For that alone I would be grateful, but I also learned a bit more about story-telling by talking to "Aser," who is a consummate tale-teller. (She's not very tactful, by the way.) And so, the book that started out as a cheap-and-easy NaNoWriMo novel ended up being a month-long writing retreat, delving into characterization and pacing.

*Aser has just poked me with her staff and told me to cut the jabber and get to the point.*

Last NaNoWriMo, I wrote a book called Out With The Trash. Midway through November, I was so sick of writing it that I intended to quit the 30-day challenge and trash the work. In a last-ditch effort at inspiration, I returned to the "gimmick" of Character Assassin and allowed the main character to "visit" me. What I wrote about meeting the main character unlocked the verbal dam in my brain and I was able to finish the challenge with words to spare, and thus Out With The Trash should be available sometime late this summer. But after writing about meeting that main character, I never went back and reviewed the conversation with her.

Okay, okay. The point is, I found that file again today, and it was COOL! I didn't remember it at all! I only found it because I was deleting junk files! There it was, a whole conversation not only with "Aser", but also with "Emily Storm." Poor Emily, she got the short end of the stick, so to speak. However, finding that forgotten file with that forgotten conversation makes me eager to finish editing Out With The Trash and get it to Lulu for print.

And I've got to figure out a way to work that file into a story for the Press.