Shoot Yer Darlins
Jun. 3rd, 2013 05:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madwriterThanks to my grandfather I grew up with Westerns. Everything from reruns of Wagon Train on Saturday afternoons (I can still hum the tune) to the Wagons West series by "Dana Fuller Ross", when I caught snatches of them at points where he would put them down. As a teenager I had in mind to write a Western novel; I never did, but that was likely still in the back of my mind when I made my first trip out to Arizona at age sixteen and decided at once that Arizona would be the subject of one of my books someday.
Now I've gotten to the point in Arizona where a big chunk of what I'm writing really is like a Western. So my inner kid is rejoicing. No shoot-em-ups yet, though, unless you count army battles with the Navajo and Apache.
I'm also going to have to do a lot of text shooting as well, apparently. I'm creeping up on the 300,000 word mark; I'd projected 350K for the first draft (the same as James Michener's Centennial, the Michener fan in me always noted), but I look on track to surpass that. So I'll need to be shooting some pretty large holes in the draft sooner or later.
Two anniversaries in the "I can't believe it's been that long" category happen this month: One, it's been a year since my Arizona work-and-play trip...and thirty years since I decided I wanted to be a writer, amid a fateful trip to visit my novelist uncle in Peoria, Illinois at the age of twelve. I've had some gaps along the way since then, including one big one where I got next to no writing done for five years during and after college, but I've plugged away fairly steadily for the last decade now.
More on the writing anniversary later. For now I'll just throw out a Progress Report, ignoring the ones I neglected to do last week.
PROGRESS REPORT FOR 6/1/13
New Words: 2300 on chapter 9 ("Copper Heart") of Arizona. Copper Heart is a "downright industrial" town now, though it won't ever have Apache miners if anyone with pull in southern Arizona can help it.
Total Words: 290800.
Reason For Stopping: Other business to attend to, and I suddenly decided that what I had been about to write next wasn't very good.
Exercise: Walked Tucker around the neighborhood.
Stimulants: None.
Today's Opening Passage: Ulpian Shively was an almost unique white man in Copper Heart: He frequented every business in town, especially the saloons, no matter what race owned them. It had started out for a simple reason: To gauge the town’s mood and root out any trouble before it started.
Darling Du Jour: This is the closest ... He’d only given official reasons for wanting the vats, of course. He took one look at the drawings of the inside of a reverberatory furnace and started shaking. He told no one, not even Chukka, that he suddenly felt like he was looking inside a tomb. He didn’t understand how he could’ve spent so much of his life underground with no problem, but one glance at the long brick furnace with its arching roof made him want to run away.
Non-Research / Review Books In Progress: Prairie Tale - A Memoir by Melissa Gilbert; The Isles - A History by Norman Davies.
Now I've gotten to the point in Arizona where a big chunk of what I'm writing really is like a Western. So my inner kid is rejoicing. No shoot-em-ups yet, though, unless you count army battles with the Navajo and Apache.
I'm also going to have to do a lot of text shooting as well, apparently. I'm creeping up on the 300,000 word mark; I'd projected 350K for the first draft (the same as James Michener's Centennial, the Michener fan in me always noted), but I look on track to surpass that. So I'll need to be shooting some pretty large holes in the draft sooner or later.
Two anniversaries in the "I can't believe it's been that long" category happen this month: One, it's been a year since my Arizona work-and-play trip...and thirty years since I decided I wanted to be a writer, amid a fateful trip to visit my novelist uncle in Peoria, Illinois at the age of twelve. I've had some gaps along the way since then, including one big one where I got next to no writing done for five years during and after college, but I've plugged away fairly steadily for the last decade now.
More on the writing anniversary later. For now I'll just throw out a Progress Report, ignoring the ones I neglected to do last week.
New Words: 2300 on chapter 9 ("Copper Heart") of Arizona. Copper Heart is a "downright industrial" town now, though it won't ever have Apache miners if anyone with pull in southern Arizona can help it.
Total Words: 290800.
Reason For Stopping: Other business to attend to, and I suddenly decided that what I had been about to write next wasn't very good.
Exercise: Walked Tucker around the neighborhood.
Stimulants: None.
Today's Opening Passage: Ulpian Shively was an almost unique white man in Copper Heart: He frequented every business in town, especially the saloons, no matter what race owned them. It had started out for a simple reason: To gauge the town’s mood and root out any trouble before it started.
Darling Du Jour: This is the closest ... He’d only given official reasons for wanting the vats, of course. He took one look at the drawings of the inside of a reverberatory furnace and started shaking. He told no one, not even Chukka, that he suddenly felt like he was looking inside a tomb. He didn’t understand how he could’ve spent so much of his life underground with no problem, but one glance at the long brick furnace with its arching roof made him want to run away.
Non-Research / Review Books In Progress: Prairie Tale - A Memoir by Melissa Gilbert; The Isles - A History by Norman Davies.
