Philip Brewer's Writing Progress

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Sunday, 05 August 2001

Yesterday the Clarion 2001 class got together for an on-line chat. (We're using Yahoo groups for our mailing list; it includes a chat facility.) That was fun. Not like being together, of course, but still fun.

I chatted for about an hour, then left. Jackie and I were watching videos and had paused in the middle so I could do the chat. The movies are mummy movies (the one with Boris Karloff and, more recent, "Tale of the Mummy"). The story I'm working on has some passing similarity to a mummy story, so I wanted to see what the classic mummy story was. That way I can either consciously use or consciously reject certain elements of the classic story.

As Beth pointed out, one of the great things about being a fiction writer is that anything counts as research.

I spent most of the day writing and made some good progress on my story. It's at 1030 words. I think I see how to trim it down to just the essential scenes. I'm still a bit fuzzy on the hero's stake in the matter. Partly it is a story of revelation--the reader learns what's going on. And the viewpoint character is a police detective investigating that mystery, so he has that much of a stake. But I'm trying to work my way to something more than that. I want it to become personal for the hero, but not in a cliched way. I'm still working on it.

Jackie and I lifted weights this morning. We went for a walk to warm up. It was hot enough that we actually considered doing our warm up in doors in the air conditioning. But we didn't. We walked around the park.

I put up a page about my Clarion Expenses, and linked to it from the journal archive page.


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