Some personal things:
1. Climbing trip for May, without children, has been scheduled.
2. The weather has been spectacular for being outside.
Writing things:
1. I'm 70% done with Black Mountain Ash. Crank. Whatever.
2. It's looking like it will end at 90-100k words. I'm thinking closer to 100k.
3. I finally found my "genre"
Okay, about genre. Plot element wise, I definitely wrote a suspense with strong romantic element. I finally buckled down and read within this genre (yeah, I know, I hadn't ever read in this genre). And I soooo did not execute this book according to genre.
No "happy" ending. Satisfying, yes.
And I kept saying "gritty" and people kept assuring me this genre has gritty-- but I don't mean violent. I mean real life depressing gritty. Gritty like the Wire is gritty. Gritty like Fight Club gritty.
Not like Hannibal Lector gritty. My reading has confirmed gritty.
I have the f-word on every page. After I edited the useless uses out. (It's not on every page, but it's there about the same number of pages)
And I've always written more literary plots, but definitely not literary execution.
So, after several waves of panic and endless searching on goodreads and amazon. I got a great idea:
1. Go to Amazon, look up "The Corner" (not fiction)
2. Look under the heading for "what other people buy who have looked at this" and scroll through until you find a novel.
3. That led me here:
I've written a suspense with a strong romantic element executed in a style and tone similar to CLOCKERS by Richard Price.
I get chills just thinking about this. I'm both afraid and excited at how much this book is coming together. It went from something I thought I'd never be able to write, a story that seemed too big, too ambitious-- and now I have 78,000 words that all mean something in Logan and Bekah's story. I know this elation will dive right back into the depths of angst in a few days (that's how the roller coaster seems to go), but for now I am grateful for every word and for every moment where I prayed for God to somehow give me the words to write the story I needed to write.
I have the first paragraph of the query nailed. The rest still needs massaged, but the bones are there.
Logan Crepeau hasn’t been on the corner since he left his reserve for the Army fourteen years ago. Now home from the desert, the eight hours in a police uniform aren’t enough to fill the rest of his twenty-four and the inevitable re-up in the corner war. All he needs is Frank Black, the old cop flooding meth into Baltimore, in a set of substantial bracelets and he might still have a chance at staying out the game. But he’s been undercover for ten months with no end in sight, and the investigation isn’t the only thing a hit away from going hard up.
When he meets fellow rock climber, Rebekah Schultz on a weekend climbing trip out in the boonies, he sees a chance to come home from war. He thinks he’s marrying a wayward Mennonite whose greatest rebellion was the weekend with him. He knows he’s marrying a woman who’s more mountain than Mennonite. But he doesn’t have any idea how deep that mountain blood runs.
With the city burning itself at the end of a pipe, his target showing up for his beat like he isn’t the biggest drug lord to hit Baltimore since Little Melvin, and his handler shooting hoppers in a desperate bid to save her career, bringing a wife into the mix was the last thing Logan should have done. Let alone a woman tied to his investigation by blood. And when his target takes a left turn into terrorism, trusting his traitorous, lying wife might be the only way to stop the bus packed with fertilizer heading into DC.
I still have a few things that need worked out:
1. Still unsure if I should switch to a 3rd POV. I think it could either way. The genre is all third person, but I'm already breaking the genre mold in execution, so I don't know if first goes along with that. For me, this isn't a huge deal right now because even if I change it to third, it will be a close, limited third. The story is with the people and it's deep in their heads.
2. Not sure I should go balls to the wall. I've kept things more mainstream and accessible-- my plot lends itself to this, but also, I want people to be able to read it. So yeah, I've made decisions towards that end-- like keeping the f-word limited to good literary uses. I haven't used the n-word at all. I've written it as real as possible while bringing it out of straight reality. (a portrait of conversation, not actual conversation--- amazing advice I received).
But it will get worked out in due time.
Okay, I'll be absent again on here for awhile. Trying to get this finished and out to beta readers soon. But, I'll be back, I promise! Especially when I start querying.
A parting musical gift from my Pinterest Board for this book:
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