Musings Of A New Southern Man

It took awhile for all the dust from the carnage of my job loss to quiet down. Now that it has, I have settled back into the routine I love, the one in which I spend several hours a day being an author. It is good to have a certain degree of normalcy in my life. No author will give details about what he or she is writing, but I will give a brief overview. I am a West Coast guy, so I focus my plot in familiar surroundings. There is not a single place I write about I have not visited or been exposed to by stories of people who have lived there. Part of that is because of one of the central tenets in my writing -- make the settings so familiar to readers that they can easily identify with them. I am a fan of Stephen Spielberg's early films, movies like "Duel" and "E.T.", because they take average folks in average surroundings and make them face amazing circumstances. The viewer then is taken along for the ride. I owe part of that tenet to writers such as Harlan...

I did it. The urge finally got too strong, and I had to do it. I sat down and wrote two chapters in my third novel!!!! Maybe that doesn't sound like much, but it's a pretty good achievement considering the rest of my schedule lately. Losing your job puts a considerable crimp in a normal writing routine. I have been feeling like a juggler who gets tossed a new task every day. Sending out queries for my second novel. Job applications. Questions about a new job at The Post. Sending out resumes. Using my reporter skills to get a good handle on what exactly happened at The Post in those maddening days when the company needed to collect severed heads in a basket and call them "voluntary resignations." It's not a pretty story in some instances ... but that's to be saved for another time. Why wait? Because I'm back to writing the stuff I love to write. I will forge on with another chapter or two today, then I will get back to continuing the outline for my stor...