Musings Of A New Southern Man

Yes, I am up in the middle of the night to write and edit again. Nothing new there. It's just that the subject matter of my writing and editing has changed. I must explain. I served as editorial director of woodypaige.com since The Denver Post columnist and ESPN personality launched the website in the fall. Well, the title "editorial director" is a bit misleading. That implies I could actually edit copy that went onto the site. Maybe wire editor is a better title. I also said "was" because Woody decided to pull the plug on the .com venture on May 1 because we couldn't get a national advertiser to help pay the bills. But for all those months, we gave it a heckuva try. Our biggest problem: We just didn't have the right business model. We posted links to 28 to 30 sports-related stories every day. It was designed to entertain that valuable 18-to-34 age demographic, but we never entertained enough of them. That led to lower numbers than advertisers wanted...

They say a reading of Ten Commandments can change a guy's life. I am sure that is true. But there are Ten Commandments, and then there are the Ten Commandments for an author. Those "tablets of stone" for writers came recently from James Scott Bell, one of the better writing coaches in the business. Bell's Commandments have forced me to take a long look and a wrecking ball to my second novel. I won't detail which commandments had such a great impact on me, but Bell taught me two lessons in the plainest language yet: refine character, complicate plot. I took those lessons and took a hard look at what I had written. There was only one conclusion to make: I had work to do. So, at 3:42 a.m. Saturday morning, with the music of Bach playing in my headphones, I reentered my novel. I had Bell's commandments playing in the back of my mind as well. This won't be a short exercise. I am taking entire sections I wrote and refining them. I am tossing out sections o...