Beautiful Handcrafted Animals

Last night was thunderstorms AND fireworks, so Jack the Dog was basically shaking non-stop for about 10 hours straight.  Which means I got even less sleep than usual . . . and now we have a kitty we’re babysitting for the weekend.

Hi!

I’ve been at a loss for how to start this blog off, so I figured a little anecdote about sleep-deprivation and pets would do the trick.  I could have talked about the book, or the old blog (www.ohbalto.com), or the fact that Chris, our “webmaster” is working on a cool template around here.   I could have explained why the insanely long web-address actually makes a lot of sense . . . I figured I’d go with pets.

The old blog (see above) was kind of a curious, mixed affair.  Ostensibly, it was about a book I was writing, “Beautiful Handcrafted Animals”.  In practice, it was a place for me to bitch about having no goddamned idea how to write a novel (in spite of having done it several times before).

So, this is a reboot.  It’ll be about the writing of the book, as well as daily word-counts, when appropriate.  It’ll also have links and pictures (things Wordpress seems to think it does well.  Only time will tell) and I’ll probably go off every now and again about nothing at all.

Who am I?  Well, I’m 34 years old and I’ve been writing, recreationally, professionally, what-have-you-ish-ly, for the better part of twenty years now.  Maybe more.  “Beautiful Handcrafted Animals”, which I’ll stop putting in quotes after this post, is a book I’ve written now . . . three times.  Maybe four?

It all gets confusing.

I’ve restarted it again.  I used to say that BHA was going to be my “grad school”.  Which is to say, “why pay to take classes in writing when I could just spend the time writing?”  So that’s what I did.  I wrote the book once, start to finish, in about a year or so.  Came out to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 110,000 words, give or take.

I got it done, read it back and realized that the beginning of the book didn’t match the ending.  Which is to say, the book I was wrote wasn’t the book I was writing.

Learning experience — okie dokie.

So I started it up again.  Well, “started it up” isn’t really fair.  What I did was prop up the “First Draft” and set to rewriting it.  It got a lot better, really came together tonally, but then something became obvious; the book I wanted was different from the book I had.

Okay, back to the drawing board.  Should I explain?  Okay, I’ll explain: originally, it was a quest narrative.  Main Character A finds himself in Plot Situation B and heads off to make things right.  Collect 5 McGuffins and seek happy ending.  That there was a twist in there (about the only thing, aside from character names that remains) didn’t make the quest narrative alright.

Believe it or not, the quest is still in there.  Sort of.  But where before it was the excuse for the story, now it’s an element of the story.  I’m working it into things in a way that I think is pretty cool.  How cool?  Imagine a quest narrative where you don’t need to see the freaking quest.

Neat, huh?

So, that’s what you’re doing here.  I’ll update, at the very least, whenever the book jumps forward.  Back in the day, I used the old blog as a way of keeping myself honest.  You might see a post like this, “1,236 words tonight — going to bed.”  And then the next day, you’d get, “deleted last night’s words, wrote more, bed.”

And sometimes I’d go on and on just like this.

So, pull up a chair and let’s see if we can’t keep me honest once again.  Right now we’re around page 6 or 7, something like 3,000 words in.  I know where I want to go and how I want to get there.  All I have to do now is figure out everything else.

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