Today I worked on the two chapters of Magellan’s Witch that I labored over yesterday. It was not as painful today, thank goodness. I cleaned them up even more and, joy of joys, when I came to a part yesterday which I knew no longer worked where it was (but decided to leave for the moment since I was tired and it was late) I knew where it belonged. And so it did. Sooner in the chapter and replacing a sort of lame-o bit that was much shorter and much less effective.
Then I went to see Zodiac. Well, odd, you know. It was a good movie for sure, but the Zodiac Killer was operating right in my backyard. Seriously. Petaluma is 45 miles north of San Francisco. I work in Sonoma, have driven many times through Vallejo and have been to Napa lots of times. And, when the killings were taking place, my school had us practice ducking on the bus. The primary suspect moved to Santa Rosa, back then 20 minutes north on the freeway (nowadays an hour or more). I used to live in San Francisco. And they seem to have shot at least parts of the movie on location. I certainly recognized many of the shots in San Francisco, as well as some of the more rural areas. So, I kept being bounced out of the movie as I said to myself, hey! that’s the Transbay Terminal! Or what have you. Something that wasn’t in the movie is that after the primary suspect moved to Santa Rosa, several young women attending the local junior college were murdered. Unsolved to this day. Creepy. Really creepy.
In happier news, I am still reading Philip Pullman’s series to my son. We’re on number 3, The Amber Spyglass and I continue to be awed. Wow. In tonight’s reading a particular thing happened and my son and I both went "What!!??!!" and he said, "But now how is Will going to help Lord Asriel?" And you know, I have no idea. Things seem pretty hopeless right now.
As a writer, all I can do is say, man, oh man. That’s what it’s about.
In other news, my agent has not told me I need to further revise the synopsis for Scandal, so I think that, indeed, it goes out to editors tomorrow. All I can say is that my chapters rock since I took a scalpel to the parts everyone in my Fiction Writing seminar really liked. Kind of interesting, no? I remember sitting there listening to the input on the chapters I submitted to the class and feeling more and more anxious as people agreed this section of chapter 2 was their favorite. I was anxious because I secretly felt myself that it was the most problematic, the least focused and the most off point. And when Sandy Schwab read the chapters and said things didn’t get really interesting until chapter three, I knew I had some serious work yet to do. I rewrote Chapter 1 to give it the intensity of chapter 3 and deleted the entire scene my Grad School class liked best. And that fixed everything.
I guess now I have to explain my post title. Which is that in Magellan’s Witch, the chapter I was working on was the previously blogged about Pharmacy scene. I ended up naming my non-human Pharmacist Larry (of course that’s not his real name!) and whenever I read that today (which was several times) I smirked because it’s just so ridiculous. Larry the Pharmacist non-human soon to be stud. And then when he is a stud, well, geez. Larry? So I guess I’ll have to change that, but right now it’s amusing me and that counts for something as we head into Monday.
