First Draft Done

Finished the first draft of the new Davecki novel last week. 114,000 words and 100 chapters. My goal to write two bad books a year is half achieved. It was a wild ride. Went places I never expected. Almost like wandering around backroads on a motorcycle, a new sight around every corner. Now, on to Raised by Savages the second draft.

New Davecki Novel

Chapter 18 of a new Dave Davecki novel is done.

Irish Weather

Interesting factoids about Ireland:

1.) For four days here in Cottage 10 it was warmer inside the refrigerator than in the living room.

2.) The shipyards in Belfast produced 22,000 ships in the four years of WWII.

3.) There are a lot of Savages in County Down. A lot. Most of them are dead.

4.) I've come up with a rather plausible epitataph for my gravestone: "He was widely tolerated by many and barely tolerated by those who knew him well."

5.) Ireland's surface area is smaller than Lake Superior, not by much, but certifiably fewer hectares in Ireland than on the Big Lake.

6.) Ireland's water table is predominantly above ground, residing mostly above ground and between the low gray clouds scudding past off the ocean at 600 feet.

7.) Irish pastries are damn near worth moving here. Not grossly sweet, delicate, deserving.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Have seven chapters done that I consider good enough for Prime Time. Actually thought of a couple new chapters to write. One about my childhood fascination with, and love of mud puddles. This is a great way to end a year, writing a book and feeling good about the prose, and making progress, not perfection.

Chapter One Done...Again

Might have 4,500 acceptable words strung together to make up a reasonably entertaining, reasonably easy to read, and reasonably coherent Chapter One. All the words may be spelled correctly and all the grammar may well be correct. One question, of a sort, remains: Does the story have merit? The answer? We shall see.

THE BEGINNING AGAIN

After a time of curing on the shelf, it's been enlightening to get back to the edit phase of Raised by Savages: Growing up Wild in Wisconsin. So far the first paragraph seems to be shaping up. Ths may take a while.

THE END

Experienced something I thought might never happen this morning. Stood by and observed as my fingers typed the last pages of Raised by Savages. 341 pages. 97 thousand words. Felt sad. Understood that it is a new project now. Back to the beginning to sift the whole pile like flour. Back when I was a lad, one of the jobs Ma gave me was to sift the flour she used for baking bread. We got commodity flour and most of the times there were little black bugs in it. They were the size of BBs or smaller, and hard and they cracked when I squished them with my fingernail. The new job with RBS is to sift all 97 thousand words and take out all the black bugs.