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.

300 PAGES PLUS

Okay, here we go. Another landmark. 300 plus pages of Raised by Savages done. Probably 200 decent pages. The rest need going over. Had an inspiring email from Guy Vanderhaeghe, author of The Englishman's Boy and The Last Crossing (excellent reads, btw). He said that most writers don's spend enough time with their stories. I've taken heed and am patiently (sometimes impatiently) going over the content again and again. I'm hoping the time and diligence will make it appealing and not appalling.

WHAT HUCK SAYS 'BOUT BOOK WRITIN'

Having finished "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" as an assignment from a teacher who has read some of my new book-in-progress, "Raised by Savages," I found what Huck said at the end of his adventure ironic at best and discouraging at worst: "...and so there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd 'a' knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't 'a' tackled it, and ain't a-going to no more."

Almost 200 Pages of "Raised by Savages" Done

Well, I've almost 200 pages of the new book done. 60,000 words. A short novel by modern comparisons. Two "test readers" have "suggested" that the narrative is too long. They kindly eschewed the word boring. So I've started cutting scenes out of the narrative like cutting calves from the herd. I've got 14 stories that seem to be acceptable prose.

I'm toying with the idea of sending one or two of the most polished stories to my agent in NYC to garner initial praise. But, of course, it might not be praise, so I've decided to keep on writing until it's done.

The photo above is a postcard of St. Joseph's Hospital in Ashland, Wisconsin, the setting for "The Ninety Dollar Baby," the book's anchor piece about me being held for ransom by nuns.