Struggling Along

Okay... so I lambasted my pal Eric for slacking on his blog (Murky Words) after I read it and enjoyed it and he took a foew days off. Now I feel his pain; struggling with avoidance, distraction and the like. My difficulties range from having good ideas and being too lazy to write them out to having no ideas or motivation.

A guy from my old writer's group (I say "old" even though we still meet (sort of) because there is damn little "writing" going on in the group), Richard- a British chap who really motivated us when he was here until he got sick of the bludgeoning winters and moved to North Carolina, Richard, yeah that guy... He got his first novel published. It's coming out shortly and I can't wait to read it.

He wrote this great fictional book about a cult in Florida and created a website and a religion to go with it. It was so convincing, people were actually buying that the site was real, it was really well done. It was interesting waiting for him to bring new chapters of the book in each week. We would get pissed when characters died, befell hard times or got the shaft. It was even more intriguing than just reading a book, primarily because we really felt part of the story, like we had some hand in guiding the flow, some investment in the characters and a limited amount of power (but more so than in any book off a bookstore shelf) in determining the character's fates.

I remember the irritation when two characters wound up together in a re-write. I felt betrayed. I so wanted one of them to get iced in the closing scene to add drama. But, all in all, it was a terrific read.

I hope to write on this blog at least five days per week, a clip I haven't come close to meeting. I hope to do better in the future.

When good old Richard's book comes out, I will read it and write a review on here.

This is the website for the book:

http://www.aforeignpolicy.com/intro1.html