Back in the Saddle Again

Get along, you varmint characters!

Well, I'm back from a cross-country family vacation -- 11 states and 2,900 miles in 7 days -- across the American West and and I'm ready to start writing again. A five-month work project involving cleantechnology companies has finally ended. Honestly, the whole thing was a horror. Strong language, I'll admit, but you try writing 30 headlines about sustainabiilty and see what it does to your attitude. The whole thing went to press on June 10 and all I wanted to do that weekend was bury some toxic waste in the backyard and watch it seep into the groundwater.

But enough of that, it's time to push forward. I've revived my dormant science fiction novel, "Killer Robots Never Work" and am preparing to submit it to a publisher that claims to like sci-fi with female main characters. I rewrote the synopsis because frankly, the synopsis I wrote last year was awful. Obviously I followed the Kitchen Sink school of synopsis writing. I'm not surprised none of the agents I queried wanted it. Bleah. I stripped the whole thing down to 500 words and limited it to four characters and took out all that stuff I liked best, which is what everybody tells you to do anyway. Actually I did leave in the Monet digital sunsets and creepy insurance agent and the volcano belching gooey tar, plus malfunctioning assassin robots killing potted plants because yes I'm self-indulgent, sue me. I feel better now.

I'm hoping to get some momentum going here, shopping around a novel and a play and working on a memoir. I keep freezing up while writing this memoir because I can't help wondering what people will say, but if I'm not brutally honest, the memoir won't be worth reading. The memoir is set in 2007-2008 during the financial crisis and right now I'm reading "Too Big to Fail" by Andrew Ross Sorkin. Reading about Wall Street bankers' greed and egotism makes me see red and keeps me plugging away at my memoir. The recession and our own foolishness nearly wiped us out that year and only luck and a providential short sale kept us afloat.

This is my first memoir -- except for my newspaper work, I'm generally a fiction writer. The manuscript is already going weird on me. It addresses all these serious issues and the stakes were so high, yet dark humor keeps creeping into the pages, like I'm making fun of my own fear. Perhaps Andrew Ross Sorkin has given me an idea for the title: "Too Small to Succeed."