Friday! I made it through another week! Huzzah!
Have you ever wondered how my mind works? Let me give you an example from yesterday:
Before I started the car to run my errands on my way to the office, I saw a headline on my phone as I was stashing it in the center console. The headline had something to do with Melania Trump; I don’t remember what it was. And this is how my thought process went:
Melania is an interesting name, I’ve never heard that name before, but then Michelle Obama was the first First Lady named Michelle, and Laura Bush was the first Laura…they’ve all had unique names, really, Hillary and Barbara and Nancy and Betty and Pat and Ladybird and Jacqueline and Mamie…Mamie is an odd name, I wonder if it was a nickname…those awful bigots in Auntie Mame called her Mamie..gosh I love that movie and haven’t seen it in a long time…I wonder why no one has ever written a book or made a movie called Auntie Maim? It seems like such a natural.
And after I chuckled over the horror novel/movie Auntie Maim:
Rosalind Russell was so great in that movie, she was friends with Joan Crawford, they were in The Women together, it was that unflattering picture in the paper with Roz that convinced Joan to never go out in public again…I should write an essay contrasting Baby Jane with Sweet Charlotte..Olivia de Havilland was terrific in that but what a movie it would have been with Crawford in that role, I always wanted to write something like Sweet Charlotte…I remember I had that idea twenty or so years ago, what was it called… oh yes, that, how could you write something like that today, oh maybe instead of having the Charlotte character be a woman she could be a gay man, which would have been equally scandalous to be having an affair with a married man but then how would you do the Miriam character they couldn’t both be gay men because that would be a stretch well maybe instead it could be that the lover was murdered and that outed the character and the character ran away and instead of being her cousin the other character is his sister and now Papa’s dying and the thrown away gay son is coming home to make peace with the dying homophobic father and the old crime was never solved…
And then as I pulled into the parking lot at work I wrote the opening in my head, and typed into the Notes app on my phone on my way into the office.
That’s how my mind works.
If you think that’s scary, imagine having to deal with that imagination all the time.
Heavy sigh.
I have maybe three chapters of line edits to input before this bitch of an edit is finished. Only. Three. More.
And I’ve been keeping notes on what and where to tweak.
And for the record, the last time I looked, I’d trimmed 101, 265 words down to around 78,000, give or take a few.
That was a serious line edit.
So, it will probably end up being around 80-85,000 when it gets queried to agents.
Fingers crossed.
And here’s your Friday hunk to slip you into the weekend:
Queer and Loathing in America 