Its fuckin' cold outside and now it is snowing and supposed to be even colder tonight! Aaaaarrrrrggggggg.... Tell me again why I moved to Wisconsin from Arizona? Money...you don't need any stinkin' money! I think I'm going to have a bad case of cabin fever this spring. It has already started. I want warm sunny days again!

Writing...remember Bob this is what this BLOG was supposed to be about. Not bitching about the 300 lb gorilla or her boyfriend buck-shot Jones. Writing. I finished Terry Pritchet's Color of Magic Sunday night. Although somewhat humorous, the book left me empty because it had no real ending. Yes it is part of a series I still felt cheated. I've heard so many good things about the author, but in honesty it all seemed a little short of what he or what I thought he was trying to accomplish. Maybe the jokes are now all used up and cease to be funny anymore. The cliched bumbling wizard, the wide-eyed adventurer and the barbarian warrior who always ends up with the treasure and the girl. He played them to the hilt. And although the world seemed quite imaginative, the characters let me down. And in some many books I've read about the writing process everyone shouts, the books are about the characters, not the ideas or the plot. Now finished with one book, I started another. I bought John Steinbecks, The Grapes of Wraith and started reading last night.

"It must be told that my second work day is a bust as far as getting into the writing. I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is
amazing the terrors, the magic's, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one. . . A strange and mystic business, writing."

I would love to get a hand on his writing journal. In the foreward to Grapes there are some quotes from his journal that left me astounded. It was like he invaded my mind and wrote down my own private thoughts as I've sat before the keyboard. Do you know he wrote in longhand. Fifteen hundred words a day. He had little need for revision or so I've read. Not all writers are like that, I know. My work always needs to be revised because I get going so fast I'm trumping the current sentence with my next thought.

me