28-Jan-2008
JERRI CORGIAT’S NEWSLETTER
January/February 2008
www.jerricorgiat.com
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Note: Sometimes my website provider's service burps and sends out more than one copy of my newsletter. If this happens, I apologize for the inadvertant cluttering of your inbox. It's not intentional.
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CONTENTS:
Note to Readers
Feature Article: WHAT A MESS!
Best Book(s) I’ve Read This Month
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Dear Readers,
The blog I mentioned starting last newsletter is up and running! I’m still polishing—and still need to learn the digital camera, so I can include pictures as well. (I blush that I’ve not yet done so; after all, I’ve had the danged thing for more than a year.)
Please visit my blog—and visit frequently—and invite your friends and post your comments and... you know the drill. :) I don’t post daily, but something new is up every few days.
Cut-and-paste the following (or use the link from the home pages of my website):
www.jerricorgiat.blogspot.com
On the book front, no news, although I’m now racing through the first draft of a new women’s fiction effort, tentatively titled SERAPHIM COVE. It’s not under contract, though, so keep fingers crossed that it will one day see print!
On the personal front, big changes in the works. I’m planning a move to Texas. Yowza! Sepcifically to the Coastal Bend area north of Corpus Christi. Anyone who's been there, lived there, still lives near there and wants to share, email me!
I hope your new year is off to a grand and glorious beginning!
Jerri
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The following is an expanded version of a recent post on my blog...
FEATURE ARTICLE: WHAT A MESS!
Writing books—-the actual, literal writing of books—-is a messy business.
Another writer (I may have mentioned her before, my good friend, Libby Sternberg) once said that after I'd been moaning about the tangle I'd created. It made me feel more relaxed about my process. Process. That sounds so professional, but, really, for me, it's just a lot of comments scribbled in margins, a lot of highlighted areas on my rough drafts (yes, that’d be drafts, plural), and indecipherable notes jotted on innumerable legal pads.
And it occurs to me that my writing process is much like life.
I don't want to scare you off by talking about God, but I happen to have one, and I’m bringing Him up today. Because it's struck me lately how often I get what I pray for.
A lot of times, though, I don't recognize it. At least, not right away. For one thing, it never happens in one fell swoop, like, God: "Alrighty, then! Here's your million, sweetums. Enjoy." I mean, it was my idea to earn my living through self-employment, but I had in mind one very sizeable book advance--or, better yet, a blockbuster movie deal. What I didn’t have in mind was juggling 1.1 gazillion freelance endeavors to support myself while I write a book on spec. (Although I’m actually enjoying it.)
Nor does the answer to my prayers ever look quite the way I'd envisioned... Me: "Um, scuse me? God? When I asked for a stretch of R&R, I forgot to mention I didn't want to spend it in a hospital."
(No, no, no...don’t send cards and flowers. Well, go ahead and send flowers if you want. Except know that I haven’t been in the hospital; it was just an example. A good one. On why it’s not the best idea to ever ask for a long stretch of R&R.)
When I write, ideas come and go, I double-back and revise, I cross-out and start over. I get afraid through the rough spots, and sometimes ask for help, and sometimes the answers surprise me. Yet, the process is often exhilarating, especially when it eventually--and sometimes only slowly--yields up a coherent and satisfying (hopefully satisfying) book. A book that rarely looks the way I envisioned it when I wrote down the first words.
And isn’t that just like life? Life’s a... (and I’m copping these words from an author I recently read and who I can’t acknowledge, as I did Libby Sternberg, because my memory is just about as clear-eyed as my process)...
Life’s never a straight line, it's a zig-zag progression... a messy task. But if you can put aside fear, weather the zig, and enjoy the zag... you'll eventually look back on a job well-done.
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BOOK(s) I’VE READ LATELY:
I’ve been reading research books for my next novel, and a cornucopia of self-help books. A list of the latter is on my blog!
Happy Reading!
Jerri
