Western Wednesday: The Ride Continues…

Hope to announce some pretty cool Western news soon. I’m pretty excited about it and I hope Western fans will be, too.

Well, the ride continues. After a week, the first draft of the new Western novel is complete and I am onto the second, about 70 pages in. Writing a novel draft in a week is nothing unusual for me. I have done it for 32 Black Horse Westerns so why change that habit now? I find if I can’t do that, the energy of that first draft suffers. I need that or get bored. It’s my clay, a sculpture in a vague shape of a saddle that eventually I carve into the fine detailed rig of a novel. I know who my players are now pretty definitely. After all, they told me along the way. I couldn’t stop them. They got spurs that jingle jangle and I just tag along for the ride.

The second draft is the difficult one for me. Ok, the first is difficult too but in a different way. The second is where the critical editor takes over from the happy go lucky creator. Every word starts looking like utter cowflop and I doubt myself, to the extent that I feel the whole book is one long stream of incoherent horse talk.

That settles down in the third and fourth drafts, but for now I hate the book and nearly every word in it. Of course, though we love them, we hate our kids sometimes, don’t we? This book is a kid in its teen years. Can’t wait to get it out of the house.

This is the part of writing I find no fun at all, but that’s ok. Because the moment you have the thing done that all changes and the sense of accomplishment (read: relief) takes over. Then of course, you have to saddle up and do it all over again…

My name is Chloe Everson…and I kick demon ass…
THE CHLOE FILES by Howard Hopkins
In the tradition of Sookie Stackhouse and Buffy, The Vampire Slayer…
In paperback from www.bn.com and www.amazon.com