Today I tackled two things at the same time. I cleaned my garage, and I cleaned up my narrative line. In both cases, I clarified the setting and really honed in on what I want stuff to look like. I’m thinking that will probably be enough thinking, thank you very much.
I recycled a lot of stuff from the garage. The book, well … I don’t think there’s anything there to recycle. Maybe something to cut, a lot of somethings to polish.
On the advice of a friend, I’ve changed the starting point of the whole collection and now need to work on the why, the reason for telling the tale. Let’s face it, I know for a fact I didn’t get this far on my good looks, but you can only get so far on good writing. There’s going to have to be something more there.
This got me to thinking about the stuff I keep. Why it has value. What the simple, subjective evaluation of a piece of writing does to the balance of a book. I used to have a box in the garage of assorted electronic cables. No devices, mind you … just the cables. Speaker wire, coax cable, RCA jacks, you know the routine. It was a pretty big box. Of cables. Probably twenty year’s worth.
I know all about the arc of obsolescence (I enjoy a fine career writing about technology.) So it stands to reason that, as things evolve … follow me here … the things we use to connect them to other things evolve as well. One man’s VGA cable is not another man’s HDMI, if you get my drift.
I thought these stories could be told in a non-linear fashion; arranged according to the month in which they happened, rather than the year. So January, 1969 is followed by February, 1980, which is followed by March, 1968. You still with me? The connection of the narrative, in this case, was the time of the year. Not the year itself. So as I’m about to drop the box of cables in the e-waste bin at the recycling center, it strikes me that maybe the commonality of the seasons is not the best way to connect these stories.
I think I’m onto something. So now I’m going to look at the dramatic arc of the collected stories and try to figure out which story best follows which.
In other words, I’m not leaving it up to the connector to dictate the order of the stories. If you’re still with me, God bless you. If I lost you, never fear. It’s going to be alright. I just know it.