A Books Final Pass

Recently I was doing the final pass on my forthcoming novel, The Pitcher. The book isn't out until September but this was my final edits. Maybe I would get another crack at it after copy editing but that is just a few tweaks. No. Now was the final pass and it was a bitch. Every word counts. All those rewrites and there were many count for nothing. There was always the I'll fix that next time. Next time was now here and so I could not kick the can down the road anymore.

And so here is where the difficulty comes. If every word now counts because this is how it will appear on the page then each sentence has to be as close to perfect as you can get. It is a nut cracking process and amazing. Amazing because so many bad sentences slipped through and the amount of overwriting was still amazing. I was still cutting like a butcher and this is the final pass! But it is because this is it that you have the guts to make those cuts that should have been made long ago.

But of course you don't see it until you see it. And now with the copy editor waiting this is the last stop of the good ship author input.  So you make your stand. You do your best. And when you send it off and know that there will not be a second chance, you hope you got it all. 

Of course you know you didn't.

Rocket Man...the rollicking story of a writer whose piece of the American Dream falls apart...Chicago Tribune

The Failed Writer

Sometimes you feel like the failed writer when you see how well all the other writers are doing. Take grants for example. How the hell do all these writers get these grants? Authors are always thanking this foundation or that for getting large sums of money to work on their fiction. Or the more obvious one...the writers who get a million dollars for a book or a quarter million or a tenth of a million. How do they do that? Or how about the writers who are guest columnists in the NY Times? How did they score that gig? Or the ones that pop up on television. Or hit the NY Times Bestseller list. How did they pull it off?

So you think well I am not doing something. And that something could be a lot of things. Maybe you aren't blogging enough. Maybe you aren't sending out your manuscripts to the right people.  Maybe you don't have a great agent. Maybe you are just writing the wrong types of books. Maybe you have been barking up the wrong tree for years in your pursuit of literary fiction and really someone should have gotten hold of you way back when and said...THIS...THIS is what sells, not...THAT! And you could have made the change then.

But years have passed and you have been pounding away on your piece of stone and your hammer is bent and dull and your stone is chipped and scratched and sort of a dully putty color. But it is your stone. And so you pick up your hammer once again with all these questions smacking around your skull. And you hit that stone one more time. Then again. Then again. For all those questions without answers.


www.billhazelgrove.com

Waiting in the Green Room at WGN Radio

You have glimmers of something passing. Sometimes you just know that what you are seeing might not be around too long. Maybe it was the space reserved for the microphone from the Scopes monkey trial. Maybe it was the foundation of the Chicago Tribune building inscribed on Lower Michigan with Culled in 1920. The slight wisp of snow in the cold darkness as a guard buzzes you into the WGN studio in the bowels of the old Tribune building and you follow a man up to the green room, passing the cases where old microphones reside and black and white pictures of celebrities long passed.

Then you sit down and wait and there is no one there in the green room, just you and rows and rows of pictures of people who look curiously human. The celebrity quality is gone and they are just men and women with gray hair, getting old. A thirty minute radio interview on WGN in Chicago is something you want to hang on too. The man doing the interview is the son of a legendary newspaper man from the Chicago Sun Times. You can hear the footfalls and you shake hands and he tells you to relax and do whatever the *&%$ you want. All Chicago old school. Then you are on in front of the WGN microphone telling your story for thirty minutes.

You try and imagine people all over Chicago waking up and hearing your voice, but your mind doesn't work that way. All you think is that it is just the two of you talking and it doesn't go near long enough. There are a million things you want to say, but you just can't get it all in and then you are walking back through the silent building and down through the guard room and suddenly outside in the cold. It's barely eight o'clock on a Sunday morning. Chicago is empty and just waking up. You drive through the streets, knowing you have used up one of the moments of your life that will never come back. You hit the city limits, then slip into the past.


http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man will be out in January