Clawback, the Ali Reynolds book for March, is complete.\u00a0 Finished.\u00a0 Done.\u00a0 I can\u2019t tell you how happy I am about that.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know if any of you remember that old Helen Reddy song:\u00a0 “Hasn\u2019t it been a long hard climb, with everything taking its own sweet time.”<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what writing Clawback was like. It really did take its own sweet time, and I\u2019ve battled with this book like no other.<\/p>\n
The next line of the song goes:\u00a0 “Hasn\u2019t in been a long lonely night, when it didn\u2019t seem that anything would turn out right.\u201d<\/p>\n
That, too.\u00a0 I lay awake night after night with this book, wrestling with the devil, as I like to say, and trying to see my way through to the end of the story.\u00a0 Was Dan Frazier a good guy or a bad guy?\u00a0 What was on that stolen memory drive?<\/p>\n
Over the weekend the end of the story finally came together, piece by piece and thread by thread.\u00a0 Here are a few things about writing novels:\u00a0 There aren\u2019t any easy ways to get to that end point.\u00a0 It takes time and patience.\u00a0 It takes not giving up.\u00a0 It takes keeping on plugging.\u00a0 It takes staying on task.<\/p>\n
In order to finish the book, I put myself into a self-imposed mani-pedi time-out.\u00a0 The last mani occurred just before I left town on the national part of the Dance of the Bones tour which has been over for some time now.\u00a0 This morning, with the manuscript for Clawback finally on my editor\u2019s desk in New York, I was cleared to go to Andy\u2019s Nails here in Bellevue.\u00a0 By then I had chipped shellac polish remaining on only three fingers \u2026 well two fingers and a thumb.\u00a0 Now as I type this, all ten of them are glowingly Candy Apple red.<\/p>\n
A few of the comments from last week\u2019s blog made me realize that my banana peel reference was evidently opaque to many of my readers.\u00a0 Here\u2019s the deal.\u00a0 In writing a book, I find that the first twenty percent is usually the most difficult because it entails getting the story started, introducing old characters and new characters.\u00a0 In this book\u2014the exception not the rule\u2014the first twenty percent went just fine.\u00a0 From twenty-percent to sixty percent\u2014the middle of the book\u2014is generally a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other slog.\u00a0 From sixty on, however, what I call the banana peel, it\u2019s usually easy\u2014a short downhill slide, as it were.\u00a0 In this regard, too, Clawback was an exception.\u00a0 It kept stalling out right around the 62% mark.<\/p>\n
So lets talk about banana peels in general and why I use that term.<\/p>\n
When I was involved in the insurance business, sales campaigns always ended with some kind of celebratory banquet.\u00a0 When I started writing, I felt that hitting the end of a book was an accomplishment worthy of celebrating.\u00a0 As a consequence, when I did so, the kids and I would go out to dinner.\u00a0 They were still in grade school back then, but they soon learned that when I told them I was \u201con the banana peel,\u201d that meant I was nearing the end the book and our going out to dinner couldn\u2019t be far behind.<\/p>\n
Years passed.\u00a0 My daughter was a senior at Newport High School when one day a food fight started out in the cafeteria and eventually spilled over into the halls.\u00a0 My daughter was there when one of the food fight kids stepped on a loose banana peel.\u00a0 His feet went straight out from under him, and down he went.\u00a0 The light came on in my daughter\u2019s head.\u00a0 Suddenly she knew why I\u2019d been talking about banana peels for all those years.<\/p>\n
06And now you do, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Clawback, the Ali Reynolds book for March, is complete.\u00a0 Finished.\u00a0 Done.\u00a0 I can\u2019t tell you how happy I am about that. I don\u2019t know if any of you remember that old Helen Reddy song:\u00a0 “Hasn\u2019t it been a long hard climb, with everything taking its own sweet time.” That\u2019s what writing Clawback was like. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[148,33,7],"tags":[125],"class_list":["post-1053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ali-reynolds","category-books","category-writing","tag-banana-peel"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-gZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1053"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1054,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053\/revisions\/1054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}