{"id":799,"date":"2015-01-02T06:00:07","date_gmt":"2015-01-02T14:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=799"},"modified":"2014-12-31T20:11:26","modified_gmt":"2015-01-01T04:11:26","slug":"new-years-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2015\/01\/02\/new-years-2\/","title":{"rendered":"New Year’s"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s New Year\u2019s Eve at ten o\u2019clock in the morning. It\u2019s sunny outside and 32 degrees. I brought in the hummingbird feeder last night and put it back out this morning. Yesterday I failed to do so and it was frozen solid by morning. Today I\u2019m being a better bird person. (Please do not call me a hypocrite for feeding the hummers and hating the heron. The heron ATE MY FISH!! Including my very own Big Guy, may he rest in peace. To my way of thinking, hummers are cute and herons are evil!)<\/span><\/p>\n

From my interactions with readers, many non-writers out there seem to be under the impression that writing gets easier as you go along. This is NOT true.<\/p>\n

The book I\u2019m currently working on has been a struggle. For one thing, I discovered that dealing with the chronic pain of a three month long ordeal with bursitis is not good for locating and tuning in to your muse. So that kept things from going smoothly.<\/p>\n

The book is supposed to be a combo mystery, a joint investigation that features two of my sets of stock characters, ones from Brandon Walker\u2019s world as well as ones from J.P. Beaumont’s. It was also supposed to be called Stand Down. The problem was, for months, I could barely get those two guys to speak to each other to say nothing of speaking to ME! Finally the other night, during the kind of restless, wrestling-with-the-devil type agony that usually comes at the END of a book, I realized what was wrong. Which brings me to a story\u2014an illustration of the difficulty, if you will.<\/p>\n

Years ago, Bill\u2019s and my first Rick Steves Europe Through the Back Door trip was a twenty-one day excursion in France. While there we visited Hotel Dieu, an ancient medieval hospital in Beaune. Walking into the main room, I saw that the far wall was covered by a huge tapestry that included a battlefield horse. It wasn\u2019t until I was right next to the tapestry that I realized one of those magnificent horses had lost a leg. \u00a0It hadn\u2019t fallen over yet, but it was doomed all the same.<\/p>\n

And that was what I realized was wrong with the book I was writing\u2014it was a three-legged horse, limping along on a fractured set of points of view. So this week, I\u2019ve removed one troublesome storyline and put it into a novella. It\u2019s the part of the story that gave the book it’s title, so the novella is now called Stand Down. It\u2019s a major piece of Beau\u2019s and Mel\u2019s story. Yes, Beau will still be working with Brandon Walker on the original case, but with all the action that was such a distraction from the main storyline out of there!<\/p>\n

That new book doesn\u2019t have a name yet, but it will have. \u00a0I\u2019m excited to go to work on it. \u00a0I have all the pieces, and now I\u2019m sure I can bring them together.<\/p>\n

Happy New Year, folks. I will NOT be taking New Year\u2019s Day off!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s New Year\u2019s Eve at ten o\u2019clock in the morning. It\u2019s sunny outside and 32 degrees. I brought in the hummingbird feeder last night and put it back out this morning. Yesterday I failed to do so and it was frozen solid by morning. Today I\u2019m being a better bird person. (Please do not call […]<\/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":[33,7],"tags":[47,105],"class_list":["post-799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-writing","tag-beaumont","tag-walker"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-cT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799","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=799"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":800,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799\/revisions\/800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}