Saturday in the Park

You'd not confuse today with the fourth of July, as the song lyrics would suggest. It's winter. Normal winter again, not that bitter cold stuff sent from my writing friends in Maine, but an average winter day in central North Carolina. I'm finishing the clean-up from my NYD party, catching up on emails, and looking for work. (The horror;the horror.)

I've written a few email responses on the craft of writing this morning, and I must confess. I now have to again, go back to some of the basics about the craft and ensure I'm not delusional in what I'm writing, that I need to put some writer Visene in my eyes and make sure I'm following all the good advice I've picked up over the years that I parrot out to others.

Is there tension on every page? Is there tension on every page of what you write? Even if it isn't a thriller, I need to make my reader squirm in his/her seat about the potential of my protag not reaching their stated goal. I want the reader to be afraid to move forward in the story because they've invested so much in the protag, that they don't want him to fail, but must read on just as I have to go down in my crawlspace, cold, dark, dank, probably bug infested, with maybe some mice or a rabid opossum, and find out what that noise is that I hear and hope that it's not Lestat. Pray for my character; pray for me.