Saturday, September 7, 2013

War & Fashion: Incongruous . . . or not?

"War is ugly. Fashion is beautiful. War projects the worst of humanity. Fashion displays sartorial splendor in its highest. War is fraught with danger, even for journalists and especially for photographers who must get up close to their subjects to frame an image. Fashion is far less perilous, though photographers must also get intimate with their subjects on and around the runways. There are photographers who shoot both: battlefields and runways, guns and glamour. At first, photographing war and fashion appear as incongruous acts that are difficult to reconcile.  Until, perhaps, you take a deeper look."

As always, pictures are more compelling than articles. For more on this bizarrely fascinating comparison, I strongly encourage reading this article from CNN.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Rough draft complete!

Nine months ago I set an aggressive deadline for completion of the rough draft of the latest incarnation of Companions of the Garden. Failure to complete said draft by 9/22/13 meant giving up the book forever. End of story.

I did this for two reasons.

First, I wanted to create the pressure I thought necessary to push the project to completion.  Second, and perhaps more important, I wanted a decisive litmus test that would determine just how much the book really meant to me. If I wasn’t able to meet the deadline, then it would be clear that the novel wasn’t a priority; that in so many words I didn’t want it enough.

As it turned out, I finished the draft Tuesday night, almost three weeks ahead of schedule, and this in spite of an enormous amount of other work. I finished it not because the deadline was looming, but because I couldn’t stop writing even if I’d wanted to.

Clearly – for better or worse – I do want it enough.

Now, the process involves my turning back to page one and commencing the fine-tuning process, obliterating verbosity, awkwardness, and redundancy, coaxing clarity out of murkiness, diminishing the word count, and, in general, advancing toward the published work I believe my characters deserve.   

9/22/13 was the last deadline on my calendar. It did its job, so expect others to follow.