Bleeps, Bloopers, Outtakes …

and Remnants of Another Year …

Okay … this is one of those weeks when having so much stuff left over on my must do list … I group it all into one posting.

Thanks to Vikki Thompson from the UK and Sheri Degrom for giving me three awards in 2012 that I have thus far not posted.  I think I was considered beautiful and the best of the year.

I am grateful and thankful to have such good friends and readers, and I apologize for the long delay in acknowledging your generous awards. Thanks, friends.

And Sheri, as for who I would love to have a cuppa java with. My vote is a round table by the ocean, strong, sweet, black coffee, and the engaging conversations of some of the best people I have ever known … virtually or otherwise.

Today, I give The Round Table Award to Sheri Degrom, Vikki Thompson, Christi Corbett, PK Hrezo, Shelley Freydont, Patricia Yager Delagrange, Brinda Berry, Sheila Seabrook, Sherry Isaac, and Gloria Richards, who would provide most of the ka-snorts.

Photo credit

Bleeps, bloopers and outtakes …

Since I have the first and second nature of a compulsive hoarder … millions of words have been stashed on disks, flash drives, an external hard drive … and the best of all … the innards of the old PC … the hard drive The Geek Squad will transfer to my new PC this month.

The day my PC screen went dark was exactly fifty days ago. And during thirty-seven of those days I’ve revisited at least half of the first million words I had written.

Site/Author Credit

I’ve come to enjoy my compulsive/obsessive behavior and saved all the half drafts, partial paragraphs, deleted pages, and my “other” first book.

I was twenty-something and doing office temp to help pay for college. At seven in the am I told the receptionist from Kelly Girls I would not be going to the lower east side in a torrential rain to take a last minute assignment.

She warned me that I should not refuse too many assignments. I informed her she should not underestimate my value as an employee. That one day she’d pick up the newspaper and find me on the NYTBSL. “When you see the title, you’ll know it’s me.”

The title? Already the single mom of two toddlers … the title was a play on who and what I was at the time. That title became the name of several journals and two failed attempts to write a comic novel, a genre some began to call “chick lit.”

I saw myself as a cross between Gail Parent and Erma Bombeck and honestly … I still resent the label “chick lit.” Is the male counter-part of humorous books and comic routines known as “dick-lit?” I think not.

I am a cross genre writer, crafting myteries and other odd happenings that crash land on the page. However, as a way of clarifying … women’s fiction is considered by most to be about a woman’s emotional journey.

Hell, every time I put a character on the page she’s in some kind of emotional turmoil.

Finding clues ain’t easy you know.

Being a cracker-jack loser or a misfit in modern society takes lots of hard work.

My hapless and clueless characters might find themselves anywhere, doing who knows what.

About the title …

It was also what I wrote in giant letters in bright red crayon on the ceiling of our Brooklyn apartment when in the middle of the Great Blizzard of 1978, I was summarily evicted.

She was … and in many ways … still is my favorite strange character.

She isn’t the only one. There are at least a dozen strange characters. Funny  gals like Lizzie Brogan, Megan O’Connor or Josie Napoli. Adventurous or wild women like Carmen Gonzales and Mama Merengue.  Confused or lost little women like Gail Goldblum, Sarah Stein, and Brina Esmerian.

For thirty-seven of these fifty days I had no mind to edit or work on either of my two WIP … my mystery or my women’s fiction books.

I did however, have a blast, rummaging through the virtual old yellow pages of over one million bleeps, bloopers and outtakes.

In film and television they die on the cutting room floor. Some of the luckier rejects are gathered together for specials hosted with folks like Ed McMahon or the late Dick Clark. Others become a montage at the end of a film as the credits roll down the screen.

Or perhaps this hilarious video?

Mine ended up in flash drives.

Tell me please …
what do you do with your rejected paragraphs
and extraneous characters?

Recycle anyone?

fOIS In The City