The Fracking War draft enters its fourth - and final - phase

NUEVO VALLARTA, Nayarit, Mexico - By the end of next week, God willing and the scorpions leave me alone, I should be starting the fourth segment of The Fracking War.

The third segment has about five chapters left to write. There is some death and destruction, a love interest and a nasty, nasty twist that has the bad guys itching like someone put fiberglass powder in their jockstraps.

Hydrofracking-related explosion

For the record, that's not what happened. What happened is waaaaaay worse.

The hardest part about this book has been forcing myself to sit and bang out a chapter or two per day. Every three or four days I do planning for the next week, sketching out the chapters based on what has just happened.

What, I don't know what's happening in my own book?

No, frankly. The damned characters are running this show.

Plus there are so many distractions here. You would think that carving out three or four hours a day would be simple. It isn't.

Today we did a whale-watching tour during normal writing time. But it wasn't a total loss. I came up with a possible wild finish for the book while watching the male whales in hot pursuit of a female.

Humpback whales speed dating

I said it was a possible wild finish.

That's the update for today. Sunday is normally a day of rest but duty calls next week. Adm. Fox and I are leading an entourage to Arroyo Seco and I will likely lose five or six days or writing in the process.

If I'm lucky, I won't have to reread the other three segments (about 60,000 words) to get up to speed on the story.

If I do, I hope it's interesting reading.

Fiction-writing contest entry in - whew, what a ride!

NUEVO VALLARTA, Nayarit, Mexico - My contest entry in the Writer's Weekly 24-hour short story fiction contest is off - sent via email an hour ago.

Whew...

You receive a prompt from WW, then have to spin off a story from that. It can be very loosely based on  the original prompt, but has to still relate. Somehow.

The exercise reminds me of those comedy shows where you hand someone a banana, a banjo and a box of Tide and tell them to weave the three into a series of jokes.

My story came in just under the 900-word limit and I was pleased with it. Thank God the contest was only 24-hours. I could have farbled around with it for days.

If my story wins a prize, I'll send out the link to it. If not, well, I'll post it here for perusal.

And then you will see what the photo below had to do with what I wrote.

The Fracking War holiday respite over, back to the trenches

NUEVO VALLARTA, Nayarit, Mexico - The Christmas, post-Christmas, right-through-New-Years-day holiday from drafting The Fracking War ends tomorrow and the characters will have to get back into character so I can reignite the plot.

I suspect they will be slow to take their places, but once launched, they will go through their paces.

Natural gas well - a butt-ugly blight on the landscape

As it is, all during this brief respite-from-writing holiday, I kept reading news accounts and blogs and reports that all scream about the disaster known as hydrofracking. The PR firms and various paid PR guns for the gas companies are fighting a losing battle against a rising tide of anti-fracking activists.

One particularly obnoxious organization called Energy In Depth Marcellus has been cranking out lies so outrageous it's amazing even pro-hydrofracking people believe the drivel.

And then there is the movie Promised Land starring Matt Damon, among other excellent actors.

I hope to get a look at the film next month. But I suspect it is an excellent film - Energy In Depth and most of the gasbags supporting hydrofracking are frothing at the mouth when they talk about it.

Well, what the frack...

One column, one chapter, one writing assignment - oh my

NUEVO VALLARTA, Nayarit, Mexico - The draft of The Fracking War continues to be, well, kind of war-like in the writing, though day to day, chapters are piling up but few bodies for a book with the word War in the title.

Slow and steady wins the race and gets the draft of a novel done.

Writing slow, but steady

Today's lifeless body - only the second person killed in 20+ chapters - is that of a high school chemistry teacher shot in an incident with a Bushmaster rifle brought into her high school classroom.

Isn't it amazing how real life and fiction mirror one another?

That chapter and section was written after I had already written a column for the Finger Lakes Times about the Newton, Conn. shootings. I realized (after a trip to the beach to think) that the characters in my book are dealing with all the same issues inside the book as I am outside of the book. Sometimes I think they are outside and I am inside. Or something like that.

Make any sense?

In the meantime, another piece of good writing news arrived this week -  an assignment from an international magazine to write a piece about life in Mexico. It's supposed to chronicle my experience here. This could be interesting.

Back to the school shooting in The Fracking War. A police helicopter just arrived and I don't want to miss the action.

Characters seize the keyboard in drafting of 'The Fracking War'

NUEVO VALLARTA, Nayarit, Mexico - Friday and Monday (yesterday) the characters in my first draft of The Fracking War apparently got tired of waiting for me.

They started moving the story line along so fast I had to shut down Microsoft Word for a few hours while I outlined where I wanted the book to go next.  I was half afraid I might open up the last chapter and find they had added to it!

I retired to a chair on the beach to do some outlining. It was a welcome respite from the dreary winter upstate-New York setting for the book.

The characters hadn't staged a coup by the time  I started writing again. But I could hear their lament: If this book is about a war, where's the freakin' war?

Admittedly, the book is already at 22 chapters (about 15,000 words) and there has been but a single violent death, lots of nasty stuff and some quite classic vandalism. Think: The Monkey Wrench Gang. But there are crusading journalists, evil gas company workers, lots of solid science about why hydrofracking is such a disaster and a dog.

Yes, a dog. It's an old labrador named Belle who showed up this morning with a female environmental specialist/activist from Colorado hired by the newspaper. I didn't say she could bring a dog, but she did.

Novel characters and actors are like that.

All in all, the draft is moving along fine and if I read my outline correctly, it seems that tomorrow the good guys and the bad guys are likely to meet in a serious clash, like matter and anti-matter (with a similar explosion), unless that is happening already while I have been away typing this update.

More next week, with a hot war underway. Maybe.