Pilsen 18th Street

Pilsen, street with El tracks over

My office

Finally . . .AT THE HEART OF CHICAGO will be up on Amazon as a paperback in a day or two . . .

Done. I finally pushed the publish button for the paperback edition of AT THE HEART OF CHICAGO, my third entry in Seraphy Pelligrini's Chicago Stories.I thought I'd never get through all the revisions and proofs, and wouldn't have, if it hadn't been for the amazingly patient folks at Booknook.biz. I finally have a proof in hand and Amazon tells me the paperback will appear on their site in a day or two.

I decided to publish the first in the series: CHICAGO STORIES: WEST OF WESTERN, in paper as well.  That meant correcting the Kindle edition--but when I did, I ended up rewriting this and that, and that meant a whole new version, which is the one I'm currently proofing. No big changes, just wording, mostly. The problem is that now I look at it again, found much I'd like to tweak and . . .anyhow, I've decided just to fix the typos and leave the rest.

Onward.

All the revisions are done, the fourth proofing run is done, and Hitch and the folks at Booknook.biz are packaging AT THE HEART OF CHICAGO for publishing! Finally! As soon as I get the Mobi, I'll have it up on Kindle. CreateSpace may take a bit longer to get the paperback version out, but I hope it won't be long.
Then I'm going to revise CHICAGO STORIES: WEST OF WESTERN and issue that as a paperback,
I've cleaned up my office space, cleared the desk, organized  my books . . . not much to do but get started on the next Chicago adventure. I have two in mind and am having trouble deciding which to do first.
A. DEEP IN THE VILLAGE takes place in winter in and around Ukrainian Village, near Seraphy's loft. 99 year old Lucy Altgeld has died and left Max a mansion in Wicker Park. The police say Lucy fell down the stairs in an accident of a  type common to the very old. Seraphy discovers Lucy was murdered . . . with the help of Lucy's housekeeper, Gertrude, she sets out to find the killer.
B, ON THE STREET OF FORTY DOORS takes place in October, perhaps ending on Halloween. Based on a townhouse in Alta Vista Terrace, a landmarked block up on the city's North Side, where a townhouse in the middle of the block has been torched. Olivia Issacs dies in the fire, but her husband Nate and their adopted baby Seth, who were sleeping in the basement, escaped.Nate is devastated, asks Seraphy to rebuild/restore the house to its original state (allowing for modern mechanicals) and she gets sucked into investigating.

I can't decide which to write next . . . ARGHH.

New cover!

Sent the mss off to Booknook.biz yesterday, so things are moving along . . .

I was coming around the corner from Graceland Cemetery  when I accidentally turned onto Alta Vista Terrace,a narrow block-long street of rowhouses. Developer Samuel Gross had been in London, fallen in love with its old neighborhoods, and decided to reproduce one in Chicago. Amazingly, the street, or at least the facades) remains largely untouched today.

It's gorgeous. Unique in Chicago.Highly prized even though the lots measure only 24 x 40 and half  the homes have no parking. At all. None.

I spent the rest of the afternoon strolling around the block and heading back to the Historical Museum to see what they knew about Alta Vista Terrace. I found the original advertising flyer, drawings of the street, and a bit more.

So this time Seraphy's given the job of rebuilding one of the homes, which has been the victim of an arsonist. I have no idea what's going to happen. As with my first books, I'm starting with a building, or in this case, a block of buildings, and letting the story develop from there.

I'm accumulating scenes and characters, which seem to pop into my head at dawn and disappear too quickly if I don't write them down. When I have enough I hope they'll come together in a story. I know, it's a lousy way to plot (as my editor knows too well), but it's the only way that works for me. I've tried sitting down and starting with a plot-- results were so boring, even to me, that I gave it up.

Onward!

Done! For the Moment.

I got my beta reader's notes back last week and started to make the corrections . . . and found typos and awkwardnesses had mysteriously multiplied in the days since I thought I had At  the Heart  of Chicago cleaned up. I'm now quite certain there's a little man hiding in the guts of my laptop and he hates me.

Yesterday my cover designer, Miyuki Meyer, showed me the cover. Who knew? The girl's a genius. I thought I knew what I wanted, and gave her some suggestions. Only suggestions, since she's the one with the graduate degree in Photography and all, and I know from bitter experience I'm no cover designer. Apparently she knows this, too, because she used none of them. Thank God. The new cover is a wonder of balance, spare and elegant in black and white. Wow. I'll have it up here soon. And yes, Miyuki is available for consultation: aishamiyuki@gmail.com.

Now what? I hate to say this, but I think I should do one more final (the fourth) run-through before sending the whole thing off to Hitch for formatting. Because this morning, checking back to see if I'd gotten a name right, I found another typo lurking in chapter three. ARGHH. And if I don't catch them now, Hitch will exact a fee for each and every change. As she should. I consider it a penance for slovenly proofing.

On another topic, I woke up thinking about metaphors and similes this morning. I've been reading a mystery with a great plot, good characters, and lousy writing. I mean a really good plot, since it's kept me reading through the most dreadful similes. Someone should tell this poor author that similes have to fit the scene in which they are used. For example, picture the protagonist driving to the store for a loaf of bread and passing the seashore. With a sunrise: 'a great golden globe rolling over a crackled metal sheet'. Say what? Surely grabbing a loaf of bread at the 7-11 doesn't require all this splendor? He wasn't finding enlightenment, or having a religious experience, or even sex. He was half awake and going out for coffee and a loaf of Wonder Bread. Arghh.

Enough. Back when I'm feeling more civil.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

Finally, finally finished the rewrite of At the Heart of Chicago, and sent it out to beta readers.

This one was harder than the first two, and I'm still not certain why. I finally decided to stop whining and sit down and get the damned thing done, and I did. Once I got past the first part--always hard to start--and cleaned up the prolix and dull middle, I actually started to like the story.

So. Now I have to get a cover for the Kindle version, see what the betas say, and send it off to Hitch for formatting. Then correct all the zillion errors I swore weren't in there, and put it on Amazon. Yea!
Another one down.

I'm going to take a break from writing the next one to get these three out in paper. I started to do that before and found CreateSpace beyond me--but that's turned out to be good. When I started to reread West of Western a few days ago, I wasn't happy with what I read,. Not happy at all. So I'm going to make a 2nd edition. Not to change the story, but to clean up the writing. Okay?

Then I'll have an assistant to put all three into the CreateSpace hopper so I'll have paper copies for those (like me, sometimes) who want hard copy.

I made a list this morning--all the things I have to do to make this happen . . .

Long Time No See

I promised myself in the beginning I'd never be one of those bloggers who just babbled on and on without anything to say, and I haven't been. Sorry if you think that's hardly an excuse for not writing for over a year, but it's all I have.

2013 was a difficult year for writing for me. I got ALONG THE RAVENSWOOD out and piddled around thinking I'd design a web site (didn't come to anything) and get both Ravenswood and CHICAGO STORIES: WEST OF WESTERN out in hard copy. That didn't happen, either. It was early spring by then, so I thought, well, I'd get to work on the next Chicago story. I already had a rough draft. Maybe I could even get it up on Amazon by July.



Obviously that didn't happen. I ditzed around all spring and summer, writing this and that, tearing out my hair, spending a lot of time working in the garden. I hated the way the story felt. It was boring and not at all like the Pilsen I remembered and loved. The characters bored me stiff. They even bored Seraphy.

I told myself I didn't have to love writing. It was a job. Stephen King has talked about that. Put your butt in the chair and write. I kept putting the butt in the chair and writing and the result was a fat butt.

Then I decided to change my main character (besides Seraphy) from Matt to his significant other, Alex. Alex, a second-generation Mexican/American, a fashion designer who's worked her way through school and started her own business, a woman on the verge of major success. Hmm, things were hotting up. She has blue-tinged temper tantrums. Seraphy was never interested in fashion and isn't sure what to do with her. Better and better.Matt remains a strong character but takes a place in the background.
The schoolhouse's former owner turns up, very dead, in the disused dumbwaiter, just when Seraphy thought the demolition was going well.

Better, but still not much is happening. Add in Paco, ten or thereabouts, a kid from a huge family barely hanging on in Pilsen, part legal, mostly not.His father and uncle and two cousins have disappeared. He can't go to the cops because they're illegal . . . the missing men and forty others had been living in the old schoolhouse Seraphy's redesigning for Alex. All disappeared just before Alex closed on the building. Seraphy is shanghaied into hunting for them.

It was all getting better, but didn't really come together until the fourth or fifth revision, when I began to understand just what I was really writing about. It's always like this for me. I write a story and am the last person to figure out what it's really all about. Not the surface story, the murder mystery, that's obvious from the start. But there's always more.

 It took a comment from my writing instructor at Gotham Writers  to point out that the theme of West of Western was home--Seraphy's learning how to make her home and what it means for her to be home. There's more,of course, the power of imagination and the havoc wreaked by those who lack it, the strength of unexpected friendship, and kittens.

When I started writing Along the Ravenswood, I intended a straight-forward mystery thatwould take place in upscale North Side Ravenswood. I ended up writing about the essence of fine architecture, what it means to be a family, what happens to old soldiers. Wow. I never saw it coming.

So why was I so surprised when AT THE HEART OF CHICAGO refused to materialize as another genre mystery, turning  into a story about immigration, about new beginnings and old evils and friendship, but above all, about what lies at the heart of Chicago. Because Chicago, ever since the days of John Winthrop, has been for so many the city on the hill.

I'm sending the manuscript off to my editor, the fierce and perceptive Elizabeth Lyon, tomorrow or the next day. Then, after she unerringly points out the icky parts,I'll fix them and send it off to Booknook for formatting--then, in a month or three, I'll sling the result up on Amazon. Really.I will.