Alma.
"Whit Tamberlaine, detective extraordinaire, is pretty much you with a dick attached," Delia said, smiling.
"Oh, my," Jasmine said. She appeared to be contemplating what that would be like.
Chase had had a dream once where she woke up with a penis and spent the rest of the dream trying to convince everyone, Gitana included, that she was still a lesbian. Freud would have had a heyday with that one.
"Jasmine, this can work. Just start from here and move forward. Find a photo of a rotund man, make a bio for him and start every chapter with someone doing something. You'll be all set. You can make Whit into a great character. Pretty people have it easy so make his life hard, make people treat him shitty and it will make the story much more interesting," Chase said. She had learned all of this the hard way from her much respected yet sadistic editor.
"How do you do that?" Delia asked.
"Years of having my editor rip my work to shreds—it makes for tough skin."
"But how can you not care when your creation is a part of you?" Jasmine asked, obviously still smarting from the attack on her manuscript.
"To be a writer you have to be a cannibal," Chase replied.
"Now, I need an explanation of that one," Alma said. She refilled her mug from the decanter on the table. She sat back and waited, her eyes shining with interest.
Chase smiled. They probably thought she was pulling shit out of her ass. She had written her first novel when she was twenty. The first two went unpublished, eleven others had followed that were published. Over a million words in print, but she'd written more than she could care to count. Writing entailed actually sitting down and connecting ideas, stringing together words to make sentences that made paragraphs and consequently pages. In the rewrite, you cut off pieces. You took stuff from elsewhere in your experience, you read everything you could get your hands on and you learned from it, you cannibalized. You had to be tenacious and ultimately vicious or you never got there.
Chase went to the closet on the back wall of the writing studio and pulled the doors open. Inside was a stack of black and white marbled composition books stacked one on top of the other, floor to ceiling, rows and rows of them.
"What's that?" Delia asked.
"Probably every word she's ever written," Bo replied. He got up to take a closer look. "Holy shit."
"And out of all that came thirteen novels." She picked up her stack of published books that sat on top of the notebooks. "That would never have been published without the necessary reduction and distillation of all this."
"Consequently, you cannibalized your own work," Alma said. "You put all your not so well-chosen words, bad scenes and unclear descriptions into the meat grinder and come up with something meaningful and understandable."
"Precisely," Chase replied, shutting the closet doors.
"I get it," Jasmine said. She rolled up her manuscript and swatted her thigh as if the thought were a fly.
Chase swore she saw the glint of savagery, a necessity for any writer, glistening in Jasmine's eyes.
There was a knock at the French doors. It was Gitana. Chase motioned her in. She smiled and said her hello's to the group. "I'm sorry to interrupt, but I need to talk to you for a minute. We've got familial snafu."
Chase nodded. "I'll be right back." She noticed that Delia didn't take her eyes off Gitana. She did look quite handsome in a pair of khaki shorts, nicely displaying her tanned and shapely calves, and a lavender tank top with a white orchid silk-screened on the front and the words, "live simply" in lowercase letters which revealed her nice breasts and strong arms.
They went out to the deck. Chase shut the door. "What's up?"
"It's Graciela. She's in jail."
"What did she do?" Chase hoped Gitana's younger sister hadn't done something horrible like stabbing one of her many
Eloise J. Knapp
Elizabeth Gilzean
Callie Kanno
Brian Lovestar
Matthew Boyd
Jessica Sims
E A Price
Christina Lauren
Kimberla Lawson Roby
Tracy Cooper-Posey