Life Beyond the Final Draft

Well, Footlights has been at the publisher's since early summer. No galleys yet. Although I've had lots of opportunities for marketing/publicizing, I have no book and little hope of publication this year. So I am starting a new project--well an old one really.

Luiza is a character that has been following me around from Boston to Long Beach (CA) to New Mexico. Her file, working title--Pernicious Academia--grows regularly. Her character ages and develops--as we non-characters do--through pain and joy and all that happens in between. I'm enrolled in an online workshop with the UCLA Extension Writers' Program specifically to tighten up Luiza's stories and fit them into a collection. So far, the critiques have been helpful; the online experience less than dynamic.

I've also revised Prairie Madness and will be submitting it to my publisher soon.

The real world--the one in which friends and family die; a dog disappears; and tough decisions must be made--seeps into my writing world. I continue to read.

It's Here!

On August 11, 2010, in Las Vegas, NM, Edwina Irving masquerades as historical non-fiction author Edwina Portelle Romero.







Be there when melo-drama and mayhem take the stage at the Historic Plaza Hotel's Ilfeld Ballroom--excerpts from The Comedy of Adam and Eve, ca. 1870; The Ticket-of-Leave Man, 1863; and "Who Killed Sean Flannery," from Prairie Madness, forthcoming [I HOPE].

A celebration of history and amateur theatre.

Footlights in the Foothills

The footlights dim, the stage goes dark, but only for a few months. Revisions and additions to the book are coming to an end, but hopefully, Sunstone Press will be able to publish it in 2010, the year of Las Vegas, New Mexico's 175th anniversary. Although Footlights in the Foothills, my story of the amateur performers, their plays and venues does not begin in 1835, it does recall amateur troupes in Las Vegas as early as 1871. I complete these revisions with mixed feelings. . . anxious to see the book in print, but sad to leave the 19th century and the grand people I met there like Mariano Monclova, Hattie Knickerbocker, the Baca Family, Alexander Randolph, Miguel Otero, Jr., and the Rothgeb girls, to mention a few.

But an exciting adventure awaits, and by August 11, the footlights will glow again when we--Deborah Blanche, Tim Crofton, a cast of talented young people, and I--take the story to the stage at the Plaza Hotel's Ilfeld Ballroom. With dramatic, and comic, readings from period plays as well as variety acts, we will recreate a typical early 19th century amateur production.

Hope to see you there.

AN UNRELIABLE READ

I believed the hype about A Reliable Wife, and it does have a decent plot . . . when you can find it. I am--once again--reminded of how little I know or can anticipate regarding what publishers want. This author, published twice by a "reliable" publisher, ignores most of the tenets of good writing: the narrative drags-in all sorts of backstory, tells rather than shows, repeats insignificant bits of information, and even contradicts itself. The rambling and nonspecific descriptions overwhelm the story-line. The narrator tells the reader what the characters believe rather than illustrating. I love good, detailed description, but not of the same scenes over and over again and not when it buries the plot so deeply that I don't care what happens next.


The upshot is . . . clearly, I do not know what publishers and agents think of as sound narrative structure, good description, exciting plot, or character development.