Getting Hot!

Whew! Hot today here near the Equator. Here in Ecuador there is no Summer or Winter. And especially here on the Costa, Guayaquil in particular, there is only rainy season and dry season. Now it is dry season.

Dry season runs from April to around November. This is also the cool season. Most days are cloudy, temperature’s are in the high 70’s to low 80’s, so everything is quite nice. However, every once in a while the clouds are gone, like today, and the harsh, Equadorian sun roasts everything.

In the rainy season, it clouds up at night, and has gully-washer rains which can flood everything out. By morning it is steaming hot, with the blue skies broiling everything, and it’s best to stay indoors and make love to your air conditioner, if you are fortunate enough to own one.

Today though, it is hot but not uncomfortably so. I worked this morning. Then Lisa and I stepped out for Shwarmas at the local Lebanese café around the corner. The work and the lunch sent my eyelids drooping so I spent 30 minutes in the hammock for some blissful peace. The wind murmered through the trees as the canaries and amazons twittered and called in the mango branches above.

Yah, I can do this.

I’m still working on a travel guide and I have several projects percolating in the “we’re just waiting for the final okay” stage (Translated: we’ll wait until the worst possible time to tell you we need it in a hurry).

But one of the best traits of an independent/freelance writer is to work on what is before you. You have to worry about getting your next job but not stress over it.

I hope to have the guide finished by Friday. Then we’ll go from there.

The ability to commit the perfect crime!

Because I've worn off my fingerprints to smooth nubs!

Seriously, the last 24 hours I've been a writing fool. I've had to recover a great deal of research lost when my memory stick came up missing. I researched and completed a two-page white paper for a marketing firm. I'm now catching up on my email and this blog before I go back to sweating away at the travel guide I'm writing and is due next week.

Plus, somewhere in here I have a feature film script a producer wants me to review for a potential rewriting gig, and I am looking over a possible writing project for a DVD/multimedia course.

And earlier this week I was complaining I didn't have enough to do.

Silly rabbit!

Bad News Confirmed

A visit to the Internet Cafe confirmed my worst fears. My memory stick is gone. It had a huge amount of research on it for the travel guide I'm now working on, plus a lot of my business records. I can reconstruct or redo almost everything by going onto my online e-mail and places like Guru.com, where I get my writing assignments. It will take a lot of time to reconstruct it. And now, with two deadlines staring me in the face, that is the last thing I needed to happen. So, instead of languidly lounging on my hammock in my lovely back yard, gravely observing the rapidly growing mangos in our three mango trees, I'm going to be writing this weekend. Writing long houtrs this weekend. Of course, isn't that the way it always works? When you are most vulnerable for a problem to happen, that's when it will happen? Anyway, Ecuador Writer is offline and hitting the damage control gear.

Writing Nightmare - Recovering from literary disaster

Nightmare!!!!

Today at noon I ducked into an Internet Cafe, stuck in my memory stick and did some email and other stuff while my wife was happily shopping. Tonite I'm home, and get ready to do some serious writing on my current travel guide project, and...

I can't find the memory stick.

I search everywhere but I can't find it. Then I terrible realization hits: I never brought it with me when I left the Internet Cafe.

It's closed now, so I'll have to check with them tomorrow to see if someone was smart enough, and honest enough, to turn it in for me to find it in the morning. My problem is too fold... most of my recent writing research is on my stick for the current project. Plus I just accepted another copywriting assignment. I'm doing a rush job to do a short, white paper over the weekend. Since I now have two writing assignments on a tight deadline, I don't need to be rushing around trying to recreate my recent work.

So much for musing about hammock time.

Questions and Answers

Q: What do you think makes a good writer?

A: I think there are a lot of things that go into answering that question. Some of the answers are different, too. What makes a good copywriter is different than what makes a good screenwriter or a novelist.

I think of myself as a generalist, someone with the ability to handle a wide range of projects. For many years I did much more script work for television and feature films than anything else, largely because I did some bit part acting on the side and made contacts in the independent film world. So most of my name projects have been while working in the Los Angeles entertainment industry. But in reality about 75% of my work is in other areas… ghostwriting, rewriting, copywriting and the like.

A few things I think I have going for me are:

I’m blessed with a curious mind, and I’m able to quickly study materials, even of a very technical nature, and quickly write about them in a way anyone can understand. So while I prefer to do screenplays, I’m also an excellent generalist. Just give me something to write about and I can communicate… from an action scene in a feature script to a finance ebook.

I also love the English language. I know the difference between British English and American English, and have dabbled in enough other languages like German, Korean and Spanish to really appreciate what a magnificent tool English speaking writers have to work with. English has the ability to handle complicated and subtle subjects in ways other languages cannot. It’s one of the reasons I’m irritated by “writer’s” who think it beneath them to learn the basic Rules of English. They truly do not know what they are missing. I break the Rules of English all the time, but always with a purpose in mind to get my point across.

I’m also old enough now and experienced enough to no longer be in love with my work. Inexperienced writers tend to think everything they write is golden. In reality, experienced writers know that forethought and rewriting are important skills to use to give depth and clarity to your words.

The final thing is a good work ethic. Writing is hard. So many believe that you just sit down and dash off words and you are done. Writing is really an emotional journey, where you give up a large piece of yourself in every paragraph, in every character and every scene. It takes some determination and dedication to set time apart everyday to get your work done.

That’s why I’m in awe of novelists. They have to be able to sit down everyday for months to churn out the 2500 to 1,000 pages it takes. That’s several months to several years working on one project. If I work on one project for two months I think I’m dying!