I don’t have an Elevator Pitch…

And that is a problem, supposedly. Ignoring the unpalatable idea of shilling my book to every person I meet, there still is an actual need for a brief summary of the book that I can use to describe it to people.  So, I could try this:

Gwendolyn Sees Stars is about chosing to fight when you can’t win.  The main character, Charlie, is detached from his life, and he feels the people around him slipping away. He sleepwalks through his job as a social worker helping street kids, until a girl named Gwendolyn wakes him up. She’s about to become an adult by legal standards, and when she does Charlie will lose her to the adult world of jail, drugs and death. So, he decides to throw aside all of the ethical and legal restrictions and try to save her from herself, even if he loses everything in the process.

The Order of Editing

I’ve come to a decision that I need to re-write the entire first chapter of my book, Gwendolyn Sees Stars. But, do I need to stop right there and do no other editing until that rewrite is done, or can I move past it safely? It would probably make the most sense to just grind out a new chapter one and compare it to the old one to see which one really floats my boat.

Whistlin’ in the dark

(as an aside, the title of this post is misleading. I’m using the phrase incorrectly, but I do that knowingly now. And yet I feel the need to write this disclaimer, instead of correcting the title. I am an odd duck)

One of the demotivating emotions that drags at my ankles when I try to march off to productivity is a feeling of useless effort. Like the time and bother I would invest in writing is a waste of time since it will make me no money, no one other than my kind wife will read it, and society will burp along unchanged no matter what I do.
I really wonder if I’m missing a drive to create that other authors have. When I read boingboing and the relentlessly self-promoting post of Cory doctrow, I’m shamed by the uneding stream of work he seems to produce while I struggle through editing my novel and procrastinate with hours of vdeo games.