Op-ed Cartoon for Janet Reid's blog

 

If you follow awesome lit agent Janet Reid's blog, this is for you.

 This was fun, more to come.  I may need help with captions.  The drawing is the easy part.

wow I can't believe it, HAPPY NEW YEAR

Yesterday I opened my email after almost two weeks and my heart skipped a beat.  At first I thought who is this Janet, probably a spammer then I read down.  It was Janet Reid thanking me, holy shit!  For sending some information.

OMG!

It took a day for the news to sink in.

So we went to the Eiffel tower on this sunny afternoon to eat a barbapapa  (cotton candy) among throes of tourists, ugh.  What was I thinking?

Happy New Year from Jocks!

Thanks Again Janet Reid

This  quote from Janet Reid's  Biblio Buffet interview From The Editors Desk, the tough work of writing a reported version of their lives, makes me want to give it another try, to write a memoir.

About six months ago I wrote to Janet Reid thanking her for her blog because I realized that I am not a writer.  I am just another one of those laughing stock the editors snicker over. Someone who feels compelled to tell their story. At least I don't have blue hair, though I may wear a bracelet made by my daughter. I thank her again for her generous blog. 

I didn't know what genre I was writing but now I know thanks to a book I splurged for as soon as I read about and thanks again to Janet Reid's blog.  (Her blog and her Query Shark blog are always the first one's I read on the stratosphere.)  The book is  Shimmering Images by Lisa Dale Norton.  Ms.  Reid describes the genre as Non-commercial Memoir but she also refers to it as Commercial Non-fiction. Surely the first is a sub to the second.  

Long ago I wanted to major in creative writing, instead became an oil painter.  But writing gives me great pleasure, even if I am a rookie.  So I'm starting this blog again and will be  returning to the saturday afternoon writing workshops at Shakespeare and Co.  Last year I signed up for a writing workshop at WICE and did not like it.  The Shakespeare and Co. workshops are way more interesting for me, perhaps because they are so brutal.    

After trashing the third first draft, over 150 pages written passionately, here I am again. This time I have a method and a structure that draws my plan like the affiches marking the Parisian metro exits.

Vitoria Lynn Schimdt's Book in a Month and her Story Structure Architect are part of the material that  I've been studying to understand structuring a longer work.  There is no way I'll write it in a month with an upcoming show and house move in the planning.

Here we go again. 

Book Poem

The Quest

Diego and Dora's Animal Adventure like

Five Quarters of The Orange,

began in A Year of Fog.  

It was Misery in 

A Thousand Acres strewn with

Les Fleurs du Mal.  They thought it would be

Per Sempre but the sight of

Brunelleschi's Dome impelled them to 

cross the County Line

where they found the Key of Light.

In response to Janet Reid's contest to write a poem with books, the above is what came about.  I had to put in Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal.  So awesome to read it in French.

County Line - by Bill Cameron and recent reads

The mail came last week and among the pile was County Line.  Since seeing the book represented on Janet Reid's blog, I've wanted to read it.

The last few books were Carol Shields Unless that I had to put down because it was too melancholy. not that I don't like melancholy but because I was flying to Florence to get divorced I needed something more upbeat.  That didn't happen because Susanna Tamaro's Per Sempre, that sold over 100K copies in one month, was what the book dealer recommended.  Introspective to say it in one word but just reading, no devouring, a book in Italian gave me a rush.  The Stephen King's Misery was what I lugged around the airport on the return to Paris.  I'm still digesting it but the aftertaste is me thinking of how magnificently he creates the psychosis of the writer and his capturer  as if they are one person.

Bill Cameron's writing requires close attention, at least from me.  I find myself going back to read to understand his word choice. It's unusual.  What I like so far is the complete avoidance of he said, she said.  There is lots to learn from Mr. Cameron,  I think I'm addicted.