The Devil's Instrument

The blog's been somewhat neglected since my last post a week ago, so I thought that I may as well come clean and admit something that I've been reluctant to do publicly. I finished writing a novel. I have been picking at it since somewhere around September. When people have asked, "Well, what do you do all day now that you're retired?" I normally say, "I don't know, but it takes all day and I still don't finish" and leave it at that and it has been the truth. As I told a friend,"If you tell people that you are writing a book, they look at you as if you told them that you were trying out for the Houston Astros." Same look.

I've gone about the process with an hour here and an hour there, but normally only three or four days a week, so it has taken a bit of time. The story took on a life of its own at some point and I picked up a bit more steam as I smelled the conclusion approaching. It is a hand written manuscript, so I tackled the task of typing the beast during this past week--which is quite the chore for me, because I hate typing almost as much as I hate painting on a house. Also, revising as I type slows the process down considerably. I hate proofreading and revising, also. What I'm saying is that I've spent a LOT of time sitting at this keyboard this past week and when the blog has called me, I haven't been able to rally the energy to tap one more consonant once I hit save for the day. I've estimated that I have 67,000 words written and that I've typed 9,700 of them. This is going to take just a little bit of my time.

To answer the curious: yes, the post title is my chosen working title for the book. I may change it. There are a slew of books out there with Devil printed on the cover. And, yes, the blues harp figures into the plot (Surprise!), along with various characters associated with the music. It most likely fits into mystery/crime genre. I actually enjoyed writing the story and it more or less flowed out, but I had been thinking about it for a long time and always told myself that I would write it down when I retired. I figured that I had no excuses not to get her done. Getting it published is another entirely different chore that I'll tackle once I quit torturing my keyboard. If it that never happens, then writing it had plenty of rewards.

Even though I should be typing on the manuscript instead of on this post, letting the cat out of the bag provided me with a bit of a distraction and a break from revising. Now I've got to go back and proofread this post and see if it needs revision, put on my Astros cap, and get back to the manuscript. I'll be back. Anyway--