Off and Running

Between sawing boards and climbing in and out of the four-foot-square hole in our utility room floor (to be fair, Livia did a lot more of both those things than I did), I started writing a new book today. I really love the first day at work on a new book. New characters, new situations and settings, and a new voice and style from the last one I did. Sure, it won't be this much fun all the way through, but for now I'm enjoying it a lot. I'm even anxious to get back to work on it tomorrow.

Richard Wheeler continues pinch-hitting admirably for Ed Gorman with a nice essay about how it used to be physically harder to writer books before computers. He's absolutely right. My first two novels were written in longhand, with a fountain pen, in spiral notebooks. Then they were typed and revised and typed yet again. I'm convinced computers made me a better writer. On some stories in the old days, things didn't get changed that probably should have simply because it was too much trouble to retype the whole thing.

For the past couple of days I've been reading MORGAN THE PIRATE by Robert Carse, the Dell paperback novelization of that 1961 Steve Reeves movie I mentioned a while back. I'm going to be writing a review of this one for a magazine, so I'll reserve comment on it for now other than to say that I'm enjoying it so far.

No movie tonight, but my daughters came home from the library with a DVD of GUNGA DIN. Joanna asked, "Isn't this the movie you said you liked?" (I had mentioned it for some reason not long ago.) I haven't seen it for years and am very eager to watch it again. It's one of the relatively few movies from that era I've seen on a big screen. In the Seventies, one of the theaters in Fort Worth operated as a revival house for a while, and I vividly remember going to a double feature of GUNGA DIN and THE OUTLAW with a couple of friends of mine, Bruce Washburn (now my brother-in-law, as a matter of fact) and Leland DeBusk, who unfortunately passed away a year or so ago. I think we were the only customers in the theater. Another time we attended a Marx Brothers triple feature in the same theater, and it did better business, including three guys who came dressed as Groucho, Chico, and Harpo. They showed up at every Marx Brothers revival in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, always in costume and in character. I must have run into them a dozen times over the years. I like the Marx Brothers but never had the urge to attend their movies in costume. Closest I ever came was when several of us all wore fedoras to a CASABLANCA revival. Come to think of it, that may have been a little odd, too . . .