would you rather

home from south lake tahoe. what a place. casinos and village shopping areas are a people-watcher's heaven. sis and i people watched a people watcher which was even more fun. great time in the sand and sun with kids, great kayak ride with the spousey, and sis and i lost money at the blackjack table though it entertained for quite some time.

and now the work (how can it be called work?) calls to me. interesting, for some time and even more time lately, i've peered closer into the rhythms in prose writing. something of sentence structure, word meter, paragraph lengths, choices, syllables, white space, sharpness...

so today, i return to a novel i finished writing nearly two years ago. people regularly ask me, "when is that novel coming out, the one set in the women's prison?" i then must reply that i haven't done a thing to it. it's waiting in clumps and odd stacks with marks all over sections while other sections have waited miserably. today, it waits no longer.

i'll be peering close, not just at the story though story is supremeo, in my opinion. but also at the feel of its structure. not only what it is, but how it will be read, what it evokes in the telling.

any comments or theories are welcome -- post away (come on, my writers, editors, readers) or email me if you would rather. would you rather? funny, i just found a great first-draft scene someone once gave me to read called "the would you rather scene." there's also a game called zobmondo brought to my attention some time ago. it's about choices, but choices like "would you rather have the CIA or the Mafia after you?" "would you rather eat your mother-in-law or your dog if you were starving to death?" the choices get exceedingly more bizarre and often disgusting.

so would you rather...okay, i can't start this right now.
off to work.