June 22, 2009
Had a very nice Father's Day. My daughter and her significant boyfriend came over at noon and I made everyone pancakes. Then we watched an English comedy Death At A Funeral which was a total hoot. We laughed and laughed.

Worked a bit on studies of century plants:

Had good photo reference I took last week on Scottsdale Road:

Also did the usual sketches:

And these:

Also noodled some Native American designs to apply to Mickey Free's serape:

And also experimented with isolated moon beams:

Then back to the panel sequences I have been studying since the beginning of this quest:

These are 9,170 thru 9,180. Clipping right along.

Speaking of clipping right along, the newest issue of The New Yorker has a fascinating feature on the romance writer Nora "F-ing" Roberts (or, NFR, as her friends call her). Evidently, it takes her about 45 days to write a book (she's written 182 novels, plus an assortment of novellas, and publishes, by my count about four or five new books a year, including a new noir series she writes under the name J.D. Robb). All her books are bestsellers (27 Nora Roberts books are sold every minute).

And, so, as the Top Secret Writer and I go into the fifth, or sixth, year of our plot-plodding-quest to publish one book, I wonder if Nora has any advice for us?

"Character is key. Character is plot. Make them accessible to the reader. They may be a billionaire or they may be half demon or they may be a gym teacher, but something about them has to relate so the reader can say, 'I understand them.'"
—Nora F. Roberts

Cut to: A lone sunset rider, half-demon, half billionaire. He's an outcast in a troubled land with a failed economy, and he's tracking a gym teacher in the wilds of the Mexican desert. . .