Musings of Two Creative Minds

Yesterday I made a drastic change to my current novel in progress.   I removed one character and chopped about 10,000 words from the manuscript.  Now I know the question on everyone's mind right now is probably "Why did you do that?" or "Gee I wonder what I should have for dinner tonight?"  If it's the second one, I'm sorry I can't help you there.  As for the first one, that's easy to answer, but it was a hard choice to make in the end. The reason I dropped this character was because she was only a secondary figure, not one of the main ones.  And her storyline, which was going to end in a dramatic and unique death-scene was not pivotal to the overall story.  Also, her storyline was actually bringing the main story to a screeching halt while I dealt with her.  That was unnacceptable to me.  Now as the story's creator I tried to keep her in and work her story to blend with the main one.  But, she was proving too much of a distraction for the ...

     I took these photos at the Long Marine Lab located on the campus of the University of Santa Cruz.  All of them are of a young Gray Whale skeleton that is 25 feet long and is obviously outdoors.  The creature has been put up on metal pipes to keep it off the ground and give it that more caught in the moment feel.  As you can see in photo #3 it has been placed next to a path and a mere 20-30 feet from a fence that allows visitors to look over a cliff and out at the ocean.  The view there is breathtaking and can really inspire a person's imagination.      In my case it inspired a terrifying scene for my second novel where a young female reporter has been snooping into matters regarding  Cassandra Elliott (billionaire heiress) and her lover Julie DeLuca-Cloudfoot (shamaness and internet erotic lesbian wrestler) my two leading characters for this novel.   They have been stalked by a strange figure wearing clothing...