Switch Hitting

Last week on The Practical Press I posted the first chapter of a story called Small Town Boys that I started writing back in 2000 or so when I was having a dry spell with Bobby Cramer. I had written about 100 pages or so and was getting pretty involved with it when I suddenly stopped and went back to Bobby, picking up right where I had left off. Small Town Boys is a third person narrative about Donny Hollenbeck, a college-aged guy from Ohio who moved out west in the early 1990's. As in the fashion of most of my writing, it's told in flashback style.

This weekend I picked up Small Town Boys and began working on it again, letting Bobby have a break for a little while and getting back to telling about Donny's adventures in L.A.

One of my friends once asked me how I could keep two story lines and two different casts separate -- and just how different are Donny and Bobby? Actually, it's not that hard; they're two facets of the same gem, actually, as are all of my characters. In fact, Donny shows up as the main character in Can't Live Without You. He's got a different story line in the play, though -- for one thing, in the play he lives in Florida, and he's a writer. In Small Town Boys he has no such ambition. There are a lot of other differences that aren't worth going into, and in the end it's all an exploration of the same character. After all, most writers write the same people over and over again.

The best part is that it's fun.