Another blog?

I'm in the middle of a writer's block at the moment. I just published Merry-Go-Round, my seventh novel on Smashwords. No ideas are popping up about what I should write about next. Instead I'm reading some of the older stuff I wrote, notably Galataea of the Poconos, ancient (like vintage 1917) Westerns, and the news -- obsessively, as usual.

I started this mainly to think out loud, maybe to critique my own work. Self-publishing by definition means working without an editor. I ask my friend Jenifer to critique now and then, but she's busy herself and doesn't need to take a few days off to read through a novel's worth of my hyperverbiage. I'm always grateful for her feedback (or anyone's) but I guess I'm shy. I don't like to impose.

I got the idea for Merry-Go-Round from a wedding picture I saw on line. It featured a very pretty bride and her new husband, in his Marine blues. His face had pretty much been burned off, mostly a lump of scar tissue. I made my protagonist only half as bad ‐ think The Phantom of the Opera before the whole mask comes off.

She looked inside and she wondered if she had wandered into a horror movie.

“Get in,” whispered the Phantom of the Pickup Truck.

“Keep walking,” her better judgment told her. “He's going to rape you and murder you with a chain saw and probably mutilate the chunks of your body before he buries you in the middle of the woods in the pouring rain.”

The right side of his face was horribly scarred. He looked demented, his mouth partially open. His right eye stared straight ahead while his left looked at her.

She felt a bit of warmth escape through the open door. He was sitting in a warm truck. He was dry.

There was no jolt for her. There was no bed, no warmth, and no safety. There was no pillow for her to fluff, grumble, and go back to sleep.

She hoped he made her demise quick. She couldn’t take much more. She got in, shivering with more than cold.

Since Our Hero's so ugly, I made the heroine prettier than average (though a heroine, of course, should be prettier than average, if not gorgeous.) That made it a Beauty and the Beast story, so I could make the abusive husband, who's the real Beast, improbably handsome.