I haven't written here in a couple of days because I started tinkering again with the novel manuscript, as I am wont to do with things I write even after I declare them finished; finding little things I could further tighten or omit, and doing this took up my writing time for the last two days. I got through four fifths of it again, and just want to go through the climax one more time...I wanted to finish it this afternoon before meeting my writer/bodybuilder friend Rexx for dinner, but my body and eyes are saying, "Wait until tomorrow."

As I've grown older I've learned to recognize my body's part in the act of writing (something it took many years to comprehend), and that weariness--even if it occurs in what seems like an unusually short period of time--may be an indication I should take a break.

For example, last night I was tempted to pass on a social occasion to stay home and continue to tinker, but luckily I decided to go out after all and hang with some film buff friends and watch a cheesy Italian horror flick and get my mind away from the manuscript. I felt refreshed when I went back to it this morning.

I appreciate everybody's kind comments on my previous post! Donna--Maria--Colo--Mike--thanks! And I hope this opus will see the published light of day in a reasonable amount of time so you can encounter in fictional form the noirish ponderings of ye ole curmudgeonly Cranky!

Boy, I'm tired tonight (I'm writing this Tuesday night just before midnight, although I'll probably post it after midnight into Wednesday). I didn't get much sleep last night, as I was excited on Tuesday morning to get up and re-read the revision I'd made on Monday to the last scene in the novel I've been working on. So I woke up after only five and a half hours of sleep, eager to get to my desk.

Well, I re-read what I wrote and only had to make some minor tweaks. The last scene did the job, and so the novel is done. You see, I had realized that my initial version of the final scene was too flippant, and I had to redo it to reflect the essential seriousness of the story so that I wouldn't make light of everything that had gone before it. The way I wrote it initially was like a literary form of self-deprecation, as if I were saying that the story wasn't really intended to be taken seriously after all, it's just a big goof, ha-ha. Quite the contrary. The new ending is dark in the extreme, as foreshadowed by everything in the story.

It's ironic--I'm self-deprecating in my conversation in real life, undercutting myself in a similar way. I did it tonight during dinner with some friends, weakening my assertions during a discussion of politics. But the self-deprecation that's forgotten from yesterday's dinner table can be ruinous when applied inappropriately to a piece of writing.

Also, in my eagerness to finish the first draft, I didn't follow through on the structure I had used throughout the manuscript, so I had to get back on the track and continue that structure right through to the climax. It was as if I had built a house, but in my haste to say "It's done!" I forgot to include the roof!

I may still take out a few words here and there, but it's essentially finished. I started it on June 11th and put in 39 days of butt-in-the-seat work on it over the course of summer: 25 days to write the first draft of about 210 pages, 7 days on the second, and 7 days on the final draft and polish (I ended up adding about 30 pages). I took breaks as long as two weeks between the drafts to refresh my mind and gain some distance from what I had written so I could look at it objectively for the purposes of revision.

It's a story that draws on my thoughts about sex, love, work, masculinity, and the haunting influence of our parents on our adult lives. I put these thoughts into a genre framework of the noirish "femme fatale" type of story. You know, a guy gets involved with a girl he hopes is right for him, but she turns out to be all wrong in all the worst ways...yet is also strangely good to him, too, in the ways he wants. In other words, life is presented as a cruel, infuriating paradox. The background of the tale draws on my knowledge of strippers (and DVDs) but amps it up for shock and tension (at least I hope that's the effect I achieved).

Now I have to see if I can sell it. My goal is to make extra money by writing psychological suspense fiction, which is the type of thriller I most admire and enjoy. And a lot of the books I like were written under similar conditions of speed: the mystery and suspense paperbacks of the 1950s, which stand up so well today despite the fact that some of them were written in two weeks to a month, for fast money.

Whether it sells or not, whether it's actually good or not, at least I can say I had a productive summer and entertained myself by writing the kind of story I would shell out my own money to read if I saw it in a bookstore. At least it tells the story I envisioned when I sketched it out on a piece of paper while sitting in a midtown Wendy's having a value-priced crunchy chicken sandwich.

I know they say our bodies are, what, 90% water or something? I had the proof late this afternoon when this babe walked by me in her low-cut blouse as I was taking a girl-watchers break at Columbus Circle. Her tits were jiggling and quivering with every step. As she went off in the distance, I marveled at my instant memory of the fluidity of her floppers when suddenly she turned around and walked back in the direction whence she came, and so I got a second look at her oceanic chest. It was an amazing science lesson I never got from Mr. Wizard. Yessir, 90% water!

For those of you who are first stumbling upon this blog and wondering why it's called "strippersversusdvds" when there don't seem to be strippers being written about...well, when I started the blog in September 2005 I had plenty of strippers to write about, because once upon a time (from about 1973 to early 2006) I could afford to go to stripclubs regularly in Manhattan, and I was very into the whole scene (with occasional time-outs for serious relationships with non-dancers that didn't work out in the long term). But in the last year I've had financial reverses as a freelance worker and had to severely cut back on my visits to Lapdance Land...

I haven't lost my interest in dancers but for the time being it's just too expensive for me to go out to the Manhattan clubs and have a relaxed, good time. So I get my eyefuls of feminine candy on the street now, looking at the Big Apple's exhibitionistic regular gals walking around in their low-cut tops, short-shorts, and high heel sandals and flat-soled flip-flops...

I've been working on a novel this summer and if I manage to sell the thing when I'm done with it, I'll treat myself to a nice evening at a club without pinching every penny...

In a way my self-imposed exile from tittie bars has heightened my senses in the outside world as I am able to conjure up vivid daydreams about girls I see in the street for maybe ten seconds...

I'm gifted that way, I guess...

Meanwhile, I can continue to watch DVDs and write about them here, and I do; and I also discuss books and other stuff too.

I'm coming into the home stretch with the revision and polishing of my novel, a psychological suspense thing. I've been thinking for weeks on how to punch up the ending to give the "customers" (as hardboiled detective writer Mickey Spillane liked to refer to readers) the most satisfying experience, and I think I got the solution to the problem this morning as I was getting out of bed. I won't get to that scene for a few more days, as I revise page by page, but I'm eager to write it and see if my solution works...

The late great Evan Hunter/Ed McBain (author of Blackboard Jungle and the 87th Precinct series) once wrote that the novelist tends to slow down as he approaches the conclusion of his revision work, and I actually feel that...I was going to write today on the manuscript as I have for the last six days, but my body and my strained eyes tell me to rest and hold off until tomorrow to begin the final assault...

Ah, testosterone will out! Look how I couched my language in macho terms: "to begin the final assault"...fun fact about Sir Cranky: the first thing I ever wrote in the sense of being a "writer" was at age 8, when I created a little booklet complete with text and drawings about The Battle of Iwo Jima...I believe I cribbed the info from a 1950s series of volumes called All About Books, which were aimed to give children overviews of various topics like dinosaurs and World War 2...

Anyway, I don't know if my current literary creation is all that good, despite the accumulated skill of 47 additional years with a pen, but at least I will have tried my best to provide an interesting read from start to finish. I also hope to meet my goal of completing it before summer's end.

Last night one of my film buff buddies loaned me a copy of Satan's Cheerleaders, a 1977 exploitation movie. The main point of interest to me was that in addition to the unknown starlets playing cheerleaders menaced by Satanists, the film boasted Hollywood veterans John Ireland, Yvonne De Carlo, John Carradine, Jack Kruschen, and Sydney Chaplin. In their 40s and 50s heyday, those actors worked with some of the greatest directors in the medium--Howard Hawks, Robert Siodmak, John Ford, and Billy Wilder. But when the plum assignments in the top films stopped coming, these actors obviously still wanted to act for whatever reasons, and so they got involved in this cheesy flick.

The names Jack Kruschen and Sydney Chaplin may not be as readily recognizable as the others, but as character actors they appeared in, respectively, Billy Wilder's The Apartment and Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharoahs. Chaplin was Charlie Chaplin's son and he played the scheming soldier who gets involved with Joan Collins' evil queen of Egypt in that very entertaining epic, now available on DVD.

I have to say that girls in those exploitation movies from the 70s are, for the most part, much less beautiful than the starlets who appear in similar trash today. The bar has really been raised in the kind of looks now deemed necessary to qualify a girl to be menaced on-screen by villains, monsters, or other forms of creep.

It was kind of sad watching Satan's Cheerleaders, because although the script was abysmal (I kept jumping around because it got boring), the Hollywood veterans gave it all the professionalism they'd learned in their earlier days during the studio system. The late John Ireland in particular has always been one of my favorite character actors, and in this crappy movie he shows some fine comedic skill in a few scenes. I read in a film magazine that Ireland had been working on an autobiography before his death, but it was never published. A pity, because the excerpt was most enjoyable and whetted my appetite for more. Here was a guy who had the potential to be a bigger star, but never really got the one iconic breakthrough role. But in his early days of the 40s he made some fine movies like Red River and Railroaded, and of course he can be seen in Kirk Douglas's Spartacus as well.

But acting sure is a tough gig to sustain over the long haul.