Writing Progress, Of Sorts

Yesterday I finished the first draft of a new story, "Hope Café." The story is set in the vicinity of what remains of the Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago's South Side, and involves a young woman who opens up a coffee shop nearby but soon after begins to question the wisdom of following her dream. I started writing the story in mid-2004 but hadn't touched it in six months. Then, having started to read There Are No Children Here last week, I found myself inspired to resume writing the story. It still needs a lot of sculpting, but I'm pleased with its potential.

Lately I've been finding my writing being directly influenced by books I'm reading. Besides Kotlowitz's book jumpstarting my work on "Hope Café", reading the first volume of James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy somehow inspired me to start writing a story revolving around the legendary Chicago alderman "Hinky Dink" Kenna and the illicit efforts of railroad czar Charles Tyson Yerkes to secure an El train monopoly in the Loop. (Though Farrell's book has nothing to do with Kenna or Yerkes, it's set in that same general era, and Farrell's street-smart Irish characters are cut from the same cloth as the likes of Kenna.) The story, "The Way Business is Done", is roughly three-quarters finished, and I'm pretty confident that eventually I'll have a finished story soon.

And before that, seeing this photo in Real Chicago: Photographs from the Files of the Chicago Sun-Times prompted me to start writing a story based on the man on the left. I've got 1,200 words written so far, but I'm not sure if this one will ever come to completion. Depends on more inspiration striking, I guess.