Month: February 2017

There is a balance between feeling enough pressure that you get something done and feeling so much that you are left without a clue what to write. I have been to both extremes and I’d like to find a comfortable position right in the middle.

I am proving to myself that I can actually decide to do something and then do it. If, along the way, I happen to accomplish something more, like writing a popular story or novel, then that is a happy surprise. I’ve started several writing projects. I’ve written fifty thousand words worth of novel on two separate occasions. That is not the whole story in either case. Both so-called novels need significant work done to them before they even deserve to be called first drafts.

The first was a novel called The Gentry. I started importing what I’d written into Scrivener. It has an impressive suite of tools for polishing a novel. I’m going to work on that for a while. It has sat on the shelf, so to speak, for three years now. I have some sense what the mistakes that I made were. The first thing I need to do is to read it and see just how bad it is. Then I will outline what I’ve got so I can start to clean it up and get rid of some of the pointless rambling and punch up the good parts so that they’re even better.

I’m going to go ahead and post this. It shows the rambling dialog that I’ve been having with myself lately. If nothing else maybe it is entertaining to see me waffle and squirm. Who knows. Maybe someday it will be famous as a peek behind the scenes of the writing of my first novel. You never can tell.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Tonight is probably one of those nights when I should just declare defeat and go to bed. I find myself sitting here asking myself deep, philosophical questions and I’m not coming up with any satisfying answers. Perhaps there are none. Perhaps I need to write some short fluffy memoir about growing up in a sleepy little river town during an age of social unrest and political turmoil.

Or maybe I should write my coming of age story. That is both too stereotypical and too private to publish in this venue at this time. I may be able to screw up my courage and tell that story at some point but not yet.

How about the story of the college freshman that wanted to be a writer but had no idea where to start. The one that would type a couple of sentences on his manual typewriter, rip the page out of the carriage, wad up the paper and throw it over his shoulder. Eventually, I started keeping those abortive starts in a notebook. They never amounted to much except as a reminder of the desire to be a writer. When I found Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way I was primed to take that first step toward actually becoming a writer.

There have been so many pieces to the puzzle that came together to be the person that I am today. I’m still adding pieces. It’s hard to make them all fit some times. I keep feeling urges to do things that seemingly have no relationship to the things that I’m already trying to accomplish. I don’t know what to do with them sometimes.

The other day Ann Marie Martin said something that resonated strongly with me. She said that some times she has characters that talk to her. She has to sit down and write what they are saying to get them to shut up so that she can finish the other things that she has on her plate.

I know the feeling. With me, it’s not always a character that is demanding my attention. Sometimes it is a program that I must write so that I will quit thinking about it. Sometimes it is a song that I’ve got to write so that it will quit haunting me all the time. Sometimes it is a dish that I want to try to cook. There are so many things that I want to do and there is so little time to do them all.

So I concentrate on doing one thing at a time. Much of what I do is done out of habit. I get up in the morning, take my shower, get dressed, and write my journal entry. I come home at night, I eat dinner and talk with my wife, sometimes I watch TV, then I write my blog post.

Habit is a powerful force for getting things done. Unfortunately, there are only so many hours in the day. At some point, if you want to add anything else to your routine, you have to drop something else. I’m struggling over that right now. I’ll let you know what I figure out.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

I haven’t felt very good this weekend. The symptoms are of a fairly mild cold. Given that there is a rather virulent strain of flu running rampant in the area I feel like I have little room to complain. None-the-less, I find that every time I try to do something, my head pounds, my throat hurts, and I get winded.

Yesterday, I went to a meeting of the Huntsville Downtown Writers’ Group. We were treated to a marvelous program on the importance of a good editor and how to choose one given by Ann Marie Martin. In addition to learning about editing and editors, I also learned some important things that will help improve my writing. I thought I’d share a couple of them with you.

First, you’ve got to capture your reader’s interest on the first page. If you can manage to do it with your title, you’re ahead of the game. Reading is an investment of time. No one wants to spend their time reading a boring story. If you don’t convince them that you have a good story for them on the first page, they won’t turn it to see if the rest of the story is any better.

The other thing that I learned is that writing with constraints, for example a limited number of words or a deadline for finishing the piece, can help sharpen the focus of your writing. It was as I listened to this advice that I realized that forcing myself to write a blog post every day was part of my writing apprenticeship. I decided that I should put a length limit on my posts to help me learn to distill what I have to say.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

We watch British television a lot at my house. Pam found an app for the Apple TV that lets us stream British television live. The catch is, when it’s six o’clock in Huntsville, Alabama, it’s midnight in London. We have learned a lot about late night British television.

For instance, on Friday nights we watch documentaries on popular music. I have learned a lot about popular music this way. I have been a fan of popular music my entire life. It was amazing how much I didn’t know about it. What is more amazing is that the BBC funds people to make these documentaries.

In the US, it takes a very motivated producer to raise the money to tackle a documentary of this quality and it has to have a stronger entertainment appeal. There seems to be more acceptance of history for history’s sake in the UK. They also recycle their old shows more than we do here.

On Sunday morning we watch reruns of Columbo. The British love Columbo. Not that I dislike the show but it is somewhat dated as far as I’m concerned. I just don’t get what they see in it.

Another show that we watch a lot is entitled 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown. 8 Out of 10 Cats is a popular panel show where two teams compete to try to guess the top five answers to a question that has been put to a group of randomly selected people. The host, comedian Jimmy Carr, is entertaining, if edgy.

After a while, the show had such a big audience that they started letting them do parodies of other popular BBC shows. One of the first ones was a parody of Deal or No Deal. It was called, strangely enough 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Deal or No Deal.

While entertaining, it didn’t stand up well to repeat productions. When they parodied the popular game show Countdown though, the hit pay dirt. The game itself, comprised of alternating word and number games, left plenty of time for the 8 out of 10 Cats crowd, all comedians, to get in plenty of dry British comedy between the more or less straight rendition of the game portions of the show.

They recruited two of the cast members from the regular Countdown show, Susie Dent, the lexicographer that passes judgement on the acceptability of words for the word game, and Rachel Riley, the mathematician that flips letters for the word portion as well as presiding over the number game. It is surprisingly entertaining.

As my wife said earlier tonight, the app to stream British TV live was the best $5 we’ve ever spent. In fact, when we compare the one time expense to the $181 a month that we pay for cable and internet, we’ve decided to start moving toward cutting the cable.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

I have been struggling to fit all the things that I want to do into my schedule. I keep coming up short. I have stubbornly refused to accept that I might need to drop something, if only temporarily.

I currently write a thousand words in the morning. That takes between forty minutes and an hour depending on how focused I am and what distractions I succumb to.

In the evening, I write a blog post. That is less of a marathon and more of a creative challenge. By that I mean that I’m not out to write a certain number of words so much as I am to communicate a complete idea. I want to tell my readers a story that I found worth repeating. That presupposes that I have a story to tell.

In all humbleness, I do have stories to tell. I just have trouble listening to the inner voice that tells them to me when I put myself under pressure to produce on a schedule. I don’t want to get out of the habit of writing but I’ve got to start getting more sleep. If that means admitting defeat sometimes and not writing a blog post every night, then I guess that’s what I may have to do.

I may find that when I give myself a break and quit pressing myself to post daily, I’ll find that it comes easier. I may end up posting every day anyway. I just want to say that I appreciate the attention that my readers have given me. I hope to continue to have stories to tell that captures their interest.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

I grew up in a family that enjoyed music. My mother played piano. My dad played trumpet until he finally decided to stick to directing plays instead of playing an instrument. He did direct a number of musicals in his career. I guess that is where I learned to like musical theater.

But by the time I was a teenager it was the late sixties. It was the time of rock and roll music. I remember listening to Steppenwolf, Santana, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Jefferson Airplane, Three Dog Night, Chicago, all the rock super groups of that time. I loved the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. I loved Simon and Garfinkle. I shouldn’t use the past tense, I still do.

My dad wanted to encourage me to study classical guitar so he bought me a classical guitar. The only concession to my rock and roll aspirations was that it had a pick up in it so I could run it through an amplifier. The only problem was that the ceramic pickups that they put in classical guitars at that time were subject to generating horrendous feedback if you turned them up at all. I was not well pleased.

Finally, he gave in and bought me a proper electric guitar. It was a Les Paul Junior, a guitar that has sense become a classic. Even though mine is in dire need of refurbishing it is still worth a good bit of money now. At the time it was just the thing I wanted. All of a sudden, I could actually play all of the rock songs that just didn’t pan out on a classical guitar.

My dad taught at the high school I attended my junior and senior year. I rode to school with him in the morning which meant that most mornings we got to school a full hour before classes started. There was a piano at the front of the auditorium where students were allowed to wait inside until school started. I got in the habit of playing the piano every morning while I waited for school to start.

It was simple chords in the left hand, bass line in the right style piano, the kind that many of the rock bands of the era featured. I even composed my own piano music.

When I was a junior, the spring play was a farce entitled Big Rock at Candy’s Mountain. It was a take off on the whole Woodstock musical festival idea with the plot structure being basically a romantic comedy. We had a small high school so we couldn’t dig up three bands so we used the same band to represent the different bands with each of the members of the band taking turns playing the leader of each of the different bands.

The kids loved it and I was hooked on playing for an audience. When I graduated from high school, one of my father’s former students offered me a job as a gunfighter and guitar player in a western theme park. I did that for three summers in a row and had a blast doing it. I miss those days a lot.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.