Death Wish
1/1/14
‘We live too long.’
That’s my mom talking. She said that to me on more than one occasion. The last time she said it she did not know Death stalked her. Consciously, or unconsciously, she was finishing her business with the world. And, I think she finally tired of dealing with life’s business. It took Death a mere 8 months to catch her.
I thought about that statement in the dark of New Year’s Eve as the popping and thunder of neighborhood fireworks sounded.
I thought about that because the year, 2013, lived too long. I wanted 2013 to go – to be finished. I wanted the business of the year to be finished – to be gone.
In my life, 2013 stormed through its days. The year filled my life with tragedy and comedy, with elation and despair, with too little beauty and too much ugliness, with elusive hope and lost hope. The future gave unfulfilled promise. The past reared up its foul shadow. And, midnight of 2013 marks the end of a past and the beginning of a future – a milestone – doesn’t it?
Milestones planted themselves in my biography this year. I reached my sixty-fifth year as healthy as a forty-year-old and feeling like a 24 year old inside. My marriage managed to achieve its thirtieth anniversary, by all appearances, way too much like other marriages of that length. My one son graduated, still jobless, college. For the first time in my life of wanderlust and restlessness, I left the Continent briefly stepping upon British soil – the land of my ancestors. Milestones marking places of passage on a life’s road from back there to up that-a-way.
I wanted that last day of 2013 to be a milestone. I wanted 2013 buried. I wanted a marked place to waft into the state of denial where all the good memories sink into the ‘good memory’ place and the bad memories spackled over like holes in a wall awaiting new paint.
The year’s business goes on, however. Too many works in process each neglected for the sake of a twitch or tweak of another that demanded attention.
Answer me a riddle? How do you set priorities? Your profession – what gets done? Your family and friends – whose needs get met? Your finances – where does the money go? Where does the money come from? Your time – how is it parceled out? By all the gods, why can’t any of all of this get done so that the rest can finally get done?
Our problems live too long, also. Twitches and tweaks grow out of them like an insecure, needy, twerpy, little friend fearing to be neglected – wanting attention.
It’s a death wish I’m having. I wish the death of all this ‘busy-ness’ of this past year. I want the bills paid. I want the kid to get a job. I want the sick friends healed. I want a ‘forever pill’ for my aunt and my Dad. I want a 28 hour day allotted to about August of last year and a time machine to go back there. I want the edit done on my old book. I want a ‘The End’ typed on my latest one.
And, finally, I want to come back to today. By God, I have a whole new list of stuff I want – no, I need – to start in on.
The image I placed on this post is: ‘El tiempo vencido por el amor, la belleza y la esperanza’, ‘Father Time Overcome by Love, Hope and Beauty’, by Simon Vouet. That is my true wish for this New Year. I wish that love, hope, and beauty come to overcome.
That’s it. I wish 2013 to be overcome. 2013 has lived too long.
Ira E. Malone - Hero
Sorry I have not been able to give your posts much attention the last several days.
My war hero father, the most upright, honest, and gentle man I have ever known, has spent 3 days dying. Early Wednesday night he finally made it. By the nature of his injury I was very glad his life ended. It was not the death he deserved. In fact, though he did have successes and longevity, he rarely got the rewards he actually deserved - he actually earned.
These days my belief system 'believes' the essence of us joins the benevolent and endless universe in a wondrous, humming, vibration that glows through eternity.
Happy humming, Dad.
I'll do better in rejoining the friendship I find here very soon.
Ira E. Malone, Jr. passed away on January 15, 2014, in Houston, Texas, at 91 years of age. Ira was born on December 15, 1922 to Ira and Lilly (Lee) Malone in Beeville, Texas.
As a youth, Ira proudly became an Eagle Scout.
Ira is a decorated veteran serving in Co. B, 405th Regt., 102nd Inf. Dv., 9th Army in WWII from 1944 to 1946. He achieved the rank of Technical Sargent and earned the
Bronze Star as well as other awards.
After the war, Ira worked for Union Producing Company, Pennzoil, and Pennzoil Offshore Gas Operators until his retirement.
In retirement, he developed a passion for genealogy, researching his various family lines back to Europe in the earliest
American colonial times. He was a member of the Sons of the American Revolution, Sons of 1812, Sons of the Republic of Texas, and Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Ira is survived by his sister Berna Timlin, sons Steven and Larry Malone, grandchildren Colin (Steven) and Nick (Larry), and great granddaughter Amelia, as well as
numerous cousins, nephews and nieces. Ira was preceded in death by his wife of 64 years, Virginia Malone.
Ira
Malone
By A. Long
A loving tribute
from a son,
time's run out, day is done.
He calls him father, honest soul,
lived his life, life was full.
Gentle, honest, and upright,
has drifted to eternal light.
War hero has seen his day,
passed into the spirit's way.
Grieve the loss of father, dear,
in the heart, always near.
Dad's reflection, in the son,
Malone lives on, moon to sun.
Writing is hard
2/11/14
Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work I go.
A work in progress just so you may know.
The thing just refuses to write itself.
Won’t just let me leave it sit on the shelf…
I am so not a poet.
And, as a general rule I avoid trying to write about writing. My shelves groan from the weight of writers writing about just that. From Aristotle, to Twain, to John Gardner, to Robert Graves, to Joseph Conrad, their tomes read and reread. Combine that with the several years Writer and Writer’s Digest stacked on my floor. People much better than I with something substantial to offer that I can’t add to.
It’s been years since I’ve read anything really new about good writing and writing well. I can turn a phrase or re-spin a strategy but it’s all told elsewhere and often told better.
I admit to a brave new world. Twitter, blogging, website, none of these existed when I traded in my Corona for my first computer. God bless the ‘backspace’ key! Hell, my first typewriter had no electrical cord dangling from its bottom. And, until recently, I transcribed first drafts of smeared ink onto blank paper or a blank screen.
I admit to new things coming out about writing for these venues. But, these are about effective use of one’s voice in these venues. It is not about good writing and what good writing is – or is not.
To me, the essence of good writing is good talking.
It’s rhetoric. Go to Aristotle. Go to the Roman orators. Follow that trail forward to learn how to effect readers through language.
Comb through my years of writer’s magazines. Find something new about writing sentences or paragraphs. Find something new about plotting. Find something new about form or persuasion. I dare you.
Writing is hard. That’s what I have to say about writing. Writing is something I imagine is like war. The writer suffers endless bouts of boredom followed by gut-wrenching, paranoid, terrified worry. The writer suffers the loneliness only artists and castaways may know. The writer waits the judgment of strangers as the condemned waits for the gallows. Not like the condemned, however, he suffers to live haunted by those judgments while the next WIP gestates.
Poor writer. Boohoo. This is the payment for those instant long lightning flashes, those blissful orgasms of creation.
I cannot stop though. I’m a junkie. Quitting Marlboro Longs, quitting meth, was easier. Those stories. Those characters. Requited love, pure and complete, keeps me at it. Those dreams in the night, those created people, they whisper sweetly to me as I lay beneath the covers. So much truer, so much fuller than real life.
Writing is hard. I cannot stop.
Girl Porn
2/23/14
‘Honey?’
Oh, God, I knew that sound. I knew that tone. My wife had been looking at ‘girl porn’ – again. I buried my face deeper into my book.
‘Honey?’ Sweeter now but more emphasis.
I turned up the TV.
‘Honey?’
‘What, love?’ I capitulate.
‘I want you to do something for me,’ she said.
I remain silent. I wait.
‘The Center is having its Home Show this weekend. I want you to go with me.’
Damn! I heard the ‘ka-ching’ sound our savings account makes when 10 thousand dollars drops from it. I heard the echo of so many less-than-subtle hints dropped here and there around the house.
The boy graduated. All of this winter’s funerals are done (I pray to all the many gods). Most of my inheritance is secured. Royalty checks now lay in the account. All that money just sits there smoldering in the bank. All thought of all that money just sits smoldering in her frontal lobe.
It is time. Time for our house to have its bi-decade infusion of tens of thousands of dollars. Things have been the same around here for far too long. If you doubt that fact just ask her.
So, where is the ‘girl porn’? The TV? The newspaper? It doesn’t really matter. She’s got the itch and I’m only the husband.
I bow to the inevitability.
The venue is in a great edifice, The Berry Center, originally dedicated to the sacred Texas religion of high school football at the cost of $73 million dollars. This mammoth hall rests next to 12,000 seat football stadium and is open for events such as Cirque du Soleil, The Nut Cracker Ballet, The Mom Expo, The CFISD Spelling Bee, rock concerts, children’s inoculations, book and crafts fairs, as well as school graduations and the sacrosanct football games. Of course, all of these are second only to ‘The Home Show’ just ask any woman in the suburban waste lands within the surrounding 50 miles.
They are all there, husbands in tow, within moments of opening, discount coupon in hand.
This year’s prime project, for us, is redoing the master bath. New shower. New tub. No tile – not any more. Less glass. A bloody bench to sit on for leg shaving. And, that’s just to begin.
As if fate came down and sat on us, the very first booth in the very first sector held stone shower inserts fit for Caesar. Of course, the bastards placed a tall, swarthy, tattooed, and confident, salesman just dying to make eye contact with moneyed, middle-aged, professional women with husbands in tow. He, they, saw her coming. Like I said, girl porn.
I had to admit, those things were for royal bathing make no mistake. Brochures dropped into totes, business cards exchanged.
Keep it a secret but I really like home shows. Eye candy even for me. And, the freebies – oh, boy, the freebies!
Water features burble. The world’s sharpest knives glitter. Light fixtures glow. Ceiling fans spin. Air filters filter. Rare coffees scent. Pitchmen tout. Experts lecture. Plants grow. Massagers vibrate. Hammocks swing. Dips and soups taste. Temptations abound.
By the end, our totes sagged with other tote bags, ball point pens, wine bottle openers, magnets and magnetic clips, filter samples (each imprinted with local business logos), local honey, Texas pressed olive oil, granite cleaners, pet odor treatments, organic corn chips, dipping bread, soup and muffin and dip mixes. Don’t even begin to count the business cards and flyers.
‘Thanks for going with me,’ she said with a smile filled with gratitude. ‘It was a lot more fun with you going. Really.’
Yeah, really. She figures that my going made it easier to pry funds from the savings account. I don’t let her know it but I really do feel that it’s her money too – that it’s her house too. I figure she’ll not give me too much trouble when my vacation just happens to begin the day the workmen start destroying the house.
Touch books
3/2/14
I love the touch of books.
I love to hold them feeling their heft in my hand. I love the way the weight of them rests on my lap. I love the touch of them as my fingers turn and my hand presses the pages as I read. A visceral thing that is sensual and tactile. One of the first real sentient pleasures given me after my weaning.
There is more to it, however. Isn’t there always? I not only want the touch of them. Like any good lover I want the way books touch me. Touch me they have. Touch me they do.
I was born a reader. Few childhood memories come without something readable near. I think that the chief function of those earlier books, as those of today, was to take me far away from ‘near’. Far away from the bland and the familiar. For a small town boy from south Texas and northwest Louisiana far away meant mountains and adventure. No mountains, no adventure, showed out my window.
However, there was Heidi - Johanna Spyri.
Heidi by Johanna Spyri is a strong early memory. I can’t remember that ‘Classics lite’ version I kept for so long, read and reread a hundred times. Go figure why. Boys teased me that it was a girl’s book. Maybe so. I loved her adventures in the mountains with her reluctant Grandfather. And, I cried. And, I did not care that it was a girl’s book.
Banner in the Sky by James Ramsey Ullman (and his various versions: The Third Man on the Mountain, and The White Tower). Men’s reading for sure. Boy conquers mountain. But, the boy lost his father on that mountain so still I managed to cry.
You gotta cry for orphans – you just do. So I guess these early readings taught me to cry for something else than the beltings I got for being bad. Spare not the rod, huh dad?
Next came the readings of men. Thank my next door neighbor for that. That and my very first electric razor he gave me for a birthday years ahead of actually having a beard. The guy moved shortly after giving that razor. A day after he left his house I played ‘get shot and roll down the hill’, out in my back yard and I spied books piled in his abandoned garbage cans.
Books!
Here was treasure. Pounds and pounds of grown up books. Like ‘film noir’ these were piles of ‘lit. noir’. Men’s detective stories and men’s adventures. Grizzled, burly, worldly heroes always looking for a reason to skip shaving that day and ready to be at the right place at the wrong time. Curly headed women with big soft chests always looking for reasons to climb out of their shirts and needing burly worldly men to help them find treasure or lost lovers. I was probably 12 when I dug through those bins. I’m probably due some therapy…
Three TV stations broadcast in the town of my youth. Each Saturday at least one ran an adventure movie in the early morning before my Mom sent me outside to play. Many Saturdays some Tarzan movie showed. Johnny Weissmueller’s famous yell rang through my neighborhood. When pushed from the house on those days I ended up some tree trying to imitate him. Some bookstore just a trolley ride downtown carried the whole set in cheap hardback bindings. I saved my Kennedy half dollar allowance for weeks at a time and bought each book one at a time.
Edgar Rice Burroughs and men’s adventure books. I was a lonely, four-eyed, car-less, young man. These books taught me two things: how to be alone and there was a much bigger world outside of the narrow confines of American South. Oh yeah, that and there might be women in the world that found excuses to climb out of their shirts.
‘That’s some catch – that Catch 22.’
And, it was too. I caught Catch 22 in high school. I caught it from a friend I admired as being very mature and worldly. I was neither. He told me Catch 22 is a ‘must read’. He said I would find ‘the truth’ in its pages. The skewed timeline threw me somewhat but the author, Joseph Heller, kept me giggling. It enlightened me, too.
Catch 22 taught me that maybe, just maybe, the world did not work exactly as I was taught in high school civics class in 1966. Viet Nam, Kent State, Richard Nixon, Civil Rights movements, other things, came along to reinforce the many ‘truths’ I found (IMHO) in the pages of Heller’s book.
I think I mentioned some lonely, four-eyed, young man. That boy stood around staring at the Drama department’s bulletin board late one afternoon during his first semester dreaming of being discovered and looking lost.
‘You look lost,’ a guy said.
Yes I was I admitted to the guy. He told me his name was Jimmy. Jimmy sort of adopted me that day. I consider Jimmy one of the folks that helped me grow up. He was my ‘in’ to the sixties radical groups – or what passed for them in that small southern college town. A few other groups of the subcultures rife in America in the late sixties became mine for the taking thanks to my new friend.
Before, dear reader, thought runs rampant know that we of the sixties were Renaissance men and women. As we explored sensation we explored thought, and poetry, and literature.
Jimmy let me see his copy of The Fellow Ship of the Ring, book the first of The Lord of the Rings. Gods, I loved those books. If ever there existed a book that took me to places I had never been or made me feel things I had never felt, it is The Lord of the Rings.
I every true sense, Tolkien’s tome taught me the meanings of friendship, loyalty, courage. Not many of those kinds of lessons down in North Louisiana. I grew up the more through the next years and learned how to apply those lessons. And, how to deal better with enemies, betrayal, and cowardice, finding their way to my door.
I felt, sometime in those years, that I had to graduate Sunday School. No one at the churches I attended seemed eager to do that for me. I didn’t understand. It’s not like I dropped a lot of change in the tithe tray. I could only memorize so many verses. I could only sit through so many hundreds of sermons. I graduated myself. I let my spiritually go dormant.
Boredom is the true mother of all new things. On a boring day I ventured into my local used bookstore and stumbled across Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal by Alan Watts. Loved the blurb and loved the cover art. Mister Watts, a defrocked priest, was a Buddhist and a wondrous explainer of things.
Doors to many places opened for me after reading that collection of essays.
Mister Watts loosened me up enough to consider buying The White Goddess by Robert Graves.
These two authors taught me how to better think about the nature of Myth and the nature of God.
A book. A great book. What makes a great book? What criteria does a reader use to measure that? I'm afraid my criteria would only be personal not universal. Did it change me? How? Did it teach me? What? Would I read it again and again? Why?
Mostly, to me, a great book must touch me. It must change me. It must dance a dance of temptation to make me hunger to reread it – to discover more of its secrets.
Busman’s Holiday
3/20/14
Dark and dreary. Winter and weather. Death and dying. Chores and change. Enough!
I needed a break. The brain was stale. The well was dry. The pages were blank and getting blanker. I needed to hit the door running and get the hell out of here. No other solution came to mind.
Got the family’s permission. Made the reservations. Packed the bags. Gassed the Honda. Kissed goodbye. Drove away.
Day the first.
They call it a ‘busman’s holiday’ because a bus driver, when he goes on vacation, gets on a bus and goes. A writer goes on vacation going somewhere to write.
‘Hello. I know I’m a bit early but I have a reservation. Is my room ready,’ I say to the desk clerk. She, already seeming exasperated, stirs up her computer.
‘Sorry, Mister Malone. Your room’s not ready. Not yet,’ she said.
‘How long, do you think?’
She shrugs and hums and scrunches up her face. ‘An hour, maybe.’
‘Busy, huh?’ I said. She sighs and nods. ‘I noticed, coming in. Lots of traffic and the streets are crowded. What’s going on?’
‘Well, not only is it Spring Break,’ Spring break! I thought that started next week. ‘It’s also Hell Week.’
‘Hell Week, what the hell is that?’
‘The bikers are out. They’re all over the place.’
Damn!
‘Alright,’ I said. ‘I’ll go find some place to hang around. Where can I find some parking? Maybe free parking?’
‘Good luck with that,’ she shrugged.
I found an open slot on the back end of town and walked Main Street jostled by the crowd. You couldn’t see the sidewalk for the feet. You couldn’t get lunch for the waiting lines of tourists. Families crowded the shops. Traffic crowded the streets. Cyclists and outlaw bikers threaded between everything. An hour later I returned to the hotel desk.
‘Sorry sir, your rooms not ready.’
‘Another hour?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘Maybe two.’
Two it was. But, the room had a balcony with a view of the pool and of a truck repair shop. Top floor, however, so no tromping of family feet over my head. I manage to find a table at a nearby German restaurant for some schnitzel and sour kraut.
Fredericksburg, TX, was founded in 1846, by 120 German immigrants under the ‘auspices’ of the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas. The Society’s Commissioner General, known as the ‘Adelsverein’ was Baron Ottfried Hans von Meusebach. Von Meusebach, besides leading German immigrants in the Central Texas hill country, is famous for an 1847 treaty made with several Indian tribes. His treaty is the only such treaty never broken and kept the German settlers at relative peace as most of the rest of Texas seethed and burned in a generation’s long feud between Texans and the Comanche tribes.
Many thousand German immigrants made the perilous journey from Indianola (also called ‘Carlshaven’) port to the rugged hill country suffering sickness, poverty, and starvation to create a land free of religious and political oppression. They named their town Fredericksburg after the chief ‘Adelsverein’ Prince Ferderick of Prussia. And, the town shows their German roots in its architecture, its food, and most of the present population. That is changing now as the town suffers a new immigration from retired yuppies and modern suburban development.
However, the rich history, the Native American ghostly spirituality from nearby Enchanted Rock, and the regal savage beauty of the Texas Hill Country (among the geologically oldest areas on the surface of the Continent), draw me here.
I left the restaurant for the room, cranked up some coffee, and pulled out my trusty fountain pen.
The brain was stale. The well was dry. The pages were blank and getting blanker. Funny how that works. This was a magic place. Did my muse not make the trip? I made some more coffee. I wanted the flow. I wanted the spark. I made myself write. I hate making myself write. Two scenes I managed to finish. Nothing new. I already knew what I wanted to say in them. Still, one scene each for two WIPs. And, all before I ran out of steam.
Day the second.
Waking from a restless, dream filled, sleep is not fun. Raking the tangles from my hair isn’t either. The ‘free’ hotel breakfast is a little better. They have omelets and something that looks like sausage links now – better than the old days of ‘Continental’ breakfast rolls with sugary fruit compote. The coffee is better, too.
A quick shower then the ergonomic office chair – I sit – I stare. Where is that muse? A walk in the sun often helps. Spending money always helps. I walk in the sun with a wad of money in my pocket. Fredericksburg is, like all tourist towns these days, great for shopping. It’s a great place for wine tastings too. There is a relatively new wine making industry in Texas. Lots of places offer tastings down Main Street. I taste lots of wine this midmorning. Texas wines are getting better. I’m looking for Cabs – you know, for the wife. One tastes like it’s mixed with espresso. One tastes of cloves. One tastes like purple grape juice. A couple are good. I buy the one that is a blend of cab and merlot. At another place I find a blend of 3 cabs. It’s good, too. I buy a bottle of that one. On the way back I pick up a sandwich. The area is famous for its German styles of sausage and smoked meat. Now, I won’t have to go out for supper.
Back to the room and its ergonomic chair. I put on P. J.s and make coffee. Within the hour I’ve hit a stride and am quite pleased with myself. The muse is still absent but the fountain pen is spouting words. Well, for a while. The weather is nice. I try the balcony.
For the first time, I notice that, behind the truck repair shop and over the barren oaks, are the savagely beautiful Hill Country hills I love so much radiant in the intense Spring sunshine. I notice the huge pool and patio. There are water features, a meander around a cement island, fire features, hot tub, umbrella sprouting tables, the lounge chairs all empty, all shimmering in that sunshine. I also notice the hum – a tremendous, thundering hum. I notice the hum and the chlorine smell. Directly below my window is the pool’s pump. Let’s say the pool’s pump complex for it resembles a chemical plant. I sit, feet propped on the railing, staring at the view or the blank paper as long as I can stand it. The hum was not calming.
I glance at the growing shadows across those distant hills through the glass sliding doors. At least I catch my writing stride again and stop only to eat that smoked beef sandwich.
Day the third.
A cold front blows through overnight. For Texas in March, that means the morning suffers a temperature in the forties, the sun carries no heat, and the wind howls. I can be satisfied with locking myself in and running through a couple of ink cartridges.
Of course, nothing comes. The brain pan dries up as fast as my determination hardens.
I go to free writing. I list and bullet. I mind map and cluster. Quotes sometimes work. I go to ‘goodreads’ and their quote page. I go to Google quotes. ‘Wikiquote’. Web searches next – looking up topics and historical personages about my subjects. Notes are made – for ‘future reference’.
The room cleaning crews are next consulted. They have extra coffee packets. A good coffee buzz might be just what the doctor ordered.
Coffee actually works – on my muse anyway. It wakes her up. She asks me to take her out to eat. We throw on my jacket and we head out in the brisk dusk to find another German restaurant. A different version of schnitzel and kraut this time washed down by some good old German beer. Muse of the ginger hair and emerald eyes likes that. She stays awake and truly helps me.
I stumble through some fairly nice scenes with my post-Civil War sequel but got stumped on my Dark Age post-Arthur saga. I am in a middle of a feast scene that needs ‘original’ Bardic poetry and tales. I am neither bard nor poet. Muse whispers in my ear. Google it, my lover, she whispers. I Google ‘Taliesin’. Low and behold, some good models appear for me to use.
Yea, Muse!
Day the fourth.
I don’t even try on this morning. It’s time for a break. Let’s do a museum day! Muse warns: stay to the writing themes – avoid the Nimitz WWII museum. That leaves the Pioneer Museum and Ft. Martin Scott. It’s Spring Break! Reinactors abound. Weaving, butter churning, blacksmiths, rope making, Civil War medics, retired Texas Rangers. Perfect.
They are all gracious. Creative sparks fire. The juices flow. I take time for BBQ and beans and potato salad. Then it’s off to work I go.
It’s the best day yet. Fingers hammer the key board. The mouse skids all over the desk. The save button is clicked and clicked. I don’t even notice the humming of the pool pump. It’s near midnight before the arthritic thumb tell me I must quit.
Day the fifth.
The busman had his holiday. The writer monk had ‘sabbathed’ his sabbatical. Shower. Pack. Drive. The family is also gracious enough to at least pretend they are glad to have me back. I am content.
Walking Down Stream of Consciousness
4/7/14
Went walking again this morning. Fourth day in a row since I’ve been back at it. I allowed myself a break from it – an indulgence. It’s been a long painful winter and I wanted the self-flagellation of avoiding everything good for me – avoiding most things that might have made things better. There has to be, however, a time when enough is enough. The alarm must be set, the shoes put on and the house left. Well, put on pants, too. I wouldn’t want to be the cause of embarrassment for the more literal of my readers.
Do not think I walked from the house before daybreak for my health. Do not think I did so for my peace of mind. I did not leave even to stimulate the birth of new creative ideas. I left fleeing from myself. I left fleeing my inner dialogue. I left to stop all thought but how to draw the next breath. That one thing. That one thought.
Walking and I have a strange history together.
I am one of those unique individuals alive today truthfully able to tell my child I walked all the way to and from school rain, sleet or snow. Of course, growing up southern had very little snow and the distance from home to school, only six blocks.
Six blocks but, oh, the anticipation. Being so grown up. Mom and I practiced for week. It was a straight shot, out the back door and through the fence gate then straight up the side road ‘til the dead end at my elementary school’s rear entrance. What a grown up adventure.
Moms can ruin growing up way too often. That first real day of real grown up adventure. I set off satchel in hand. I joined up with some neighborhood friends. But I looked back for that one last glance of boyhood, that first glance of adulthood. And, there was my mother a block back with another mother following me, following us. No adulthood for you her presence said. I seem to remember bawling at her to go home.
I lost that one chance for that one memory. On the second day, full of trepidation, spending the whole walk looking over my shoulder. She didn’t follow but that one, that first, grand walk never happened. It was gone.
Walking to school. ‘Didn’t have to for what we called Junior High. The trolley (not San Francisco trolleys, ours were electric buses that had a big arm on top that connected to an electric line strung above the roads) stopped at the end of the block that took me right to school.
By high school and the time I reached full blown nerd hood, my Mom got as tired of driving me as I got tired of being the kid a mom always brought to school. It was the school all the rich kids went to and I was the kid from across the tracks. They, most of them, got to drive daddy’s car. I didn’t.
Byrd High School’s original name was ‘The High School’. An edifice, both beautiful and hoary at the same time, built in the 1920’s three stories high and of white-trimmed red brick. Whose cornerstone was laid with full Masonic ceremonies and including a letter from C. E. Byrd; a boll weevil symbolizing problems of the farmer; a bottle of oil, symbolic of the oil business; an ear of corn representing agriculture; coins representing the financial situation, and a Bible. A total representation of the town and the environment where I grew up. It lay 2 ½ miles from my front door.
Down to the end of the block. Cross the busy street where the trolleys are. At the trolley stop is the cemetery. Circle around that on the days you are not brave. Ease into a commercial area with warehouses and near the 6 story skyscraper where Dad worked. Cross those infamous railroad tracks I’m on the wrong side of. Enter into the upper middle class area where my ritzy Baptist church is. Make your way between those well-trimmed homes and the glares from the upper class housewives suspicious of any young man walking through. Find the busy street that goes from downtown to the Parish line.
There’s the school. Ooze into it and try to be invisible. Do this while carrying a load of school books, wearing the loafers with the lighting stripe inset you think is so cool, and dodging the Federal suits roaming the grounds protecting the one black kid the year they integrated the town’s public schools and businesses. Come rain, come sleet, come dark of dawn…
College came. Its streets were tame. Class in the daylight, the 24 hour coffee shop in the night, the only paths. Or, so I thought. A sophomore adopted my orphan self and walked me into the glories and glooms of the sixties. Tune in, turn on, drop out, and hitchhike across America by highways not unlike Route 66.
Putting my thumb out to the motorized nation became my next walking. I had a love/hate with the lonesomeness of the road. But I walked my thumb, not the kind that stood on the corners waiting. Here’s a secret for anyone brave enough to do that these days. You get rides quicker the farther out in nowhere you happen to be.
That kind of walking changes a man. It changed a few women, too. Best and worst drive the ways. The fact that I survived makes all those memories into great adventures and a slight case of PTSD.
Later, when sanity again reigned in my life, I learned another way of walking. I learned the ‘Tai Chi walk’ as it was called in my new martial arts class. It is so much easier to watch and model than to explain but the Tai Chi walk is the way one places feet and transfers weight through the various forms of Taijiquan.
We walk wrong. Did you know that? Normally most people seem to throw their torso forward as if falling then step their feet forward catching their weight with each step in some headlong flow. Better is to begin by keeping the torso erect, the top of your head in line with the ears, shoulders, and hips. Transfer weight to one foot with the knee slightly bent, extend the non-weight bearing leg touching the heel to the floor then lowering the toes until the foot rests lightly on the floor. Next, in an even flow, transfer the weight to that forward foot. Only when all the weight is on that forward foot does one lift the now non-weight bearing foot bringing it first up to the weight bearing foot then extending it forward with the heel lightly touching the floor and repeat. After some practice, add something. When each heel rests on the floor turn the toe out at a 45 degree angle before transferring the weight. As you shift forward, keeping the torso erect allow it to turn toward that 45 degree angle then transfer the weight. This will make your steps seem to make a 90 degree rotation left and right allowing a solid fighting platform aiding in martial stability. Again, easier to model than to explain.
Walk right in, sit right down, daddy let your mind roll on
Walk right in, sit right down, daddy let your mind roll on
Everybody's talking 'bout a new way of walking
Do you want to lose your mind?
Walk right in, sit right down, daddy let your mind roll on
- Dr. Hook – ‘Walk Right In’ Lyrics
Only now, as a man of advancing years, do I walk for something that the neighbors think may be for my health. It’s not, though. I leave out before dawn. I walk to be a creature of the night and, in the dark, I own the empty world. There is the wind and the breath in my lungs and, for a short time, nothing else.
Ballet 5/26/14
Tights, Short Skirts, and Jumping Around
5/26/14
By Steven D. Malone
‘Twas a dark and quiet night in an empty urban park deep in the downtown of the fourth largest city in the nation. Late night. The skyscrapers slept through their vigil. Passing cops glared at us until they determined we were harmless. Only a few homeless walked the esplanade but only the three of us walked near the chortling pool, myself and the two women. I can’t remember where we’d been. Some club probably where the music played too loud for our adult ears and the wine and ale cost more than our adult wallets wanted to pay.
We enjoyed the night. A blues band probably played. I love the blues. I probably drank imported ale. I love British ale. Out on the sidewalks when the band had enough, we discovered downtown deserted. Downtown belonged to us. We walked. Well, they walked. I strolled. The three of us go out a lot. But, it’s the two women and me, the third, Y-chromosome, arm despite being married to one and knowing the other for over 30 years. The two marched out in front of me chortling and giggling like the fountain in the pool. I followed watching their swaying butts, as was my want, and drank in the humid night air, as was my want.
I knew they plotted and schemed when they walked and giggled. They were dangerous when they did that. That night they pondered places to go that were sophisticated and worldly so they could go there to be sophisticated and worldly. They, the both of them, were that already and they would be sophisticated and worldly playing putt-putt golf or pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. For them, however, you go somewhere and be somewhere to be sophisticated and worldly. Doing so makes it so.
Then, I heard the ladies say the word “Opera”. No!
“No, my lovelies, no.” I said. “If you go to the Opera, you go alone.”
Not an Opera fan. Can you tell? I can listen to the “soul” of Joe Cocker, the “blues” of Janis Joplin, the once pristine notes of Joan Baez, and tear up. I even remember a cute little soprano that sang in an old movie – I can’t remember if it was the Marx Brother, W. C. Fields, or Laurel and Hardy – but I like the clarity of her voice that I’ve not seen in any Opera I’ve ever suffered through. Get me in front of a “fat lady singing” or a stuffed bearded baritone and you may see my skin crawl. The human voice is NOT a symphonic instrument. It’s all hoot and gargle. Don’t know why. The mother that carried me rolls over in her grave for all the treasure and time she took forcing such things on me – I prefer the gentle tones of nails on a chalk board to an Opera.
They turned back to sway and giggle and wander the dark park with new searches. I heard the word “Ballet”.
“I’d go to the ballet with you,” I said. The turned on me as if I cut cheese in church, mouths agape, eyes wide.
“You like the ballet?” They couldn’t believe those words came out of me.
“Classical music. Girls in tights and short skirts jumping up and down. What’s not to like?”
Hey, relax. I’m a guy and I like symphony music where folks don’t sing.
Before the sun set on the following day, I proudly owned season tickets.
Within a season are two, we sat comfortably dead center on the Luge Deck, the two ladies in their sparkly dresses and pashmina stoles and me with my little 10X binoculars and my dress up shirt. They’re busy being posh and sophisticated and me – I’m just a grinning. I love almost all of the music I hear and the girls do wear tights and short skirts and jump around. I know a lot more about this wondrous art now and appreciate it for what is actually is. I stare in rapped awe at what those folks do. Sometimes I don’t even believe what I’m seeing.
I won’t try to create poetic crap about ballet. I’ll give a mention of a couple of recent ones not like Swan Lake nor the Nutcracker. Not like what you think. Not like what you may be familiar with. These demonstrate sublime acts of creation. They show what a creative mind can do bringing dance and the human form to music. They bring humor and beauty and they stand above and beyond others I’ve seen.
Two I found complete on Youtube. You will be amazed and you will laugh:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhU-brXFQR0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Yib2GFMssM
One, I have only a snippet, but you will see beauty:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oL1NaitBxck
Time worth spending.
The Sentence Copious
(or The Sentence Copia-ous)
6/8/14
God, I hate writing this sentence. I am hating the sentence in my WIP that sparked this essay, too. You will not read that sentence – probably ever.
I am not the kind of writer that agonizes over just the right word, just the right sentence construction, or just the right nuance or just the right thought, in my work. (You may read my work to find that out.) I let it flow. For good or ill, I let it flow then work it over in following drafts.
However, looking at that hated sentence, I had the question begged. What to do about it? What to do with any and all sentences I find myself hating?
The answer, of course, is to create a “Copia” for that sentence.
Surprised? I was surprised when I discovered “Copia” about a week ago.
A loose definition of the Latin word “copia” is an abundant supply of language at one’s finger tips. Something fitting to say (or write) when you need it. Hear expansiveness, amplification, abundance – hear copious.
Scholars I scanned spot “copia” in ancient and medieval texts on rhetoric, most often in Desiderius Erasmus’ work “De duplici copia verborum ac rerum” (“Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style”) once a very popular book on how to write, speak, and persuade.
The pertinent exercise, for this essay, from Erasmus is the application of different styles upon one particular phrase or sentence. He provided 150 different styles for one particular sentence. The sentence is: "Your letter has delighted me very much" (Tuae literae me magnopere delectarunt). Easier to show than to explain…
Edward Corbett translated some examples into English:
Your epistle has cheered me greatly.
Your note has been the occasion of unusual pleasure for me.
When your letter came, I was seized with an extraordinary pleasure.
What you wrote to me was most delightful.
On reading your letter, I was filled with joy.
Your letter provided me with no little pleasure.
Here are some of mine:
Reading your letter made me smile.
Upon ripping apart the wrapper ‘round your missive, raucous chortling accompanied each nuanced phrase as I recited aloud.
Your letter came and I laughed as I read it.
Your note brought me great pleasure.
Aperi. Curabitur. Protulit. (Opened. Read. Smiled.)
Get the Idea?
The idea was not just to pile up more words. Rather copiousness was about providing options, building stylistic fluency that would allow writers to have a large array of articulations, choosing the most appropriate to fit specific situations and/or specific audiences.
SENTENCES I WORKED ON:
The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination. – Northrup Frye
Books limit truth only to man’s dreams.
Literature creates worlds without limits.
Anything, anywhere can be reached or created in the mind of the writer.
Yesterday's kook book becomes tomorrow's standard text. – Northrup Frye
Ancient alchemy is future science.
Last century’s idiocy is tomorrow’s masterpiece
Yesterday’s silliness is tomorrow’s bible.
They say that all nature is alive. – Northrup Frye
I hear the gods and spirits live in every tree and spring.
The wise tell us that Nature houses the gods.
Can princes born in palaces be sensible of the misery of those who dwell in cottages? –Stanisław Leszczyński
Do the rich in his realm knows not the wretchedness in the hovel of the humble?
Never will the playboy in his penthouse touch the tramp in his hut?
Few rich men come from their mansions to meet the beggars under their bridges.
Richard Nordquist says:
“Why should we, as students and teachers of English, care about copia? Because the exercise still serves a useful purpose: not to promote windy repetition or cleverness for its own sake but to encourage stylistic experimentation and flexibility.”
Effective prose needs to respond to the interests and needs of readers. To achieve that, I need to be ready, as I write my draft, to experiment with words, fiddle with sentence structures, and play with figures of speech. Maybe that will get something done about those hated sentences.
Stanley Fish says:
“People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.”
And “Sentence writers are not copyists; they are selectors.”
William Zinsser says:
“Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do.”
Book of Firsts,
or My Life as an “Indie”,
or the Confessions of an “Indie”
7/10/14
It’s my son’s fault. The big bully.
My first (published) novel sat on a shelf in my office for years. Years. Long enough to have the electronic files made useless as technology advanced. I mean that. The first copy was a loose stack of paper in a box on the shelf and lay as data strings on a floppy disc. A floppy disc. Most of you are too young to know what that is.
He caught me moping about getting old and letting go of lost dreams one day. I told him about the box of hardcopy over there on the shelf on the left by the “How-to-be-a-writer” Books”.
The next thing out of his mouth: “Well, you should get it published.”
“Get it published” became his personal crusade. He rode me daily as only a teenager can ride. He followed up on that riding – daily.
It must have been fate for about the time I was warping the manuscript into Word 2007 (a mind destroying exercise for a techno-caveman) amazon started pushing is free “indie” publishing movement.
I went for it. The “submission-for-publication” route’s trail already oft trod. Luckier than most, I collected a ream of acceptance letters and rejection letters. My portfolio glowed with some few “published author” bullet points. Rest assured all you envious hopefuls, most of them were paid in copies but some came with checks. Divide net by time and I probably make .007 cents an hour as an author.
I’m old. I don’t have the time. I went for it. I became an “indie”. According to “amazon” the process was easy-peasy.
Every mistake in the book?
If there was a mistake to make, I made it. Minute one, hour one, day one, every mistake in the book.
I want to tell you, I read and edited my book eighty times at least, eighty, before I submitted my manuscript. Eighty-one would not have helped. Spell check, another forty. Grammar check, more than 20.
Why do the eyes stop seeing?
The thing was rife with errors?
I designed my own cover. Worked it up on Power Point using my own photo of the creek where the book’s set piece battle took place and some ancient photos of some of the people I based my characters on. Turned it into a jpeg.
Done is done, right? Wrong. It took two days and six email exchanges to get the thing centered and aligned over at Kindle. More at Createspace.
Why didn’t you get help?
Remember, I was a caveman lost in the last century of “rejection slip” wallpaper, snail mail, S.A.S.E’s, and waiting for nothing to happen. I did not know help was available. Copy editors were things of publishing houses. Proofreaders – why, proofreading was what co-eds offered in English class if they thought you were cute. I was only dimly aware of Goodreads and Google-plus. I pushed that button and twenty-seven hours later people could buy my book.
So, you’re a published author?
Thank you, God, for phone apps and eReaders. For if there is anything worthy of hating these are them. Places such as Kindle and Createspace have things called “Grinders” that grind such things as Word documents, html documents, and .txt files into books. Grinders replace typesetters for good or ill. I suggest ill.
These grinders became the bane of my existence. The “Look Inside” tool on my book’s amazon page, all of those preview readers and their respective emulations of ereaders and apps, phone apps. Paperwhites, lap tops, phones, notebooks – even calibre! All of them showed my book’s formatting as a big mess. Skewed indentation, awkward guttering (Guttering in a thing. I did not know that. I do now.), obstinate text wrapping, almost random line spacing.
Updates followed updates. Whole weeks of my life gone that I can never get back.
Well, didn’t you get help?
Yes, I did.
Their answer; “Well, it looked okay to us. I guess it depends on which ereader emulation you’re using.”
You’re killing me here, guys. I’m getting complaints. How can I sell my books if even the “Look Inside” tool introduces my book as one big mess?
Their answer; “Well, readers can adjust the font size.”
I did that. It didn’t help.
Well, didn’t you ask for help?
Yes, I did. Enough was enough. I engaged a professional editor recommended to me by a writer I respected.
Proofreading and copy editing for content, throw in formatting for Kindle and Createspace for free. Just a couple of grand. (That’s about a grand and a half more than I ever expect to make on the book.)
The proofing was great though I found at least 6 misspellings we both missed as did the spell check just two weeks ago.
The content editing? Well, of course, I write magic. Right? Wrong. The editor was mostly right about most of the things. Still, historical fiction was not the editor’s most favorite genre. We snapped back and forth about some archaic usage, how much poetic license can be allowed with weather, etc. Anyway, the poor thing really didn’t like my book though characterization, voice, pace, etc. were sound. Not great, in the editor’s opinion, but sound. Well, liking it wasn’t required. I didn’t like Dostoevsky – people read him though.
However, my editor seems to have dropped off the map. Those “free” formatted manuscripts that appeared in the contract as if part of the paid for service? You tell me. They’re not in my inbox.
I guess the lessons here are; don’t pay upfront the entire amount to an editor working from home with many pieces of personal business impinging on a workday and try not to pay for editing services to someone living in another country.
I engaged another formatting service. Of course, I paid in full. So, we’ll hope. The second edition is coming soon.
Are you ever going to stop whining?
Yes, I am.
“Oh, the Humanity”
A Reflection on Recent Events
7/26/14
Oh, the humanity! Remember that cry?
News reporter Herbert Morrison speaking as he watched the airship Hindenburg in flames and hurtling to the ground.
His pain sang out to the men, women and children falling with the ship. I thought of him when I watched recent events in Eastern Europe. I thought of him as I thought of those men, women and children falling from the Ukrainian sky.
I would cry; Oh, the Inhumanity!
A great swath of “humanity” blinked out in the instant that unthinking and very human idiot flipped the switch sending that death machine up into the heavens.
I know that the soldier lays in his bed at night telling himself; “but I thought it was a transport. I thought it was a transport.”
I don’t see him sleeping well. I don’t see him sleeping well for years to come. And I hope he doesn’t. Not for a long, long time.
Wars and rumors of wars. Wars for God. Iraq. Wars for power. Palestine. Wars for place. Crimea. There are wars of blood and wars of words. There are even made up wars like we have over here in America. Last winter, for the third or fourth time, we were told there was a war against Christmas!
For a short moment after news of the downed passenger plane broke, I begged the question:
“Oh, humanity, how have we gotten this way?”
That is the wrong question. We have always been this way. A better question; why are we still this way?
"Can we all get along?" – Rodney King
A friend once told me what war is. War is murder. Murder is how you spend your time. You commit murder. You sit around thinking of the next murder. You sit around and be afraid of being murdered. Murder.
True enough. War is also ugly. War is messy. War includes the innocent. We saw it rain innocents and bits of innocents just the other day. For whatever reason, this cannot be helped. And that’s with wars of blood and wars of words.
I saw this ugliness the other day, too. I saw it watching TV coverage of the war against our black President. Folks stood before busses of little brown children that crossed our border thinking this was a safe and welcoming place after the hell they bore in their home countries. These folks made their ugly faces, held their ugly signs, and yelled their ugly words. How ugly our hate makes us. This is not a new thing. I saw the same ugly faces and the same ugly words in the sixties when folks fought against integration.
I wonder if, in twenty years, these folks will look at the news pictures and regret how ugly they looked and how ugly they acted.
Probably not.
Recently archeologists dug up bones tens of thousands of years old. All ages. Men, women and children. They showed signs of being shot full of holes with bows and arrows. They speculate family groups fighting over a pool of water. It could have been a hate crime or a crime of passion. Some wayward thug angered because his mate left him. In-laws must die. Some superior” beings feeling they had better right to the puddle than did the “lesser” beings. Lesser beings must die.
We have not changed.
I try to change myself. It’s ongoing. Just got sick of myself. Of the things I was doing. Of the things I was holding on to. I sought philosophies of peace and tranquility. I made an effort to shed the philosophies of tribe and culture that kept me separated from those different from me.
To some degree these efforts must have worked. These days I ponder the mystery of why we, as a species, can’t get over ourselves enough to find a way to live in peace with each other.
It is no mystery, however. This ugly thing is in me as it is in you. I know the why of hate and of violence. I know the exclusion of seeing a “them”. I know the belonging of seeking of an “us”. I know the holding onto the pain of being wronged. I know the desire to hurt back.
I even know the motives of those that claim the ear of a god in gathering a “congregation”. The promise of a salvation in exchange for devotion and obedience. Devotion and obedience to the man, or woman, not to the book that is thumped or to any divinity that may be staring down from the heavens.
The opposite is in us, also. We have, well most of us have empathy. We can project ourselves into the experiences of others. We can feel and share in another’s joy and pain, triumph and defeat. Joining is sought as we long for friendship and mating and parenthood. And, despite how we parse these feelings and these relationships to set boundaries and exclusiveness, we want this society.
In some weird way, humans are a yin/yang swirl of social community and solipsist avarice.
The best I can do is continue to change myself. Maybe to encourage my family to maintain some innocence and generosity of soul. Maybe to continue toward kindness and acceptance hoping it gets paid forward in some ripple effect as a pebble dropped into a pond.
What do you do to make that ripple?
Hours I Will Never Get Back
Or, risks of the writer of Historical Fiction
8/11/14
I have a WIP (Work in Progress). The story takes place just after the American Civil War. In it there is a sea chase between a ship built as a blockade runner and a naval gunboat.
That gunboat rested in my mind as clear as last year’s Christmas tree. I remember it. I remember seeing it during one of my great, time wasting, net surfing marathons. The gunboat’s “visual” is there. And it is not there.
The gunboat is a problem. I need an updated visual. A visual to build my WIP on.
Our civil war was much more “technological” than we suppose. In it was born the steam powered and iron clad navy. Maybe the first big war to use these monsters. Maybe the first big war to build metal ships from the ground up in large numbers. The Navies of both sides built brutes made for war.
I went looking. Google images. Bing images. Wikicommons. Handfuls of Naval history and Civil War sites. Power of Steam sites. I went looking. I did not find.
They say that memories are not remembered. They are built. Built from wishes and wants and denials.
So over time I constructed a brute ship. It fit perfectly into my sea chase. I saw it looming, full of menace and threat, always there and always getting closer. I saw it haunting my heroes. I saw it haunting their dreams. I saw it a perfect fit for my WIP. I saw it dissolve away along with scene after scene.
Hours lost that I can never get back.
I write Historical Fiction. My monster, my brute, must exist in some form in the navies of the day. I had to pick a new one. A new menace to chase and to haunt.
So let me go back through all of those images. What will fit? What will work? What will menace and haunt? What will need to be rewritten?
Oh, there’s one. It might work.
More hours gone never to return.
Next the refit. How does it change my story? How does it temper all of the several characters chasing and being chased? How will it change the menace and the haunt?
More hours gone never to return.
Can the time that should have spent writing count as time never gotten back?
Monday was set. The schedule made. The ink was in the pen. The blank paper sat waiting.
For want of a boat the hour was lost. For want of an hour the morning was lost. For want of a morning the scene was lost. For want of a morning much is lost never to return.
Appositive Truth
8/16/24
I sit in my chair holding a most wondrous thing. A gift that took too long in coming. My gift is in the form of two spiral notebooks. My oldest friend gave them to me. The notebooks hold a catalogue of my sins.
I’ve known this woman longer than time and she does, in fact, know where all my skeletons hide. She may hold one or two or ten of those skeletons herself. But those skeletons are not the sins catalogued.
Not the cardinal sins though I have committed most if not all of them. Not the sins of the flesh though I seek to continue to commit them for some years to come. Very ambitious for and old man married these many years. Hope springs eternal.
The sins catalogued in my great gift are the sins against grammar. Sins catalogued point by point, line by line, start to finish. And, with any luck at all, every last blessed one of them is on the list.
My sins against the lowly comma amounts to serial date rape. My use, abuse, and neglect of the comma are legion. As far as I can tell I’ve never done a right thing to, with, or for the comma.
Go easy with me. Use, abuse, and neglect or use, abuse and neglect? Not even Webster and Strunk find agreement. I worked with three editors on my book late in its published life. The first would not know a comma error if it crawled down its shirt. The other two? Well, let me say that I will not invite them to share a room together for they take opposite views on the matter. Both are adamant about their stances.
I make repeated comma sins against the mighty appositive. What the hell is an appositive? Do you know what an appositive is? An appositive is a noun, or a noun phrase, that renames a noun right beside it. “The rebel, the old man, slouched.” When I rename the noun “rebel” I appositive it. The appositive is “the old man”. I can’t remember the time I ever renamed a noun, even not knowing there was a word for it, when I did not set it apart with commas.
My editor tells me I do it a lot. I blame my grammar checker. My grammar checker is armed. She has a weapon. She has the “Autocorrect” and it’s loaded. I accuse her of automatically deleting the appositive commas. I do not know what the grammar checker has against appositives. I have nothing against appositives.
She, however, refuses to leave appositives dressed in commas.
Then there exists the apostrophe and its continual struggle to be used properly by me and by my grammar’s Autocorrect.
I’ll get specific. My Autocorrect is a vengeful creature. It sneaks up in the night and changes things. Take the nouns Comanche and Yankee. Take them, please. I’m tired of them and they may never appear in my work again.
I spent nearly a year using Comanche in drafts and edits of my book. Too often I wanted to make the word plural by adding an “s”, Comanches. My auto correct kept adding an apostrophe and making it possessive. I thought it knew more than me about how to spell the plural of Comanche. Comanche is the plural of Comanche. Well, duh, how ignorant am I. I did no less than four “Find and Replace” clicks to change Comanches and Comanche’s to then did a last search to find possessive Comanche to add back the possessive apostrophe and its “s”. My editor still found handfuls of the misspelled plurals.
What’s the thing with Yankee? Yankees is the plural of Yankee. Why did my editor find almost no plural Yankees and way too many groups of Yankees singularly owning things? I blame that sneaky weapon, the dreaded Autocorrect. It certainly can’t be my fault. Well, it can’t. Just ask my wife. Nothing is ever his fault, she’ll say.
I’m supposed to use a comma to separate two independent clauses when I use “and” but I’m supposed to use a colon, not a comma, to separate them when I don’t use “and”. Who thinks this stuff up? Who makes fifth grade teachers teach that lesson on the day I’m home sick? My colon hurts just thinking about this.
I tried to blame my Autocorrect on not telling me that. Didn’t work.
I’ll end this with a digression. Did you know that “hoofs” and “hooves” are both correct? However, they’re only correct if I choose just one and stick with it all the way through. I was sick the day they taught that, too. (Am I supposed to use a comma with the word “too” in the last sentence? How about in the sentence where I ask that question?)
I will take my great gift, those two notebooks, and cherish it. I will compile a list of most common grammar mistakes that I make and post them somewhere on my wall. I will find the book “The Comma for Idiots” and learn how to treat commas better. I will decide between hoofs and hooves then I will remain faithful to my choice. I will swear on those notebooks that I will be a better writer and a better man.
And I will ask my gentle reader, you, to please not search out my mistakes in this post.
Launch Liquor and Limeade
in Aytch Town
19/7/14
Ebb and flow. Swing from having no life to having a life. I grumble and whine either way.
“I’m so bored, boo hoo.”
“Cut me some slack, the world is too much with me.”
Time to change. Let’s have a road trip, we said Saturday. So it was off to the big city for some fun and adventure. Good stuff this day. Agenda: a book launch from a great author and Houston’s first “legal” whisky distillery complete with tastings.
Yea!
Mystery, mayhem, murder and morning coffee provided by Pamela Fagan Hutchins, Houston author of the new novel “Going for Kona”. And, all delivered alfresco on a bright and beautiful day at the Fioza Café. “Going for Kona”, Pamela's fourth romantic mystery, a Katie & Annalise spin-off, promises:
“When her husband is killed in a hit-and-run bicycling accident, it takes all of Michele Lopez Hanson’s strength not to burrow into their bed for the rest of her life. But their kids need her, and she promised herself she’d do the Kona Ironman Triathlon in Adrian’s honor, and someone seems to be stalking her family, so she slogs through the pain to keep herself on track. Her dangerously delirious training sessions become a link between her and Adrian, and she discovers that if she keeps moving fast enough to fly, she can hold onto her husband—even as she loses her grip on herself and faces her biggest threat yet.”
Pamela, and her husband and biggest fan, were gracious hosts and a delight to meet. And we look forward to reading her book. Learn more of Pamela and her writings at: http://pamelahutchins.com/
Next stop, liquor!
Touted, truthfully, as Houston’s first “legal” whisky distillery, Yellow Rose Distilling conveniently located itself just a mile or two from the book launch café. Well, maybe three miles.
Yellow Rose is not what I expected. It’s placed in a business park setting, upscale business park but not like most wineries and breweries I’ve gone to. I expected the old west or the “Roaring Twenties”.
To be the “first legal distillery” in town the doors have been open for about two weeks. Though they say they’ve been at it for a couple of years. But the setting is pleasant, like a neighborhood bar with the modern distillery in the back, and the staff are eager, proud, and friendly. You can tell, however, they are new at dealing with the tour groups.
Their products and cocktails are available thanks to a new, if limiting, city law at the bar. We took advantage as we waited and bought a glass of something not available for the tasting during the tour. The “Distiller’s Reserve” as it happened. Have one of those while you’re there. It was goooooood! It is the most expensive to buy by the bottle.
Now, pleasantly mellow for the tour, we went to the back rooms where the magic happens. There are about twenty of us, eager and wide-eyed.
To the right the grinding room complete with a ton of organic corn from North Texas for making corn vodka. Corn vodka? Why not potatoes? I thought vodka was potato whisky. To the left the one single distiller but it’s huge and shiny. Before us are racks of barrels, three sizes. Just behind the barrels are several tables with chairs and the sampling bars where the five liquors are standing at attention before trays of little cups. Four trays of caramel colored whiskies and one of clear corn vodka.
You can tell the guys are new to this, uncomfortable but proud and open to questions. They seem as wide-eyed as the tour group is. They offer us their wares. The Double Barrel Bourbon Whiskey not like the bourbon of others it is made entirely here in Texas. Most smooth. The Blended Whiskey harsher but nice. The Straight Rye Whisky, for making a Manhattan, tasting loudly of pine. Pine. The Outlaw Bourbon Whisky, aged in the small barrels, sweet and worth the sniff and swig. And The Blended Whisky easy to swallow but hearty. The corn vodka did not remind me of my long lost moonshining uncles’ corn squeezings, a blessing, and was a treat to drink.
Tours are in the afternoons Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. For times and information go to their site:
http://yellowrosedistilling.com/
Across the street from the distillery is Prince’s Hamburgers, an old time Houston tradition with just the place to polish off a Saturday outing. Love that Prince:
There are things great to do in “Aytch Town”
Living Long and Jolly
Food as Medicine
10/29/14
It’s not a baby aspirin. It’s an 81 mg aspirin. True, it’s not a baby aspirin but it is chewable and orange flavored. I buy them three bottles at a time to save money. They sit on my kitchen cabinet so I will not forget them before I go up to bed.
Why? Well, I’ve been told they help my heart. No, that proved wrong in recent studies. One’s body adapts and it loses its power to aid the heart. Or, so it’s said. But it helps slow the development of skin cancer. That’s a good thing, especially for an Irishman spending most of his youth surfing the summers away. Back on the cabinet.
Then there is the wondrous magic of whole,
unsweetened cocoa. Chocolate keeping the brain alive fending off Alzheimer. What could be better than that.
Wine. Wine is good for you. Always has been. Wine is in my house.
And vinegar, wonderful vinegar, the stuff of salad dressings, and pickles, and a major ingredient in ketchup. Why, it’s even used to reduce the pain of sunburn. You need raw, unfiltered and organic vinegar with “the mother” left in it. “The mother” is all the trash and cloudiness left even after drawing the vinegar off the apple pulp. Unsightly yes but required for the vinegar’s power to change the way your body digests sugar. People that take vinegar daily lose 3 to 5 pounds over people that don’t.
Good ol’ flaxseed oil. Keep that skin young and soft. Keep those aging eyes from drying out.
Green tea for weight loss. Blueberries for brain power.
Ginseng for energy and sex. Celery for blood pressure.
Add a little exercise in going out to the store and I should live forever.
I have a friend, sufferer of a host of ailments, who orders raw and organic chocolate online. He hopes to fend off the onset of dementia. He gets a pound for about $20.
My cousin has a cup of blueberries every breakfast. She buys them fresh. I buy them frozen and not organic. Cheap at about $3 a pound. Three. I don’t eat them every day.
My friend swears by green coffee tablets for weight loss. Tried it. Did not work for me. Anyway, the cost is huge.
At this time in my life I do things healthier than I used to.
That aspirin every day. I increase my allotment of veggies. Some, and often many of them, are organic. I decrease my allotment of red meat and take most of the fat out of that. I have fairly abandoned French fries as a way of life. That’s the greatest sacrifice. An Irishman loves his potatoes. It’s much less coffee and much more green tea.
It’s food as medicine around here. And maybe it works. I’m not much skinnier but I don’t take blood pressure medicine. I’m not diabetic. Not yet, anyway. My cholesterol remains low.
What’s low is the girth of my wallet. Why is it that the day after any study finds some food is actually good for you and may lengthen your life the price for it triples?
I’ll have to think about that one. I’ll think about it after a good dose of blueberries and when my chocolate gets here.
In the end, I think, there is no way out. None of us get out alive. Good nutrition is good nutrition. I am a student of Tai Chi and of Qigong. Each of these ways of life spend much study and effort in what they call “longevity”. Longevity to them is an observed path to a long and vital life. From what I read, most of the past masters lived to a generally average lifespan. Those I know about pass from us in their sixties, seventies or eighties. A few younger. A few older. There are tales of men and women living a hundred or more years. Some tales tell of much longer lives. If there is a 270+ year old alive today, he or she is not telling us about it. Good genes will probably tell the tale better than what a person eats.
Maybe the best “way” is to search out a happy time with the life given us. Maybe the best thing to do is to worry less. I think I’ll go eat some dark chocolate with blueberries while I sip some good green tea and think about something else.
Awaiting Echoes
11/18/14
“Publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.”
― Don Marquis
The house is quiet. Even the cats are outside. I sit at my keyboard glowering, lonely.
Writing is, all said and done, a lonely vocation by its nature. A writer is twice alone as the work is getting done. Alone at his desk in his (or her) room or in a cubicle and alone in his head with only his words. Alone in the final arbitration of word choice and organization. Alone in the decision to hit the “submit” button.
And, as Don Marquis reminds, the writer is alone on the canyon’s precipice waiting to hear any echo his words might have.
Alone in a crowd, too. I’ve stopped telling folks that I’m a writer much less a self-published writer. I get two kinds of responses when I do. Well, three if you conclude that a blank-stare nonresponse as a response.
The first kind (and least problematical if you can believe it) goes something like: You write? What’s the matter, can’t find a real job? No I can’t, I guess. Don’t really want too. In my long and checkered life I’ve jacked many trades and mastered a few. Many I just hated. Some, like teaching and mental health work, had many small victories but, well, just but.
The second kind of response has two general categories.
The first is: “I’ve lead an interesting life. You should write my biography.” Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. Folks, write your own. No one can do it better.
The second and most problematic is: “Would you look at my poetry? Tell me what you think?” Being of warm heart and generous spirit, I used to say yes to that. Maudlin stuff for the most part. It’s always a wonder how harsh life is to most folks. How much pain folks carry in themselves. I tell these people that their stuff is good, that it’s almost there. Almost. I tell them to research the place of “Universals” in literature (and maybe in psychology). That is what is usually missing in that stuff.
That failed connection with those nice people is away from anything truly shared. I am left remaining alone and lonely with my writing.
My wife looks over my shoulder and says, “That’s not so. You’re not so alone. What about all those Facebook and Google Plus and Twitter friends?”
Oops. I cannot forget those happy few, that band of brothers and sisters, whose hands I have not shaken, whose voices I have never heard. However, there are days when the echo is distant and long in coming.
Poor old Facebook, in a quixotic quest for money, has near ruined that brotherhood. I wonder what algorithm they use to selectively deny an interchange of posts to something like 3/4s of my friends and liked pages.
I’m new to Twitter but, by all the gods of the mountain, what a bust! Much like membership in a political party where members volunteer to be lied to by the puppet masters, joining Twitter is volunteering to be spammed near to death by the so-called “followers”. And, with all good will and innocence, on day one I commenced to “retweet” thinking that was accepted and expected behavior. Of the several hundred souls that “follow” me, or say they are, maybe 6 have retweeted any of my tweets. Those 6 will be retweeted by me. I will stop saying I’m on twitter and start saying; “I’m a twit”.
There is a bright spot over on the Google. G+ has gained me 20 or 30 engagers and I love them all. I just must remember not to or rarely mention my work and blithely ignore the mention of the works of others that get posted (Save those happy few. Those I’ll share around some).
Forgot Goodreads. Okay place as long as I always talk about what they want to talk about. I’m a rare enough bird with most specific interests that are shared by very few. Very few. Does not generate much conversation.
The Canyon of No Echo! Self-publishing.
I wrote a good book, worth the read, just in time for the amazon gift of free self-publishing. I did that. I dropped that thing down the Canyon of Soon Reduced Expectations. I did that knowing the stigma, knowing the universal abandonment of reading, knowing that some would call my baby ugly. You suck it up when your child looks you in the eye and says; “Do it!”
I did the “free days” and more than once. There are, apparently, some 2,300 owners of free copies of “Sideshow at Honey Creek”. As far as I can determine, not one of them wrote a review. No echo.
I did get reviews. For the most part, the book was well received by “verified purchasers”. “Gripping.” “Exciting.” “This should be made into a movie.” “The book stayed with me for a long time.” Yea, echoes.
That said, I still managed to make most of the mistakes of first time self-publishers. One reviewer said; “I’m sure this author can write but there were too many grammar mistakes…”
Now I’ve managed to discover a couple of reviewers on social media. And I know a couple of neighbors that read the thing. Each of them either said they did not notice the errors or that they weren’t all that disruptive.
Still that stung. I paid to have the thing proofread and I did an edit to freshen some of my prose. I did one more “free day”. Another thousand odd copies were downloaded.
Echoes? A review making a comment on better editing? Not one.
Publishing a book of any kind is dropping that rose petal and hearing no echo.
Strong Women
2/25/13
Strong women play a large part in my historical fiction. I am lucky to have supreme role models in my ancestors and in the women that share my world. They are giants of will and perseverance. They guide me as I create my fiction’s characters.
My great-great-great-great grandmother, Rhoda, became a widow in 1815. Her war veteran husband’s will, coin and goods, added up to $7. Four young children lived in her cabin. The 1820 US census listed her as a head-of-household. Few women found themselves on that list. When the Choctaw left their ‘treaty’ land in 1820, Rhoda packed up those children and left for what became Copia County, Mississippi. Again, the Copia County tax rolls listed her as head-of-household, just as rare there. Together they carved out a home in that forested wilderness.
Her son, Ike, married Pretia in Mississippi but by around 1845 they immigrated to the Republic of Texas. By the time of the Civil War, she lived on the edge of settled areas of America. On this frontier, Pretia birthed and raised 11 children. She endured all the travails of frontier life that women lived and survived. She helped found towns, turns a republic into a state, holds on through Reconstruction, resists the depredations of Indians and outlaws, and keeps house under the harshest of conditions.
My wife is also a pioneer. Becoming an adult in the early ‘70’s, she broke a number of glass ceilings, did what was then (and now for that matter) a man’s job in a man’s world, all while managing her two boy children – me and my son – and being an all-around great human being.
The list is not yet complete. There are all the mom’s, dentists, business owners, teachers, writers, nurses, doctors, and others to many to list. They enrich my world and my art.
All of these influence my character creating. In spirit or in truth, they lean over my shoulder as I write correcting me, guiding me, giving me ‘real’ female characters.