Black History Month 2021

Tags

Adichie, Black Author, Black History Month, books, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half a Yellow Sun, reading

I try to read a black-authored book during February., and it bothers me. It bothers me because I have to even protest such nonsense. The nonsense: why we cannot treat everyone the same. But I do. It’s not so much to add my voice to any protest but to reaffirm in myself that racism is a problem and if you’re not part of the solution … I suppose this is my meager contribution to solutions. I have countered many many idiots who claimed I need to watch better news or buy a gun or whatever nonsense they were spewing with my advice, “try reading a book.” I am convinced if we all became regular and varied readers, we’d all by much better off.

In the past few years for BHM I have read Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, Henry Louis Gates Jr’s Colored People, W.A. Spray’s The Blacks of New Brunswick, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and the short story collection Children of the Night edited by Gloria Naylor. I read all but Dhalgren for the purpose of reading black authors. Last year it was the end of February and I said damn, I should really read a black author. Then I stuck my head back into that beast of a book and never minded who wrote it. That’s a good thing, right? When you don’t even notice who the author is? It wasn’t till I got to a part he talked about a gang with blacks and whites in it and nobody cared that I realized he was black and I laughed at myself.

Black authors I’ve read outside of BHM. I think this is an important point to make. I read books for many reasons, and except for BHM, I do not read or pan books based on the author’s demographics, values, politics, religion, or anything else. I read Ender’s Game knowing full well the author was a bigot. I read Ayn Rand knowing full well that she was a nutcase. I am sorry to say I have to search for black authors I’ve read outside of BHM: Andre Alexis’ Fifteen Dogs, Lawrence Hill’s The Illegal, Adwoa Badoe’s Between Sisters, Alice Walker’s The Way Forward Is A Broken Heart, and of course Toni Morrison: Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and Sula. I plan on reading more Morrison this year.

For 2021 I am reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. This has been high on my TBR list anyway, and I think I can honestly say I am not reading this because she is black. I am reading it because she’s been highly recommended by a literary friend and it’s long past the time I gave her a go. I have also watched a number of her YouTube videos where I have learned things about racism that I did not know. For example, I no longer ask people of color where their ancestral home is. I only did that because of their skin color and accent, but I never did that for new white friends. I know Adichie is a very intelligent and gifted writer and I am really looking forward to this read, especially after reading the first page: … how the bungalows here were painted the color of the sky and sat side by side like polite, well-dressed men … Yeah, this author can write!

The Writing Walls are Crumbling.

Tags

Biden, bipartisan, debate, discussion, left wing, moving forward, right wing, Trump, walls

I have had a very hard time blogging over the past four years. It wasn’t just Donny and his insane cabal but his many followers. I have unfriended many people during this reign, and I have blocked many of them. And I did try to listen. I tried to understand the divide, not just in America but in Canada and around the world . I have teased and ridiculed not only Donny but these followers. I knew converting the mindless was not possible, but they were never my target. I targeted the middle-of-the road centrists, the non-partisan voters who see truth above party politics. Unfortunately, these people tend to be more laissez-faire and vote less than the indoctrinated [on both sides]. Biden winning the vote feels like a victory but a tainted one. We are not in a good place.

Now that we have a change on the horizon, can I dump the farcical memes and get back to arguing with logic? I hope I can. I hope we all can. I would much rather see far-righters and far-lefties write out what they believe and openly discuss their arguments. I would hope we can all sit down quietly, read others’ stances on issues, and work to some consensus. It is this back and forth playing with ideas that moves us forward. It is how I move my writings forward. I don’t write knock-out stories in one go. It takes many tries of pushing that theme or pushing this character or pushing that conflict. All of my best writing has come from pushing into areas I never ended up in. The same is true, I believe, for moving forward in social and political discourse. Life is story, and those of us who write a lot of story can attest that what we think is best almost always is not.

I could not write much about life these past four years because so many have adopted views of life I do not agree with. And no, it is not just the righties. I am anti-government. When governments in my Canada want to implement new programs, I cringe, because I know my government’s debts will rise with no compensating benefit. Too many pay no service at all to our enormous debts.

What do I want to Write About?

The list is long, and I don’t claim to be qualified to write about much of it. But the following is a quick list.

• Socialism
  • what is it?
  • where should social policies fit in a capitalistic society?
  • what do Liberals really want?
  • what are Conservatives afraid of?
• Competition
  • I am for competition, when it makes sense
  • when does competition not make sense?
  • how do we manage non-competitive units so everyone is happy?
• Executive Accountability
  • this is currently a critical problem in not only America but in Canada and around the world
• Taxation
  • does the low-taxation-of-billionaires model make sense?
  • what is the logical management perspective on achieving good government?
  • of course, taxation of expatriates and management of tax fraud.
• Reading and Writing
  • I work at my writing every day. I have many ideas on making writing more interesting and relevant
  • reading is a forgotten skill. We have millions of experts who do not read anything more than Facebook posts or their favorite news headlines
  • how to correctly punctuate lists 😉
• Racial Injustice
  • unfortunately, the list is endless!
• My many other interests: books, fountain pens, inks, poetry, nutrition, diabetes, and more.

There is so much to write about and such little time to do it. I’ve been sitting on my hands for so long, I don’t really know if I can do this. Is Humpty Trumpty falling off the wall enough to get me back into this? But of course I have to write. The only way we’re going to move forward as a civilization is through discourse and debate. I remember when the Berlin Wall started to come down. It was the day my firstborn entered the world. I was so hopeful. The world really did seem to offer a brighter future. But of course we’ve erected replacement walls, and unfortunately we always will. I think the purpose of my writing and many other blogs has to be the dismantling of walls. These ideological walls need to crumble.

The Ray Bradbury Challenge

 

So we decided to try this challenge. Write a short story a week for 52 weeks.

It’s hard.

It’s very hard.

I don’t know how it can be done.

Sure, I can write a short story in a day, but we all know it won’t be finished. I have written several this year within a week. None of them were complete. Pick them upa  week or two later, a month later, and three months later and you discover how unfinished they are. I honestly don’t know how Ray did it.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say people of Ray’s ilk, writers in the 1920s, 1930s, and up to the 1960s were not inundated by television, computers, smartphones, the internet, and the global village. Their life was books, books, and more books. They read and wrote and read and wrote. Their skills at as writers 18 were light years beyond ours at the same age.

I work at my writing. I claim to understand most grammar. Yet, as I edit a piece for the fiftieth time, I still find issues. If was spelled of and I never saw it. Generalizations. Inconsistencies. Neoplasms. Weak verbs. Echoed starting sentences. Loss of agency. You name it, I do it.

I don’t know if this year’s efforts will yield publication credits, but I sure have grown. Not only am I writing short stories [all the time] but I am reading them too. My current collection is Joyce Carol Oates’ Telling Stories, an anthology for writers. The two biggest activities writers can do to improve their skills is write and read. That’s what 2018 is for me — the year of the short story.

And I have grown. It’s hard to explain how. A sense of agency in a story might be the biggest thing. And I don’t recall anyone or any book ever teaching it. This year I discovered the concept in Alice LaPlante’s The Making of a Story and then later at a writing workshop. Maybe I just missed it before; maybe it has been worded differently; but it’s now something I try to feel in every story I read and write.

The second thing is this nebulous concept of imagery. I have written a story called Grandpa’s Hat. It’s about my grandfather cheating on my grandmother. Complete fiction, no real names. “The end isn’t logical; the middle doesn’t lead up to your ending.” Interesting; because in my mind it did. Oh, those mid-west, small town values I included but barely showed. Oh, those things I see but nobody else did. Oh … I see now. I can’t explain any better than that, but now when I read it I feel the ending and say, “Oh my!”

So I am busy writing. I am getting there. I can feel it. I am writing stories — I wrote a new one this morning — at the rate of about one every ten days. I have returned to 750words.com and find myself writing down a new story idea about once every three days. And I have a collection started. I have a theme and many of my stories are falling in line. Need maybe six more, depending on a decision. This is a collection I never would have dreamed of writing two years ago. Thanks to keeping one’s eyes and min open. Thanks to social media. Thanks to Ray Bradbury.

Going to try to write more blog posts, but it’s hard. I’m scared of what I might write about the political scene.

 

 

 

The SAD month of MAY

April was poetry month, and now May is short story month. That’s a short story a day, every day, for 31 days. I’ve done seven NaNoWriMos and eight NaPoWriMos or equivalents. I don’t want to try to name this month. NaSsWriMo?

I sat at my desk on Monday, May 1, 2017, having written 54 poems and a blog post about it, wondering what to write next. Do I pull out 2012 and commit three or four months to fixing it? Do I continue salvaging parts of 2016 to make a short story collection? Maybe I should pull out 2010 or 2014 and have a second go at those unfinished novels. 2016 called the hardest and I’d all but settled on it. That would mean skimming the 50,000 words looking for nuggets. I have pulled the first three scenes as stories already, but where to next? Always the question.

So I did what any good writer would do: I opened Facebook. Almost immediately I found a post by my friend Andrea about a contest in May to write a short story a day. We talked about this in the past on our Sunday morning write-ins, I’ve participated in 15 other x-a-day events, so I didn’t need to think about the implications very much. I went to the Story-A-Day site, signed up, took the first prompt, and wrote a 1489 word story.

Bang. #1 done. It felt great.

\The story had nothing to do with anything I’ve written before, but it was based on reality. For that reason alone, I will not share it. Especially where fiction is weaved in, and some of that fiction is not nice. Sorry I had to kill you off, X.

May 2’s prompt fit almost perfectly a scene/story for 2016 I had been pondering. I sat and wrote. I took a break at 500 words to think, ponder, and write nasty political tweets — Even though I gave up my U.S. Citizenship, I still fight for Americans living abroad. And I’ve been quite acerbic lately towards the liberal shills out there supporting #FATCA and calling people like me tax cheaters.

I could not fit today’s prompt into any existing project, which is no concern, but I could fit it into a potential 2017 NaNoWriMo story. I’ve been pondering writing Science Fiction instead of my social conscious urban literary stuff.  I only invested 313 words in it, but I think it is full of theme, conflict, and potential. The conflict is implied: we’re all becoming the same, and what does that mean for humanity. Could be my backbone theme for my seen-book series *grin* It is a very thin piece, trite, but I actually love it. I will try to write more around this piece and other ideas this month and through the busy summer ahead of me. NaSsWriMo might just make NaNoWriMo very productive.

Enjoy

Prompt: People called him The Doll Maker. Nobody ever wondered aloud why every doll had the same face.

“Did you guys see Doctor Davis’ new robots?”

The lunch table paid no attention to him. Jared set down his tray and pulled in his chair.

“He can choose any face he wants with a few clicks but he picks the same face, the same physical features for every one of them. You guys don’t find that odd?”

“Jarrod,” Emily says. “You had a busy morning? You’re late.” She stuffs a roll of California Gold into her mouth.

“You haven’t heard a word I said.”

“Sorry,” she says as she crunches on the crusty, green roll of processed unknowns the government has certified as optimally nutritious for young scientists. She chases it with a glass of fortified water the color of the noon sky as displayed in the wall monitors. “We were just discussing Doc Davis’ new robots. Did you know he ordered them to all look identical? Why would he do that?”

Jarrod picked the gray New Jersey Jets roll up from his gray plate. “It makes no sense. You’d think he was building an army or something.”

Emily inspects her mint-green plate for crumbs but finds none. “I know. It’s so creepy. We’re not going to be able to tell which is which.”

“They’re all fucking robots,” William chimes in with his usual cheer. “Who cares what they look like? You ask for a Solar Coffee, they get you a Solar Coffee. It’s not like you’d have sex with one of them.”

“Speak for yourself,” Emily says.

“They’re all male,” Jarrod says.

“So?” says William.

“They’re all so…unremarkable,” Emily says and smiles.

“He could have selected at least some variety,” Jarrod says.

“They’re robots,” William says.

“What does he have planned?” they all say simultaneously. They stop but don’t laugh.

William picks up his blue Florida Fish Roll from his light-blue plate and looks at it. “Why are they all the same?”

 

NaNoWriMo 2016 Aftermath – the novel

I wrote 50,091 words. It might be telling that as soon as I noticed I had reached the mark, I stopped writing mid-sentence. It’s not that I don’t believe in this story, but at 11:30 pm after playing trivia at the pub and drinking three 25 ounce beers, after being awake since 3 am and writing regularly throughout the day (5,109 for the day), including a poem, I was a bit tired.

My approach to this novel was entirely exploratory. I wrote three characters I could not normally relate to about subjects literally outside of my experiential scope. I am a 55 year old white male and I wrote about women’s rights; I wrote about a white, privileged, authoritarian, right-winged, American male and I consider myself a white, lower-middle-class, introverted, centrist truth-seeker; I wrote about a woman, a mother, who had sacrificed her career for money, who had sacrificed her dignity for her husband’s empire. for her family’s standing, but who worked through the years to escape the binds; I wrote a high school senior, a girl, who preparing to enter the adult world learns there are adult issues and that being a woman is in no way equal to being a man nor is it fair, but she does not see any reason it cannot be. I knew these people as well as I knew people on the news.

I know them better now, but I don’t honestly know them. I am happiest with my father and daughter stories. I am not so happy with mom’s. I won’t detail the issues or the stories, but Mom’s is rather hyperbolic. Her story pushes my boundaries, and my boundaries are quite malleable.

It is a story told from the three perspectives. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible are both on my near-term reading list, both because of they follow similar structures. One of my issues is the interaction. Each character has their own story instead of being a single story. Dad and daughter interact closely, and Mom and Dad do as well, but Mom and the daughter not so much. I expect a lot of pondering, reflective writing (which this blog is), and planning over the next few months. I hope to attack it again in February, but I may never revisit this story.

The writing is mostly active. It is not particularly literary or deep; though at times I dig into more imagery and reflective prose. It borders more on YA than it does adult literary. It’s another decision I have to make: who is its audience? All of the above?

Anyway, here’s a fairly innocent example of Dad (and a conflict already raises its ugly head: he knows from experience he has to walk alone, yet he has rarely done so¿).

Why can’t that woman make a decent pot of coffee? Made fresh and tastes a week old. All you need to do is pour in the pre-packaged grounds and flip the water switch. Does she not clean the pot first? The regular coffee brewers are all in training, and Carl knows from too much experience with difficult clients that he needs to get away from his desk and think, get away from the office and let the insane outside world temper his disdain.

Carl wonders how his city looks so strange in the mid-morning, and thinking back over his career at Harris and Saunders he cannot recall simply walking the streets alone if it was not lunch time or dinner time. He has always been accompanied by his mentor Keith Saunders, his current aging partner, Keith’s brother Peter Saunders, a senior manager, or a client.

He feels lost. He knows the streetlights but only from the view from behind his windshield, raised, perpendicular and parallel, not these angular perspectives. The shops are strange. A Subway shop. How long has that been there? A foreign restaurant. Indian? Egyptian? Turkish? Its letters remind him of when he tried to teach his young kids how to write. Lauren caught on pretty quickly, but Michael took a few years. Boys and girls, they are so different. Carl looks for a coffee shop but can’t find any. Where do all these young hotshots go on their break? He comes to an intersection, looks left, and sees a large, brown coffee cup swinging in the warm breeze.

NaNoWriMo 2016

Tags

authoritarian, Québec City, rammstein, summer, topfree, white male, white privilege

This year’s story is inspired by an image a young female friend posted on her Facebook this summer of a young female acquaintance of hers who attended a Rammstein concert in Québec City topfree. Not completely. She wore electrical tape pasties. I don’t know how old she is, but a mutual friend (male) is 20.

A few things struck me. First, she had to convince security she was legal. Her post has since been deleted (a shame she probably incurred abuse) but I believe she confronted them rather sternly. Yeah! Second, I was there. I didn’t see her, and I didn’t attend the concert; but I was exactly where she had her confrontation outside the gates.

Rammstein fans lingering around the fountain in front of the Québec Parliament building

 

My wife and I were visiting the city that very same evening . We were on our way to Toronto and I wanted to see the Parliament (my 2011 novel has a scene at the fountain). The property was all dug up and many of the statues removed, but we walked the grounds amid the crowd of heavy metal fans. The Plains of Abraham across the road were packed, and thousands more were walking up the hill to try to squeeze in.

 

 

Somewhere out here a young Saint John woman is going topfree and having a blast

Third, I’d like to consider myself a fighter of equal rights for everybody. A woman, any woman, should be able to pull off her top and enjoy the weather just as any man can. Why they cannot speaks to the growth we have not yet attained as a  human race. It’s one thing for a young Canadian girl to do this in a large crowd in Québec City, arguably the most progressive North American city. It’s quite another to do it in America’s Jesusland where she might be severely ridiculed or jailed or in a Muslim country where she might be killed. Fourth, she was young. My research suggests most women who go topfree are a bit older. Not much but they are more mature, are wiser, maybe have worked up their courage over time. I don’t really know. I am a 55 year old white male with almost no credibility to write such a story.

My story is about a young 17 year old school student who goes top free. I am writing it in three parts: the father, the girl, and the mother. The same story from three points of view. I should be able to write the father okay, except he is totally not me and I am struggling with his words and actions. I consider myself open-minded, socially liberal (fiscally conservative), agnostic, and … meh when it comes to such things as nudity. You want to run around town buck naked? That’s how we used to do it before we left Africa. Go for it. As long as you keep your pecker to yourself. Listening and fighting with right-winged fundies has helped me, especially during this election season. I think I can see their binary, authoritarian, idiotic minds, but I really don’t understand them. When I write a man objecting to a woman breastfeeding in a coffee shop,  I feel like I’m writing satire; because I see absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Writing the girl scares me. I haven’t started yet. I have had discussions though with both young women and young men. I might be scared, but I am looking forward to writing her. My beta readers will have a field day with me. The tricky part is finding the situation where it can be accepted as natural, and not on a nude beach or behind gates and fences. Out in the open, in public, not in protest.

The mother I have yet to settle on, but so far she’s turning out to be a mess. She capitulated to her desires for freedom by marrying the young, white, privileged rich kid. Her life’s been easy but empty. She’s an alcoholic and … much more. She could be a lot of fun.

I don’t know how this will turn out. The first 5,000 words have me excited, but writing a novel is a long road. If it gets published — two more years at least before submission — you can read it and maybe understand what I am going through. If not, let’s just say I now look at women differently. I think I’ve always been pretty progressive. I treat women with full respect. I admire, appreciate, and am attracted to them as well, and there are battles. I’ve been raised with this religious-dominated view that nudity is desirable but wrong, attractive but repulsive. A bag of mixed messages. I think I have just about sorted myself out.

 

 

 

 

Novel Finished!

Tags

Canada 150, editing, nanowrimo, novel, Writing

As if novels are ever finished.

I have finished draft number 6 of novel 2011. A review: I start a novel every year during NaNoWriMo and have won that contest six years in a row. I spend the rest of the year re-writing these novels or working on other projects. Here’s a list of my novel WIPs:

Year – My Ranking of Potential (1 to 5) – Draft – Words – Status – Plan

2010 – 4 Stars – Draft 3, a complete story – 80,000 – not touched since 2012. Needs a setting overhaul and a major rewrite. – Indefinite revisit.

2011 – 5 Stars! – Draft #6 – 129,000 words – Ready for pitching – About to undertake a major submission agenda.

2012 – 4 Stars – Draft #4 – 130,000 words – Needs a story trim; much too much happening; needs a writing overhaul, a killing of bad habits. – Indefinite revisit.

2013 – 2 Stars – Draft #1 – 51,000 words – Need to find the tension. I have characters and ending but the plot falls down in the mud. – Indefinite revisit.

2014 – 4 stars – Draft #1 – 51,000 words – A Sequel to 2012; I really like this story and it could become 5 star – Indefinite revisit.

2015 – 1 Star – Draft #1 – 50,000 words – an attempt at writing in an additive style; I cannot function in this style, not solely – XXX

Undecided Upon

2016 – 5 Star! – Concept – 0 words – A story with social implications I am not sure I am qualified to pull off, but if I do …
2016 – 4 Star! – Concept – 0 words – A less defined story with social implications I feel more comfortable attacking, but the story itself is mostly undefined.

I’ve had to overcome some major writing issues since I undertook this journey, and I don’t claim to be finished. My writing has been a rebellious child.

I tend to write weak conversational sentences which overuse stage-management verbs: she looked, she saw, she felt, etc.. I also tend to generalize. I know the story, so I don’t need to write all the details. I don’t need them. And putting myself in my readers’ shoes has been a struggle. Even when I try hard, I tend to slip into the internal know-it-all mode. Yet whenever I read others’ writings, their generalizations jump out at me. It is a pattern I have yet to resolve.

I think I have figured out the tension and drama of sentences, paragraphs, sections, scenes, chapters, and stories. I have a series of blogs in progress where I elucidate my understanding of pattern in prose: the general narrative arc we so easily apply to story also applies at each sub-level. My daily reading and analysis of narrative prose has been a tremendous help as has my attacking of several writing craft books.

I think it is all coming together, finally, but of course it seems held together by fine threads.

This 2012 novel feels really good. At least it does to me. I have concerns how others will take it, and I have been mindful of the differences between my own thinking and the common person’s. I am an INFP who lives in his diffuse-thinking half of his mind and who easily visits all angles of an argument but has difficulty taking sides. He hates run-on sentences but sometimes uses them to demonstrate how he thinks. This novel has political implications, and I fear staunch wingers, left or right, may view this story as wishy-washy. Yet our world is full of wishy-washy people, and I might argue these people should run the world.

2012 is also uber-Canadian. You can’t get more Canadian than my story, and I mean that in every conceivable sense. I cant see the rest of the world reading it (especially Americans) and saying, “Wha?” Yet they will never find a better guide of our country 😉

2017 is Canada’s 150th birthday. It’s going to be a hell of a party. My guts say this story needs to be out there for much of next year, and there’s only one sure way I know of doing that, and that’s not really the route I want to take. I’d rather a major publisher take it on and pump it out in six months rather than the twenty four they a lot new authors.

If they’d only read it!

Anyway, wish me luck on this journey.

 

 

 

 

Writing and Drinking

Tags

alcohol, Irish Whisky, Literary, Scotch Whisky, Single Malt, Strathisla, Whisky, Writers Tears

“Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.”

This quote is from Peter Devries’ Reuben, Reuben and not from Earnest Hemingway

I like to drink. I like the taste of beers, wines, and spirits. I like the sensations of tingling tongues and burning palates. I like the off-centered sensations. My mind works looser but not better. I feel freer to explore ideas, but almost always the result is crap. Writing and human relationship.

I think our brains are finely wired. Our Apollonian and the Dionysian modes are not independent but work in tandem. Each alone is almost useless. Alcohol sends us into this Apollonian mode, the creative world, but it blocks out the rational, focused world. Our thoughts and actions become psychedelic, not constructive.

I also have health issues that heavy drinking would only exacerbate and append. While getting lost in the netherworld of the bottle is attractive at times, getting lost from the world is not as pretty. Yet, I have decided to try to incorporate alcohol into my writing.

I am going to try to use finer drinks as a reward system: accomplish something significant, have a toddy. Some significant milestones include finishing editing chapters and scenes, revisions of stories, and of course any awards or publications (should that ever happen). Finish a chapter, celebrate with a shot of Writers Tears.

Reading is also important to me. I firmly believe any writer needs to read and study what he or she reads. A writer cannot write that killer story without understanding the lessons of both published masters and clunkers. Reading is so important to me, I would almost consider a good old drunk for each book, but I’ll settle for a lone shot of single malt.

I do not condone writing or editing drunk, and not because I think it’s evil. If you want to do it, go write ahead. But I know it doesn’t work for me. I am now calling bottles of spirits bottles of encouragement and each shot a notch in my pen marking success.

Bottoms up!

Novel Progress

Tags

2011

I am exactly halfway through my current project — I have two projects demanding attention — and I need to write something about it for posterity.

I completed Version IV of “2011” last October after some heavy summer slogging. It is a curious process, writing a novel. For each scene I read, edit, and repeat until happy, then move on to the next scene. It’s the happy part that is curious. Each pass through when I re-read a scene after much time away, I think, “My Jesus you suck, John. You write like a middle schooler.” But of course I see the errors of my ways and correct them.

This process has happened without fail. Well, there have been some temporary failures. I’ve read scenes and been happy enough to make only minor changes. I’ve never glowed with delight after reading them, well, I lie. Yes I have. But eventually I come back and return to the John-is-a-shitty-writer realization.

Sometime during last summer and fall’s edit, I recall hitting a point where I said, “You need to write like this: this is your structure, your style, and your voice.” So I changed. This January/February I read Bell’s Write Great Fiction – Plot & Structure and Wood’s How Fiction Works, two fairly advanced writing-craft books. As I worked through them, I almost continually remarked, “This is how I write; this is what I do; I know this stuff.” I have felt totally confident in my writing since I finished both. This week I hit that point in my novel I had reached last edit. I have edited about six scenes in a row where my re-reads excited me.

Of course I am editing; which means changing some things. I needed to build the threat of conspiracy, so I have been weaving that in. I have also enhanced some of the goings-on with gesture, tighter dialogue, and cutting some of the excess. There is always excess in my writing.

The 40% prior to this week, February to end of April, has been a struggle. I have used the big knives for this one. This has been the grand sacrifice of virgins and wayward travellers. I have killed so many darlings, I just about need mass graves. And I have invested much time in transience. I’ve walked, sat in coffee shops and played AlphaBetty, chatted with Tina and Bill, written poetry (see my PAD posts), and tinkered with many things not “2011” related. Yet about once a week I’ve received epiphanies. I have fed my Muses with thoughts and troubles, and I have given them long leashes. I think they have delivered. I’ve been able to pare this thing down to a level of tightness I currently feel pretty happy with.

My current word count is 125,500 down from 133,500. I’ve cut 8,000 words from the first half of this novel. Yeah. I do see some more cuts, maybe, but there are no scenes dangling in front of me like there were in the first half. I have only 1/2 a scene to cut and maybe a whole one, but I’ll decide when I get there.

This may seem like a large word count, especially if you are an agent or publisher wanting to give me a large contract, emphasis on large, but the story demands it. Seriously, it does. I won’t say much, but it is a cross-country journey. If you’ve ever travelled Canada, you know you can’t do it quickly. You know you can’t do it justice in 70k or 105k words. 145k feels right to me, but my editing skills are so good, I am now well below that. BFG 😉

So I’ve come full circle again, and this time it feels good. This time it feels very good and very right. Every day I am laughing and crying, and it’s at my work, my story, my characters. I sure hope I can get it ready sooner than later. Canada and maybe the world need to read this story 🙂

 

NaPoWriMo/PAD 2016 Day 12

Two-for-Tuesday day!

For today’s prompt, take on one (or both) of the following prompts:

• Write a serious poem. Or…
• Write a silly poem.

I posted at 7:38am my time, and I was tired. Images were not concrete but a fast-speed slideshow of blurred shots. I initially wrote in fountain pen,

It’s a mask I wear. My students wear similar masks. A daily charade. An endless Halloween party.

Stick-man Premier Frank McKenna

I guess I had youth on my mind from yesterday and I continued down that path. The phrase Halloween party stopped me in my tracks. Halloween means many things to me. My mother passed away on Halloween. I had major eye surgery on Oct 26th and I told the surgeon to give me extra stitches for Halloween. I often run through the country alone, in a car, taking pictures. The featured image, the rusty gas pump with American Pickers’ patina was shot on Halloween in 2009. It’s a day of thinking for me, a day of reflection. In 1987, at a Halloween party, a guy wore a face of newly-elected Premier Frank McKenna, now a director of the evil Haliburton. He cut it out and pasted it to cardboard and strapped it to his face. From the other side of the room he was Premier Frank McKenna. That evil mask has stayed with me all these years. Brian Gallant is our new Premier, and I actually like him.

 

Stick-man Premier Brian Gallant

The writing of the word Halloween took me back to this party, to any Halloween party, to a fictional Halloween party where people, serious in their daily lives, hide their true identities and true natures by wearing costumes and masks. The serious become silly. So I ran with the party theme.

I could have made this poem much longer. I almost inserted lines about my mother who loved Halloween. She had an old Indian squaw costume she loved to wear. It just didn’t want to fit. The poem does not live entirely in a Halloween party. “My perpetual,” suggests a life of mask wearing; in which case the party becomes metaphor.

Personally, I am not a fan of Halloween. I don masks every day when I write. I have more than enough silly in my life to have to release myself from serious for a day. For me, Halloween is almost the opposite. Serious John, Halloween sore thumb. The last third is real life and suggests a façade, that day-to-day living is very much a mask. And the final line is just nonsense, perhaps a real life blending of serious and silly, a lawyer facing real, hard decisions makes light of the unfortunate choice of words. Don’t we all do this? Don’t we all live in artificial, overly serious or overly-silly worlds?

Bobbing For Apples

It’s a mask, I wear. My perpetual Halloween party
Bobbing for apples and shooting stiff ones through slits, on the face of it
The camo-girl jumps on a table with her AK-47 and Singapore Slings, the cheering
Prisoners gather and salute, a priest refills her ammunition
The sexy nurse in the corner rubs her dying beer’s hand, the politician
At the bar he waits to hit on her, for her to attend, his ailing body
Wears a a tuxedo and Premier Brian mask cut from an election poster, the cardboard façade
Adorns this province’s parking lots and water coolers
The yellow beer stain on his white shirt shifts our direction
Tomorrow he will try to get me to buy Japanese steel stocks
The nurse will sit and code
The soldier will lay dead in her bead
A new client today wanted to divorce his wife for screwing him, I assured
There are easier ways to resolve such conflicts