October 2023 – John D Reinhart

The Ship is Launched

You’re a writer – you know how it is. You think about a project, and dream about it, and you wonder and wonder how it will turn out, all before you actually start it. And then, one day, you start it. And it’s entirely different than what you thought.

The first episode of California Air Museums is on the, well, air. Actually, it’s on YouTube, but YouTube is as much the new TV as 60 is the new 40, and orange is the new, well, it was the…

Anyway, you can view the first episode here.

My wonderful wife stood in as camera operator, and the Mojave Air Museum stood in as the museum. It was a ton of fun!

We got there around 2 in the afternoon and spent a good ten minutes wandering around the Mojave Air and Space Port looking for it, only to discover we’d driven right past it at the entrance. Oops.

No one was there, which made it a great place to try out our video production process. Even though I wore a lavalier microphone, the stiff wind obliterated, like, 90% of what I said. Luckily, I tend to babble, so we didn’t miss anything.

You know how it goes – most of what you shoot goes on the cutting room floor anyway. Of course, with video, there IS no cuttong room anymore…

We shot about 35 gigabytes of footage over the span of an hour and a half, and I have to tell you: this video business is a gas!

And the airplanes themselves were terrific. If you’re an aviation geek, or, like me, not too bright but like the airplanes, you will love this little musuem!

What this video does is formally launch California Air Museums as a thing. The site is revamped, and now holds slots for the many museum visits to come.

Zoom!

you see what I did there by writing zoom – kind of like saying we’re having fun and at the same time making a kind of airplane hand gesture sort of thing – oh, yeah. you caught that…

A New Venue

My wife is a remarkable woman. Beautiful, brilliant, willing to put up with me, and just full of genius-level ideas.

If you visit JohnDReinhart.com – it’s pretty easy: just click on the name up there in the upper left-hand corner. Go ahead and try it… we’ll wait.

Did you see it? No? It’s something different. Take another look. Dum-de-doo-de-dum, black seven goes on the red six… Did you find it?

(Aggravated sigh) Do I have to do everything around here? The name, down there in the middle – the name. John D Reinhart Creative.

Okay, maybe you haven’t been to my site before, so, okay, I get it.

Now my site is called John D Reinhart Creative – kind of flows off the tongue, doesn’t it? Maybe?

You see, the California Air Museums project has taken on a new life. In addition to visiting the museums, my wife suggested that I do video visits, interviewing the curator, or director, or an otherwise interested person. And, the interview will end up on the California Air Museums site, and on a California Air Museums channel on YouTube.

So, I’ve got this cool Galaxy Z4 fold phone that has an awesome, awesome camera in it and 500 gigs of storage, and I’ve got a pair of wireless lavalier mikes, and I’ve got the newest version of DaVinci Resolve to edit it all together. What are we waiting for?

Well, I kinda sorta needed business cards to hand to the person when I say, like, drop me a line or something, because that’s what savvy businesspeople do.

So, here I am in Adobe Illustrator, making this epically long list of all the creative things I do, trying to squeeze it onto this itty-bitty, 2.5×3 inch business card in, like, 3pt type, when the very love of my life says “You’re an idiot. Just give yourself a name that covers all that stuff.”

And, viola, an industrial giant is born. A nice set of 100 Vistaprint business cards for, like, 28 bucks, due to arrive in, like, two weeks. Like, wow. Business cards? For me? It’s so… creative!

What is curious is that I’ve always been creative, but had never given myself the title. Now that I have it, everything just seems to drop right into place.

The key finally fit, and the door finally opened.

And it’s nice to be home. I feel like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. All I needed was to wear a dead lady’s shoes.

Plus, I got cool business cards!

Surrounded by Red Herrings

You’re a writer, you know how it goes. You write and write and write, and then, one day, you wonder if you’re writing the right stuff… uh oh.

So, you know me. I write a lot of stuff. I’ve got this blog, a blog about pirates, a project documenting California’s air museums, and that DIY site. And all of that is on top of forever rewriting and revamping novels. And all of THAT is on top of a regular 9-5 working as, of all things, a writer!

With all of that going on, I begins to get meself a little crazy, if you know what I mean. If I’m not panicking about posting here, I’m flipping out about researching there. And where’s that damned book?

So I nominated myself CEO of my organization, John D Reinhart Enterprises, or JDRE. Chief, cook, and bottle-washer, so to speak.

In my previous existences, I would hurry up and crank out a logo and maybe some letterhead or something, thinking that doing that work would make it official and somehow bound for success. Ah, I was younger then.

In my current existence, I made myself a schedule: Mondays are for Skippity Whistles and the Museums, Tuesday is Novel Night, Wednesday is Find A Paying Freelance Gig night, and Thursday is Blog Night.

So, I’m asking myself WtF?!? What am I doing? Is THIS how I’m going to burn up the balance of my youth (all 9 remaining days…), scrambling after this insane schedule? What madness is this?

And then I think wait a minute, here. These are all red herrings…

According to MentalFloss.com, the phrase Red Herring finds its origins in Jolly Olde England, whither the huntsmen would train the fox-hunting horses to follow the smell of said dead fish, that they might keep their horsey calm during the bump and hustle of the hunt. Some poor devil would have to go out the night before and sprinkle red-dead redemption herrings wherever foxes were presumed to hide. I’m sure the foxes liked that…

Anyway, back at the schedule, I realize it ain’t real, mate. It can’t be! Writing is writing, not scheduling. Sommat ain’t right.

Monday I DID work on the air museums database. Tuesday I goofed around on my phone, for I was surely brain-fried, but the book is in the hands of the lovely-sister reader, and there’s nowt I can do about that. Wednesday I submitted a joke to Reader’s Digest, good for $25 if they like it (my wife thought it was an old groaner, and I had to tell her “Honey, that’s all I know…”).

And here it is, Thursday, and I’m tapping out this post. And I’m writing it, not because it’s Thursday and it’s on the sched, but because I wanted to tell you this story.

It is not the schedule that’s the red herring, it’s the thinking that somehow creating the schedule is the thing that will lead me to success. The schedule is a fake. Success doesn’t come from the sched. It comes from the writing.

But now there’s the scary thing that I durst not even think about. I’m daring myself to even write it down. The words are coming slowly.

It. Is. All. A. Waste. Of. Time.

What is writing, but the pouring out of what’s inside? What if what’s inside is pointless meanderings ( I mean, look at this post!)?

Nobody reads my stuff – I mean, YOU do, and I am terribly, terribly grateful for that. Thank you, most sincerely.

But no one reads my books. No one visits my sites. I know.

I know.

And yet still I persist, feverishly building and writing and crafting and wringing my hands together in the dark garret of my mind, turning key after key after key, fitting them one-by-one into the Lock of Success. Surely this one. No, well, then, this one certainly. I’d stake my life on this one over here. Key by key by key, writing this, writing that, searching for the key that will swing those golden doors open. It is a sickness. A madness.

Especially when I have a perfectly good writing job during the day. I’m a success at that, surely. It’s technical translation, of course, with the occasional promotional stuff thrown in, and never a by-line in sight. And, no, it’s not the utterances of my heart, but what if my heart is filled with candy corn and bat poop? Maybe it’d be best to keep that away from the children…

It wakes me up at night, that horrid thought. If not this, what? Perhaps there IS no golden door. What if this water IS the ocean…

But, hey, per the schedule, writing time is up, so I guess I’m done now.

I have Fridays off.

How To How To

You’re a writer. You know how it goes. You’ve got irons in the fire, thoughts in the cabesa, concepts swirling around your noodle.

I was trying to come up with some new how-to topics for my how-to site Skippity Whistles because, frankly, I haven’t told anybody how to do anything for quite a while.

That’s mostly because I haven’t done anything for quite a while. I mean, I go to work and do my job, but there are not a lot of how-tos that pop up there. How to draw an interesting clock face in Adobe Illustrator has a kind of limited appeal.

At home I do stuff, but have had to slow down on stuff like mowing the lawn because of a recent surgery. The last couple of weeks have been things like how to sit in an Adirondack chair. How to nod off watching movies on Netflix…

But in thinking about how-to stuff, I hit this topic this morning: how to write a story.

Well, that’s easy, right? You’ve got your protagonist and your situation and what you want to have happen. How hard could that be?

When you tell someone how to draw, say, a monkey, you don’t tell ’em sharpen your pencils and take out your crayons, do you? Step one: Get a piece of paper. That’s kind of a given, dontcha think?

So, how do you say that you have to find your voice, your point of view. Who are you in the story? Who’s going to tell it? Is that too esoteric?

When I’m putting together a long story, like a novel, I always try to remember the structure of a three-act play.

In act one, we meet everybody and learn the setting and about who wants what. It all seems to be going so well,until, right at the end, a big problem arises.

In act two, the problem gets huge, and becomes insurmountable until, right at the end, a solution arises.

In act three, we work through the solution and defeat the problem, and we all go home wiser and much relieved. End of the story, have a nice day.

What do you think? Does that make a decent how-to?

Maybe it’s too stuffy, too high-handed. Well, my child, let me explain…

One of my favorite lines from Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day comes when Owl is trying to help Piglet to be courageous.

“I-I’m afraid I’m just a sm-small animal,”Piglet stammers.

“Then to ease your small mind, I shall tell you a story…”

Maybe How to Write a Story is not a good topic.

I’ll stick to How to Make Scrambled Eggs…

Thanks for the help!

10 Ways to Make Yourself Feel Stupid

Well, the novel is in the hands of the lovely sister once more, and I do believe it’s for the last time.

While it’s out, I found a really quick and simple way to make money online. Ah, but there’s a catch…

There’s this site called Listverse, see, and they’ll pay you a hundred bucks to provide a list of, well, really, on any subject you choose. You make a list, write a paragraph or two about each item, list your sources, and submit it. They like the list and pump a hundred bucks into your PayPal account. Done deal.

Come on. You’re a writer. You know how this goes. It’s like shooting candy from a barrel, or something like that. Come on. Make a list, right now, of ten things you know about that would be interesting to somebody…

I came up with one topic. And I got, like, seven items. How about this? Ten Common Phrases that have Nautical Origins…

Well, let’s see, there’s “three square meals a day”, and “there’s keep your powder dry”, although that one’s not so common. Howzabout “you’ll have the devil to pay for this.” That’s a good one, except nobody ever says it.

Hmph.

I’m a smart guy. I really am. I don’t have a PhD or anything, but I’ve been to the doctor’s office. And I played Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey at the Santa Paula Theater Center with a really good actor who played a doctor. That should count… Doctor by extraction or something. Anyway, I’m not a total dope.

At least I didn’t think so.

But I cannot come up with a list of ten interesting things to save my life.

Ten Euphemisms for I Feel Like a Dummy.

Hey! I got one!