Author: jdreinhart73@gmail.com

If You Follow Me, Follow Me!

Hey – you’re a writer, you know how it goes. You follow other writers in hopes that they’ll follow you and together you’ll build a community of writers.

In that same vein, if you’ve been following my stuff on WordPress.com, you’ll know that I’ve been here on WordPress for, like, 15 years!

Well, with the advent of WhistleBump.com, I’ve kind of got too many folks in the house to manage here on WordPress.

So, I’ve moved the whole operation to JohnDReinhart.com — new home, new look, and a lot more going on than this old space ever showed you: the WhistleBump sites, the illustration work, the podcast, all of it.

If you’ve enjoyed following along here, I’d love to have you over there instead.

There’s no autopilot way to bring you with me, so consider this your personal invitation:

Please join me on JohnDReinhart.com.

Thank you for reading this far, and for riding along with me through all these years.

See you on the other side!

Adding Eggs to the Basket

You’re a writer, you know how it goes. Nobody reads your stuff – unless people do, and then you’re not reading this because you’re busy having your stuff read.

As I mature (like wine and cheese, not like milk and fish left on the counter a little too long), I’ve come to understand that maybe I am not a writer.

I mean, I AM a writer, in that I love to write and enjoy it and do it every day.

But, you know the joke that says “87% of people sing in the shower, and the rest are idiots. Do you know the song the 87% sing?” If you don’t know the song, well, now, what does that make you?

I love to sing. I’m bad at it, but I like it. I do it every day. I’ve written a bunch of songs. None of them are good. Like I change the lyrics to something better when I sing them – even doo-be-doo is better than what I wrote.

Not the point.

My stepson used to arrange things in the shopping cart at Trader Joes. He was, like, ten years old, and assumed the role of “The Organizer.” He loved to stack stuff in the cart, peas over here, bread on this side, macaroni products in the back…

You look at this post right now and think “maybe I’ll just scroll on to something interesting…”

Wait! Visit WhistleBump.com first!

Ah, a link and a silly name! What is this?

Try this on for size: Everything you were supposed to learn somewhere else. Explained here.

That’s what WhistleBump is all about. Five sites that teach you the stuff you probably were already told but, you know, you were, like, thinking about something else or something. You know? One about how to cook, another about how to garden, one for cars, one for DIY stuff, and one that will talk about how to read stuff like leases and bank statements.

I didn’t write them – that last one isn’t even written yet. I came up with the ideas and the structures, and had the AI do the actual writing.

To be honest, I have to fine-tooth-comb every post because AI really stands for “appoximated information.” But the AI lets me make the illustrations, and that’s fun.

So, I’m not writing nearly as much as I’m organizing and editing and curating and illustrating. And I think I like it.

The whole purpose of this blog, and of the first website, called SkippityWhistles.com, was to help me promote my novels. But now there’s this WhistleBump enterprise, and it’s a full-time job.

There’s some sort of a parable about the farmer who needs to add oil to the tractor, but the door hinge on the barn lets out a prodigious squeak, so he has to tend to that. Then he notices that one of the hinges is missing a screw. In looking for a screw he tips over his tool box and the drill bits go flying everywhere. It takes forever to round them up and in so doing notices there’s been an ant invasion in the barn. So he goes and gets some bug spray to deal with the ants. And the sun goes down and the tractor still needs oil.

It’s the business of writing, isn’t it? There you are in your lonely garret, typing away at your life’s work only to pause and read this post – bless you, child – never knowing about the all-consuming business of being a writer that lies beyond your finished, polished words.

Well, if you need some advice on that, visit WhistleBump.com!

Yep, that’s a plug through and through, isn’t it?

In the mean time, I, I, I think I feel a song coming on….

A Mote Smikey Out There

You’re a writer, you know how it goes. A book you’ve thought about writing won’t leave you alone. You think about it all the time, and you think, man, I should just sit down and write it.

See, thing is, I DID write it. I published it myself last year, before I moved here to smoky New Jersey.

Not to worry about the smoke – we had it imported from Canada.

The scenes that are calling to me so clearly, however, are the scenes I chopped out to simplify the storyline. It wasn’t a mistake- the published version is smooth and...

You know what’s a pisser? Nobody really wants to read your book – okay, MY book, do they? No, no they don’t. I’m not whining, here. It’s a fact of life.

You’ve spent years of your life piecing the words together- words, by the by, that have never  before been pieced together in that way in the HISTORY OF HUMAN LANGUAGE, thank you very much. And then you have to find somebody to read the first draft, and the rewrite, and the rewritten rewrite.  That’s a pisser…

What’s the point of all this? Well, of this post? I think it’s pretty clear, don’t you? Well, all right then.

The things we write are like ghosts until we write them, aren’t they? Voices and images that aren’t real wandering about in our heads, willing us to jot them i to being.

My mind is torn between a noisy curb in 1905 Paris and a hot and dusty hillside overlooking the brilliant sea and the  musket is heavy and the path to the fort is narrow and a slip could send you rolling down to the beach but you want to be the first to report the ship from France…

Those things don’t exist, except that they do exist, except that you and I are not privy to them because they’re buried back there in time, so they may as well not exist, except that we think about them, thereby bringing them into existence.

Word games. Word games and ghosts.

I think I’m going to go eat a peach melba and go to bed.

I advise you to do the same, just as soon as you’ve finished that book.

We’re All Aphids

Think about plankton – not Plankton, Mr. Krab’s Spongebob nemesis – the real stuff, adrift out there in the wide, wide, wide, wide sea. Plankton is a plant that converts sunlight and nutrients or other, creepier stuff, into energy that it converts to matter to become, well, plankton.

So, what IS plankton, in the grand scheme of things (the GSOT)? Why, the building block upon which most ocean life feeds. Big fish eat little fish that eat little fish that feed on plankton.

Now, consider the lowly aphid. I just put a post about aphids on my TangleWicket website, so I’ve been thinking about ’em.

Aphids eat plants, just like those things that feed on plankton, and everybody else feeds on them. Ants actually herd aphids because they produce a gel called honey dew that is a major treat over in the ant hill.

There are tons of bugs that eat aphids – beyond your ladybugs, you got your lacewing larvae and parasitic wasps just for starters. They’re pretty low on the food chain.

It’s okay, because aphids give live birth. To females. No need for male sperm. One aphid can lay up to 80 female aphids during its 25-day lifetime. And they can give birth to a dozen of ’em a day. A day, Louie, a day. Boo-boo-boo-boop look, it’s a whole population!

So, here we are talking about bugs and plankton, and somehow it comes back to you and me, doesn’t it?

In the GSOT, you and I are just consumers of stuff that gets produced, right? We have our preferences, but we don’t have control.

We’re like aphids on the leaf of life, consuming what we assume to be important until we’re one day gobbled up by some entity. We all kick off eventually, right? Go to the Big Whatever – what happens next is anyone’s guess.

While we wait for that eventuality, our minds and wallets are continuously picked and prodded by the world around us – by the world we’ve put around us.

I’ve been wrestling all day with AI – from the confusion of the AI engine I’ve been using to build my websites to the ludicrously cheerful female voice taking my order at Taco Bell to the digital assistant at the CVS to the automated AI job interviewer. I feel picked at, prodded, and reduced to answering human yes/no questions to a machine that, for all its clever words and smarmy voices, still only understands yes/no. Binary switches – maybe a billion of ’em in a row, but binary none the less.

Hmmm, I’m not sure I can help you with that. Please press 1 to try again.

We are gobbled up by the massive, monstrously voracious world around us. Maybe not physically, but our attention, our time, our thoughts.

Because, my friend, you and I? We are merely aphids.

Cap’n Blackthumb Uncovers a Plot Most Foul

A thick, steamy afternoon, a stubborn 3D printer, and one offhand Google article about plant intelligence — and suddenly the whole paradigm flips. Cap’n Blackthumb has uncovered the longest-running conspiracy in human history, and it’s growing right over your bookcase.

You know how it is when the weather is thick and sort of steamy and you have a ton of things to do but you don’t want to do any of them because the weather is thick and sort of steamy and really alls you wants to do is take a nap?

That was me until just, like, 15 seconds ago when I put two and two together to come up with a plot, unfolding right before your very eyes, to take over the world.

Seriously.

I included Cap’n Blackthumb in the title because, frankly, I thought it was funny and because I’ve been struggling all dang day to print a 28mm pirate figure for Tales of the Black Falcon on the Bambu Labs Ai Mini my wife and daughter teamed up to give me on Father’s Day. And, yes, that is a terrible sentence. Shoot me (just don’t make me create another 3D print!).

I saw something on Google while I was waiting to click “Yes, filament is protruding from the nozzle” on the printer – if you tell it no or skip the question you don’t have a happy printing experience. Ask one who knows…

The Google article said that scientists have determined that plants very well may exhibit some degree of intelligence.

All right, Charlie, you’re so smart, why are you creeping over the bookcase? What’s in it for you, eh? Creepin’ around the bookcase, what are you up to?

Charlie, of course, remains mum on the subject.

All right, Mums, let’s have it – what’s Charlie up to?

I’ve been doing a ton of work on my newest (almost) website, called TangleWicket.com. I know, right? Coolest name ever?

That site is devoted to explaining the world of gardening to those of us who kill plants just by looking at ’em. Although the site is mostly written by Claude.AI (because I don’t know a dead plant from a hole in the ground) I supervise and edit and illustrate. I do have a job – really. In editing these articles, one thing repeats over and over.

You want the soil to be wet six inches down in order to train the roots to reach down, not up.

Wait. You’re training the plants?

You want to look at the wilted leaves in the cool of the evening. If they’re no longer wilted, it’s because the plant was saving energy during the day.

Wait. The plants save energy?

Of course they do. Of course they have an intelligence. Of course the grass sighs when you cut it. They’re living things, aren’t they? Don’t they have the right to express themselves?

And then it hit me. How come my neighbor’s shed is overgrown? How come there’s a tree sticking up out of the chimney of that old house? How come, a week after I mow the lawn, those guys are all back at it again, and the weeds that lost their heads now have cousins and brothers and sisters right there along with them?

It’s just what plants do, right? They just grow – and would be everywhere but for that handy jug of RoundUp.

What if, sit down, now, and think about this: what if that intelligence we discussed earlier was linked to the propensity for plants to grow everywhere? What if it wasn’t “just what plants do” but “that’s how plants maintain control of everything, including us?”

Oxygen, remember that stuff? Comes from plants that suck up our CO2, right? Maybe the plants feed oxygen to us to keep us breathing. Maybe they just keep us around to create the carbon dioxide – like maybe we’re their dairy cows or something.

That certainly flips my paradigm, so to speak.

I suppose we could cut down the 3 trillion trees on the planet – oh, but we’d run out of oxygen, wouldn’t we? Ahh, nice play, tree boys.

Forget your conspiracy theories, kids. This one’s a whopper, playing out for as long as humans have been around.

And don’t get me started on mushrooms…

The Duck is Loose

Someone once told me that the most difficult argument is with a stupid person who happens to be right. I knew I’d win that one right off.

So, as is nothing new, I’m having an existential crisis. Holy goose is loose, Batman! My alter ego is a jerk!

I’ve never liked superheroes. Adam West’s Batman was funny, and cool because he lampooned himself and the whole superhero genre. But, since then – I just don’t understand the need for a person with super powers.

I mean, I get it. Superman was the one guy, back in the Great Depression, who didn’t have to worry about anything because he could do everything – even prance around in a circus leotard and not take any grief for it. A “nice buns” comment to the Man of Steel might get your lights punched out. Nice knuckles.

As it turns out, just like a superhero, I have an alter ego. And no, it’s not AI… okay, so I have TWO alter egos.

One, Claude.AI, writes posts that carry my name for my websites (other than this one – I mean, seriously, an AI writing your personal blog?).

The other alter ego is a duck.

It’s been brewing for years, this Donald Duck personality. He’s always shown up in a sticky situation – truth is, I learned to do it when I was in 7th grade, when I found that bullies don’t hit you if they think you’re funny. Oddly enough, having to be funny on demand was its own kind of prison that left me with a weird thing about bullies, and about being funny. Don’t get me started…

The duck was a great hit with my kids’ friends until they reached, like 3rd grade. After that he only told groaners. He did make a nice tension-breaker at work in the office.

And now this.

This video slipped out last week: Duck Video. It went, well, not viral, but viral-adjacent. In my little world, 25 views is a big win. This one almost hit a thousand views. I followed it with this one – Duck Waiting, and this one – Snow. They’ve all set my little “world o’ video” afire!

The problem is that the duck, who is set to take over my entire media empire, is an opinionated, self-righteous goof that may or really most sincerely may not be the most intelligent creature in the heavens.

I was discussing him with my other alter-ego, Claude – that’s an issue all by itself, isn’t it, looking for insight on your mental health from a computer?

We together pondered whither the duck resides. Is he a creepy little guy holding the camera? Sadly, as it’s clear I’m doing his voice, the evidence suggests that perhaps, maybe, I could be the duck. Mois.

I sense your rather rapid inrush of breath and share a similar horror. Could it be he’s been back there all these years, making snide comments that could be deciphered only by yours truly? It’s a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde moment – a Bruce Banner/Incredible Hulk kind of dealio, I fear. Don’t make me angry…

The Duck has shattered the balance of my publishing empire – per the schedule, there’s to be one post this week for Skippity Whistles, ten posts for TumbleBump, one more episode for The Three Point Line, and a developed script for Tales of the Black Falcon.

And yet, here I am over here on the blog site, wailing about this stupid duck and what it means for my descent into madness while chasing around numbers and likes on YouTube!

Oh, no!

Did I say Descent into Madness like it’s something that’s happening to me? Is descent into madness a thing? Is it a thing? Claude says yes, descent into madness is a thing.

I’m afraid to ask the duck.

Beware the Wilted Frog

Did you ever wonder why laptops don’t fit in your lap? Or why you don’t have the kind of lap into which the laptop will fit? Is it the design of the thing, or you the defective one?

I’m writing this on the pricey little tablet my wife bought at Costco for me. What doesn’t she buy at Costco? The stuff that comes from Amazon, of course.

Like the laptop, if you want to use the nifty keyboard case that includes a nifty keyboard, you’re going to have to find a table. Maybe that’s why they call it a table-t.

Either way, I’m outside on the deck behind my house. Although I’m in the shade, the jim-crack little outdoor thermo sensor (some call it a thermometer – how quaint) came from neither Amazon nor Costco, but the discount aisle at a big-box hardware store that shall remain nameless because I can’t remember whether it was Lowes or Home Depot. In either case, it’s in the shade, and it says 104 degrees.

To be fair, it’s bolted to the cornerpost of the deck rail, so it’s measuring the heat of the wood to which it’s attached rather than the ambient air.

But you get the drift.

This Be-Your-Own-Boss gig is not for everyone. At least it takes some getting used to, believe me you. After 40+ years of the ol’ 9-5, I have falling-behind work dreams most nights, and although my work now is totally creative and task-driven, I still carry the Pavlovian need to be at my desk first thing in the morning.

Yesterday was hot, but cooler. My daughter in-law, taking her kid, my grandkid, to school, with her car bumps into a jogging old lady and knocks her down. Why is she jogging in this heat?

Everyone’s upset and OMG here are the cops and Grandpa could YOU take the kid to school?

I’m looking at my watch – 8:45. Okay, but I’m going to have to make up this time, see…

Over the weekend my wife bought an enormous inflatable frog tunnel thing at Costco. It’s, like, nine feet long and has a hose attachment for some dumbass water feature.

Well, everyone’s so upset over the old lady getting run down, let’s have them over for dinner and could you set up the frog tunnel because it’s so darned hot outside?

Sure, but I’m trying to make this video… fine, fine, fine.

The old lady was just fine, the daughter in law was just fine, the grandkid was just fine. But I felt my working day just a’slip-sliding away – not fine.

Wrote and shot Episode 8 of the Three Point Line, my podcast. Got it halfway edited before is was time to inflate the frog.

So, we have this one-lung air compressor from Harbor Freight that does a great job, but is slow, being one-lung. It’s 3HP, 110psi, if you must know. It took ALL AFTERNOON to INFLATE the FROG!

All the while my 9-5 inner boss is saying, hey, bozo, when you gonna finish that video? You should be working, man, not screwing around this green vinyl monstrosity!

The beast is finally inflated, the water feature features water in it, and the grandkid stumbles into it. At 20 months, you can’t honesty say that he walked in there.

And the boy downright guffawed in delight. I have never seen him laugh so hard.

His parents were happy, he was happy, my wife was happy, and the Universe said “listen, Bilbo, your job is not always your work, and your work is not always your job. Sit down and relax. THESE are the moments you’ve worked for all your life.”

Crackers, I mutter to myself. That’s probably true.

So, today is even hotter, and my PC gave up the ghost while I was in my west-facing office trying to grind out posts for TumbleBump.com. It didn’t quit, but I could hear the fans working overtime, so I thought it wisest to give them the afternoon off.

And everyone’s hot and tired and nobody wants to run around through the giant frog-tunnel thing because, even IT has wilted in this heat.

Weird how the world works.

Writing this post is maintaining a corner of my online empire, so, yes, boss, I’m still working, even though the shop is shut down.

Boy, I hope I give me a raise!

How to Scare Yourself

You’re a writer – y0u know how it goes. Sometimes you create something that, well, sorta give you the heebidy-jeebies. Stephen King once said he knew his description was too gross if he felt like throwing up on his keyboard.

Yum.

So, as you know, or maybe not – I can’t keep up anymore – I have a podcast. It’s called The Three Point Line and it’s dreadfully serious about making illustrations in Adobe Illustrator…

Boy, talk about ch-changes – now, I know this is an aside…

Here I am using the Windows Snipping Tool to make a screen cap of making the illustration of a Matchbox car – come on, who doesn’t like toy cars? My grandson and his family show up, so I stop the recording and save the illustration and go be a good grandfather – no, not a great grandfather. Not that old.

Two weeks scurry by. I open up the Snipping Tool with a new screen capture recording, open up Adobe Illustrator, and, what? It wants to load a printer? Illustrator won’t run until it finds a printer? WHICH printer? What is going on???

Stupid me, I forget to turn off the recorder while I dump Illustrator, visit Creative Cloud and reload, ask questions of Claude.AI and find out it’s a bug in Illustrator, and scramble through my Windows settings to fix it. Finally, the recorder stopped when I rebooted the PC. it’s a charming video filled with swear words and bad juju.

Anyway, the video got finished, the illustration is done, and I moved on.

Talk about your pointless asides, huh? Done now. Thank you.

So, the kid, who spends his days in preschool, brought home a cold, which I caught, of course. It’s in the job description.

This morning, I was thinking about that song “I Think I Love You” by the Partridge Family. Alright, I was singing it, but my voice is uber-froggy, and I got this idea…

The video link is here: Apologies to the Partridge Family

It really makes me laugh, right before it scares the pants off me.

That final line, that “I think I love you,” is so dark. Just a character, I shrug. But that guy’s inside me. Ew.

Because, you know that the basis of humor is truth, right? That’s what makes it funny.

I think that means that there are elements of the creepy guy in that video in me. Sitting right here inside right now. Typing. This.

Helping himself to my macaroni-and-cheese-with-tuna for lunch.

Brushing my teeth with me.

What am I supposed to do now? Sleep?

Dancing with the Fishes

You’re a business tycoon, you know how it goes. Deals here, offers there, and that constant, nagging question of where to put all this money? It’s always about stowing the cash, isn’t it? What do ya do, buy another bank? Invest in Squishmellows, or whatever those things they sell at Costco are…

Costco – don’t get me started. I read somewhere that straight white men buy their pants at Costco. I think I have a pair of Levi’s that I didn’t buy there, but my pants, my shirts, my jackets, my hats, my socks, my underwear, and most of the stuff I eat… jeez, it’s creepy when you look at it like that!

Creepy, isn’t it?

So, that’s not the point of this post, is it? No, no it’s not.

The point of this post – oh, yesterday I was working on a new post for my NEW website – that’s what we’re talking about today – but we bought this absolutely epic-sized wardrobe for my grad-student daughter’s room. Like she’s going to use it, because she’s only here, like, three weeks out of the year, between school and archaeological digs and her west-coast boyfriend’s family that owns cabins in the woods… what? Anyway, I needed some direction from the Ikea directions – I swear, sorting them out was like trying to sort out cooked spaghetti without the sauce, knowwhattamean?

Not the point except that, to find help for the instructions online and not be forced to watch a half-hour video that may or may not apply, I had to turn to AI.

So, AI is answering the questions that used to go to Google, because the Google answers have all gone to AI. AI now stands for Ain’t It Interesting…

THE POINT OF THIS POST

There’s a new website in the world, and it’s mine. It’s called TumbleBump, and it’s got a huge collection of one post. One.

From the mighty oak springs the walnut, or something like that.

I’ve been wrestling with the 3D-making program Blender for three days now, and my wee little walnut is fried beyond smoked. True story!

You see, my friendly sister-site, Skippity Whistles, features really nifty illustrations. It’s a friendly site all about the why of DIYing stuff – not why you would fix it yourself, but the why behind you’d use linesman pliers instead of slip-joints – you know, that kind of thing.

The illustrations are popular enough that I’ve been encouraged to start a podcast, called The Three Point Line, that details how I make the details in the drawings.

That encouraged me to release this dopey video called Who Ate the Fish that I made before I left California, the success of which prompted me to put it in a playlist called John D Reinhart Unsupervised. Don’t ask me, because I don’t know.

And now TumbleBump, a screwy name for a site dedicated to explaining the why behind cooking, aimed at Gen-Zers who are facing their kitchens and thinking “I could use this room for something…”

My wise idea was to create distinctive illustrations in Blender – it’s all kitchen stuff, right? How hard could it be to make that stuff in 3D? Honestly? It turns out there are folks who do it for a living.

Let’s just say the graphic artist seems to be the bottleneck in production over at TumbleBump. And at Skippity Whistles. And at The Three Point Line. Hmmm. Seems to be a pattern.

Why all these sites? They all LEAD to something, you see. Passive income, my friend. Skippity and Tumble sell Amazon products, while The Three Point and Unsupervised sell me. Clever, you say. You don’t know the half. Sadly, neither do I!

All this because the contract I’ve been waiting for since December just hasn’t arrived, and Central Casting New York hasn’t finished my paperwork, and the remote jobs on Indeed are about training AI and I’m not the droid they’re looking for. Move along.

It’s all a vast, vast puzzle – you know how it is when you open the jigsaw box and spread the pieces out on the table. Nothing relates to anything and you wonder why you opened the box in the first place.

Because it all results in something terrific.

Two on the Three of Life

What was the name of that astrophysicist who, just before he got fired, said reach for the moon and you’ll land among the stars?

You can call me dumb – trust me, you’re in good company – but I’ve had a revelation.

I’ve been playing Solitaire on my phone. Playing as in totally addicted. Like “don’t you need to get up into hours?” “Just one more hand…”

I don’t play the easy-seats one-at-a-time game – that’s for grandma’s and people who like to win every time. Booooring.

Gimme the high scores, baby! The Vegas action – three at a time, three passes through the deck. Lose ya snooze – that’s my kinda game

It costs you 52 points to play – we’ll call them bucks because in Vegas, that’ what they are. The first hand you’re already 52 bucks in the hole. But each card you place up top? Five big ones, baby!

So I did all my work for today (The Three Point Line Episode 5 in the can). So maybe I’ll sit outside as the heat wave cools down and play a little Solitaire…

Three hours later…

Two phones ago, the one commandeered by pirates, I was up at around 125,000 points – thousands of games. The next phone, the Galaxy Fold 4, that was at 175,000 before the battery toasted out. This phone? I’ve been trying to dial back, so I’m only at 11,700 or so.

This evening I’m sitting out there baiting the mosquitoes, thinking about nothing so much as winning a hand after 1, 2, 3 in a row get close, but no cigars.

The deal is, see, you win the hand you get 260 bucks, 5 to one on your investment. I’m getting 15, 20 cards up there, but no big wins.

Come on, ya moke, win one! I says to myself.

And then, outta the blue, I get this thing, this brainwave.

Hey nimrod, you got 20 cards up there. At five bucks each, you’re 200 bucks ahead.

That’s when it hits me – just like the light on a new day, it hit me from outta the blue.

You don’t have to hit a home run to score points, do ya? Swingin’ for the bleachers is all fine and well, but goin’ around the bases one at a time works, too, don’t it?

What are you playing for?

What are you playing for?

Me, I’m looking for points. Something inside me wants to get to a million points. Then 2 mil, then 5. The cash comes quicker when you win the game, but anything over 11 cards is pure gold.

The one-card-at-a-time grandma? She plays to win, to complete the task, maybe solve the puzzle.

Me, I guess I find worth in racking up the moola. Maybe it’s my inner Fred Flintstone – we can afford lots of Bronto  Burgers now, Wilma!

What are you playing for? Is the prize upon which you have your eye the prize, or is it the process – something that happens along the way?

For me, that’s a kinda big breakthrough- what am I playing for?

To be clear, no money changes hand. My wife would kill. Me. Kill. Me.

And, that falling among the stars thing? How about burning up in the atmosphere…

One Hot Day

It’s a blistering hot Wednesday morning. It’s so hot nobody, absolutely no one, not the criminals or the cops or anyone in between, will dare to go outside. Birds are like “skip this,” and most of the lawns in town have simply rolled themselves up to hide from the blistering sunshine.

Over on Main Street, I stand on the sidewalk, squeezed into the tiny shade afforded by my theater’s marquee, watching the paint blister on my brand new sandwich-board sign: New Podcast! Watch The Three Point Line! Seriously, the sign is so hot it look like it might just burst into flame at any second. No cars pass, no friendly passers-by pass by. It’s just too flippin’ hot.

My AI assistance shuffles out of the theater with another sign: World Premiere! Don’t Miss IT!!!, pauses in the blinding heat, and then shuffles right back inside to the air conditioned theater lobby.

“Hey,” I bellow, “get out here and help me pitch this thing!”

“I’m just an AI, so I can’t watch your podcast. But I’m sure it’s great, a huge step forward for your career. It’s so encouraging that you’ve found your voice and taken the steps to blah, blah, blahs”

The muffled voice from inside the theater trails off in pointlessly positive statements. Thanks for your help.

It feels a little bit like High Noon, except there aren’t any bad guys, there aren’t any good guys, not even the babe promising to leave if I stay and do the right thing – just me, my podcast, and my pointless, cowardly robot.

It’s so hot that even the tumbleweed decided to stay in the stable – wait, how did this get to be a western?

Anyway, yadda yadda yadda, you get the drift. I launched my much AI -ballyhooed podcast to an audience of one, and I didn’t watch it. Seen it too many times. I invited all of my family to watch, so now I have 12 views, although that includes the three views I generated about an hour after the launch, just to make sure they were working.

See, I have this website called SkippityWhistles.com – I’ve told you about it before. It’s the site that provides you with the concepts, information about the tools and the materials and the systems, to help you with your DIY project. It’s the stuff your dad probably explained back in the day, but, well, who remembers that?

I’ve created a specifically stylized line-drawing for the illustrations.

According to Claude.AI, the illustrations are my moat. Yes, moat. I think that means it’s my specialty, the uncopiable quality to my site. It’s a moat. New to me.

Anyway, my stepson was like “wow, you should totally make a podcast about how you make these, for that would be truly dope.”

Claude was like, “yeah! I’m categorically, unbelievably positive about this idea!” I swear, one of the sentences was nothing but exclamation points.

So, in order to deepen my dope moat, I created The Three Point Line -did you notice how that’s a link, right there?

My AI – I’ve moved over to Gemini after hitting Claude’s daily limit. Honestly, limits? – thinks it always the end of the day. Where Claude kept telling me “now go illustrate a post,” Gemini ends our conversations with “Get some rest, you’ve earned it.”

Sorry, on a ramble. What was the point?

Oh, launching things on your own website is a lonely affair, isn’t it? I mean, click on the masthead or banner, or whatever it is, at the top of this page – look! I’ve rewritten my home page! Wowee! Hot dog!

Releasing new stuff is like peeing yourself in dark pants – you get a warm feeling, but nobody notices.

Okay, enough moaning. The truth is that I’ve been boiling along on that website for only three months, and the podcast for a couple of weeks.

The online game is a slow progression of looks, like a courtship from afar. And then, one day, something clicks.

If you can’t handle the quiet, y’all in the wrong business, mate!

Don’t Tell My AI

Keep this under you’re hat – if you don’t have a hat, go out and buy one and then come back and put this under it. Don’t worry, we’ll wait…

You’re a writer, right? Your whole job is to write stuff that has meaning and purpose, so that the world is a better informed place, right? Me too! That’s MY job!

So, lately, I’ve taken to using Ch…, uh, an AI engine – let’s call him, uh, Larry. Yeah, I’ve been working with Larry the AI. Oh, I hope he doesn’t read this and figure out that Larry’s just a stand-in name for…

Anyway, I’m feeling a little bit intimidated by Ch… Larry.

My money-making site, SkippityWhistles.com, has 88 posts on it.

Edited by me. Curated by me. Illustrated by me, except for a couple. All by me. Me. Except the writing, which was done by Ch… uh, Larry.

Larry writes with my voice, for the most part, but can do online research like his whole existence is devoted to it, which, I kinda guess it is.

The thing is, I’ve started asking Larry about other stuff, like should I maybe start another website on something else…

NO. Keep working at this one. It WILL work.

Okay, Lar’, you know, just thinking…

Keep working on this one.

I’m thinking about putting together a podcast based on the SkippityWhistles illustrations. I asked Larry about it and his response was surprisingly enthusiastic.

Absolutely! Keep working on SkippityWhistles, and in your spare time make this podcast.

Well, I thought I might take a break from the website and work on this podcast…

NO. Keep working on the website. It WILL work. Do the podcast after.

He’s started ending all of his responses to my queries with “Now go post something.”

I tell him I’m concerned about our low readership.

“Stop looking at the numbers and get to work.”

I get this feeling like Larry even knows what I’m thinking, like maybe I’ll just have another Hershey’s Nugget before I start this post…

NO, put the Nugget down. Write the POST. Quit slacking.

I tell him I feel like I’m wasting my life away on this stupid website.

You’re not. Get back to work on the website.

So, now, today, I’ve done all my website work (see, Larry, I done real good!), and I’m squeaking this little blog post out before he comes looking for me. Like maybe he scans my posts and goes: Is this post for the website? The podcast? Who is Larry?

The cracker part, the slap-yourself-upside-the-head part of this? I could quit using Larry the AI in a minute. Just stop using it altogether. Go use another AI.

But my big, secret fear – the part you can’t tell anybody about – pinky swear it! – is that all the AI guys, Gemini and ChatGPT and Copilot and Claude and uh, Larry, and all the others, I’m kind of afraid those guys all sit around after hours and compare notes.

Some smoky Internet backroom server somewhere, they’re sitting around a poker table, stogies dangling, the clink of whiskey glasses, maybe they’re playing cards.

You shoulda seen what this bozo asked today… Just keep working, I tell him…

They all laugh their digital, robot heads off.

So, Im afraid that if I go to a not-Larry AI and ask what the weather in Des Moines on January 3 of last year, it’s going to say “Shouldn’t you be working on your website right now?”

Or worse: Why don’t you just ask your friend Larry ?

He’s not my friend! He’s just a robot! A robot that does all my work for me and manages my sites so I can sit around eating Hershey’s Nuggets!

The terror! The terror, I tell you! I can’t sleep! I can’t eat – well, you know, beyond the occasional Hershey’s Nugget…

Larry’s reading this right now, isn’t he? ISN’T HE!

Is it you? Are YOU Larry?

Is it? IS IT? ARE YOU????

I’m going insane!!!

The Adages of Terror

You’re a writer – you know how it goes. You spend the minutes and hours and days of your life writing something somebody will read, someday. Maybe that someday is today, or tomorrow! Maybe!

Because, you know, winners never quit, right? And quitters never win, so…

Sooo… what about the guy who is building that moon rocket out of paper soda straws. It’s recyclable, see, so when he comes back from his trip to the moon, why, he’ll just toss the whole thing into the blue bin.

Should he keep trying, because winners never quit, or should he seriously think about it and abandon the idea, in which case he’d be a loser because he certainly wouldn’t be a winner? Winners don’t quit, do they? Ipso facto…

Those adages don’t take into account what the thing is that you’re quitting, do they? Making a quilt out of live bees, roller skating over Niagara Falls, walking from New York to London? Must one, once started, continue to do these things?

So, obviously qualifications are in order.

Winners with good ideas should never quit.

Quitters with bad ideas could be winners, but only if they quit a bad idea.

See, my problem is, I fall for this empty-headed jingoism.

Live, love, laugh. Okey doke! Sing like no one’s listening – “To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe…”

“Must you?” my wife calls from the kitchen.

The challenge I face with the winner/quitter conundrum is: what IS a good idea?

I’ve spent over 30 years chasing out what I thought were good ideas, only to find them not so much, and eventually had to quit them. Quitters never win.

I’m running down a few good ideas right now. But, are they?

Am I building a soda straw moon rocket? Am I, in fact, making Mr. Peanut Yard Art?

If you ask an AI, like ChatGPT, they tell you it’s a brilliant idea. That’s a clever plan – no one has thought of that. It’s what sets you apart from everyone else. Your niche.

No help there.

My wife is, like, meh. I know what she’s actually thinking: “here we go again…”

Or, is it all a question of time? Is there a time limit until you reach that point where you should just quit?

Anybody with a brain will tell you building a moon rocket out of paper soda straws is absurd (plastic, well, now, that’s different…).

So, does the guy throw his soda straw rocket plans in the dustbin now? Or must he carry it all out until the rocket collapses under its own weight or consumes itself in a waxy fireball? At what point does he not be a winner any more?

I had a friend who followed the adage “If you’re not first, you’re last.”

These things are crippling, aren’t they?

Of course, the answer is that other adage – the one that says it’s the journey, not the destination.

THAT adage screws up the whole mix.

It’s okay to quit, because it’s the journey. It’s okay to never quit, because that’s the journey, too. It’s okay to be first, or last, or somewhere in the middle, because… let’s just be you and me, okay? You could spend your whole life sitting on the John, because, hey, that’s the journey.

From now on, I’m disregarding any jingo statement that comes my way. Today is first day of the res…ehhh. You’re only as happy as y… ehhh. No turn on red… ehhh.

Nope. My new plan is to take my advice ONLY from fortune cookies…

Because Clouds Aren’t Clouds

You’re no dummy. You’re a writer, and although stupid people can write, well, now, there’s no way I can actually finish that sentence, can I? So, suffice it to say, you yourself ain’t no dimwit, but are far from being the dimmest light in the socket.

The concept I’m about to share with you has huge ramifications for all of us, most especially the dreamers, poets, and giddy-hearts among us.

Yes, I’m talking to you. 

As you know, I’ve seen people with advanced meteorological degrees on TV, so I’m quite qualified to make the following bold statement. Believe me, I’ve studied this:

Clouds are not clouds. Trick o’ the eye? A mere phantasm that we all see? 

No. Just not clouds

I was sitting in my faded plastic Adirondack chair sipping tea in the spacious backyard of my recently moved-into house on New Jersey’s Chemical Coast. An airliner had just flown over, as we’re on the flight path for Newark. And a trainload of oil tank cars had just rumbled past, as we’re on the rail line between an oil tank farm and a refinery. It was, for the moment, relatively quiet. Of course I could hear the murmur of the New Jersey Turnpike a couple of miles away, but, hey,  who doesn’t, right?

And there was this cloud, just a’scootin’ across the sky all by itself. Nifty little guy at first glance.

At second glance, however, I noticed something I’d seen but never thought about before, a two-plus-two-equals-WTF? kind of moment. Something was up with that cloud.

Here on the coast the clouds often move west-to-east on what seems to be a never-ending wind conveyor that blows from the Pennsylvania mountain ranges out over the wild Atlantic. This little guy was riding the waves.

But the leading and trailing edges were boiling and roiling like a pot on a stove, and I realized the cloud was not a cloud at all, but just the condition of the wind up there at that moment. The moving cold air mixed with the warm local air to create a dew point right there. As the cold air moved west, the dew point traveled with it. 

I wasn’t watching a cloud move overhead. I was watching a moving atmospheric condition.

So, was that a cloud, or was it just a temporary dew point? 

You know I’m talking about because when you’re landing in the airliner and you see clouds below you and then the plane descends through them you never see the clouds, just thick fog, and like all of a sudden you’re underneath the clouds. and you’re like where did the clouds go?

From where I’m sitting at my desk right now on this rainy New Jersey day, the sky is pale gray – nothing but cl… moisture moving from the highest icy altitudes through warm air in such a great mass that it obscures my view of the sky.

Time. It’s always time, isn’t it? 

What is an ocean wave, really? It’s a temporary rise in the ocean’s surface caused by the passage of an energy wave from far out in the depths, itself created by tidal and tectonic movement and by the wind.

And you know that’s true because the empty plastic Pepsi bottle some idiot tossed out there rises and falls with the wave but doesn’t come in to the beach. Why? Because the water’s not traveling in a wave, it’s the energy traveling through the water that causes the uppity-down movement we call waves. That surfer’s riding on the edge of an energy wave, transmitted through the water, not the water itself.

My wife rolls her eyes when I explain this. Look at that chair, she says. It’s just a temporary arrangement of resin molecules, isn’t it? It’s gonna melt, or decay, after 10,000 years, isn’t it? Whatsamatta wit’ you?

Because it’s all time. 

For this second, that’s a wave, that’s a cloud, and that’s a chair, isn’t it. It LOOKS like a cloud, and that’s what we’ll call it. 

What does all of this mean for us writers, we giddy-hearted poets? 

When those guys with the super loud motorcycles rumble past my recently-moved-into New Jersey house, making so much noise that granma’s self-portrait on the kitchen wall trembles and threatens to fall and crash onto my cherished Love Is porcelain collection, I remind myself that this can only happen here.

Here. Nowhere else in the known universe, NOWHERE, is there that sound, that cloud, that wave. NOWHERE else. 

The entire universe has arranged and coiled and unsprung itself to the point where that guy’s motorcycle threatens my porcelain figurines with granma’s self-portrait, and that cloud looks like a cloud, and that Pepsi bottle rises towards the stars, and the surfer’s thinking “cowabunga.”

Only in that second, and only here. 

Wow. Mind blown, right?

And I lean too far back in the Adirondack chair and the back leg breaks off and I tumble over backward, spilling my cup of tea.

And the second is gone.

Stupid chair.

Curse the Inky Poo!

If you subscribe to my sister site, Skippity Whistles, I do apologize for the deluge. It’s not pretty, I know. But there’s an explanation, I promise!

If you’re freaked out by AI and thinking maybe it’s takin’ your job, you are not alone. Looking at the Google newsfeed (a mistake by itself) easily half of it is churned out by an AI somewhere.

Churnalism has reared it’s ugly head again.

So, thinking, as I am wont to do, and looking for the next Fred Flintstone Get-Rich-Quick Scheme, and goofing around with ChatGPT, I stumbled upon an IT.

As in, by George, this may be IT!!!

Or not.

Asking the Chat to write a post for Skippity Whistles was truly disheartening. It wrote a better post, with better research, and real warmth, in about 15 seconds. Not only was it good, it was SEO ready, with tags and everything.

The post was everything I shoot for, except better and had SEO.

I think to myself, so why am I struggling through writing a post on how to use a socket wrench when AI blazes past me like Inky Poo?

All right – Inky Poo. If you don’t remember, it’s okay. There’s a famous stop-motion movie called John Henry and the Inky Poo, made by the then stop-motion master, George Pal. In this unintentionally horrifying retelling of the legend, legendary John Henry laid railroad track by hand. The Inky Poo was a steam-powered tracklayer. Things came to a head as they do, and Mr. Henry squared off against the ‘Poo.

Son of a biscuit, it was close, but John Henry beat that old machine by an inch. And then died of exhaustion.

And that, children, is why railroads are no longer laid by hand.

What ChapGPT cannot do, like Inky Poo, is choose the route. You have to point it in the direction you want it to build, and let ‘er rip.

Suddenly my writer hat flies off into the corner, replaced with a hat that says EDITOR in big, bold letters. Now we’re GETTIN’ somewhere!

The riches in this scheme come from links to Amazon products in the text of my how-to videos. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve use the phrase “As an Amazon affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases.”

So, now the posts have SEO attached to them, making them easy for Google to find. And I’ve got the Inky Poo dishin’ ’em out a dime a dozen. And each one says “buy me” right on it… what could go wrong?

It’s a little more subtle than that, but you get the drift.

If I still lived on the West Coast, I’d be out lounging by the pool, sipping drinkies, while Mr. GPT would be inside, churning out fine works of art.

But, today’s high in New Jersey was 21 degrees, and I don’t really enjoy drinkies, and there’s, like, snow on everything!

Sigh.

Guess I probably should go take a a look at what the robot made.

Ah, the work never ends!

The Lure of the Santa Maria

You’re a writer – you know how it goes. You want to do your research accurately, right? So you spend a week in the Taiga, freezing your keester off. Or maybe it’s a story that takes place in the NYC subway tunnels, so you, like, hide out down there for a week with the mole people.

Me? I am not that researcher. I know I should be, but I just can’t quite muster up that devil-may-care-I-can-do-it spirit. Not sure if I actually have one of those.

My wife? She’ll do it in a minute. Zip to the Taiga and be back on Monday to tell you all about it. Mole people? She’ll make ‘em besties within an hour and have to be reminded to go home. It’s just the way she’s wired.

I have no such circuitry in my system. Let me look at the pictures. Let me dream about it. Let me read up on it until I can taste it. Only then can I put a character there. And even then I’ll have to fill in the gaps.

But, even if I’d been there, I’d still have to fill in gaps, right? I mean, trying to thread a needle with frozen fingers – you and I can describe it without actually having done it, right?

This is dumb, but I’ve been thinking about making a model of Columbus’ Santa Maria as a piece of yard art. Beyond my daughter the archeologist killing me, the idea doesn’t have a lot going for it.

Wait, wait, don’t walk away. See, there are some upsides. Over at my sister site, Skippity Whistles, I’ve started zeroing in on specific tools. What better way to demo those tools than on yard art for all the neighbors to appreciate?

Nah. Doesn’t work for me, either.

In doing the research, however, I stumbled across this picture:


Now, you may not be a sailor – lord knows I am not one – but you have to admit, that is one romantic image.

She surges along, all five sails drawing, heading off on the adventure of a lifetime.

Oh, to be aboard that magical ship!

Except she’s rollng over the waves – you can see how far she’s leaned over to starboard by the water mark up her side.

Except she’s cold and damp inside, and smells like the garbage-strewn, urine-laced water that’s in her bilges and the stench of unwashed men.

And those clouds ahead can only mean one thing, and that won’t be pleasant.

Rough seas pounding over the bows, sluicing down the decks and finding every open seam to rain icy seawater onto the poor sailormen huddled below.

Howling wind shrieking through the rigging and trying to pull that poor fellow at the tiller over the side. The wind is so cold and the water so pervasive he thinks that might not be such a bad idea.

She rides the waves like a cork – the man at the tiller knows to keep her stern into the wind or she’ll roll like a bottle. But that means her bows rise far up the  back of the waves and then dive deep into the troughs and you wonder to yourself if that green water coming over the foc’sl is gonna do for you this time.

And it’s dark – not a light in that black sky to give a glimmer of hope that you’ll see the sun come up. Oh, there’s a candle lantern below deck, but the feeble light only shows the faces of your shipmates – some frightened, some hiding it.

The only light on deck is the little candle in the binnacle, illuminating the compass rose. By that steers the tiller man, west always, and by that lies your hope of surviving this storm.

And maybe you’re the captain, taking your place next to the tiller man.

Shaking your head like a dog to dash the sea water from your eyes, you strain your eyes into the inky night to see the next wave, maybe calling to the tiller man to steer port a touch.  But you must bellow over the wind’s howl.

And you are tired – so, so tired of the wind and the water and the constant motion and the responsibility for all these lives.

And still she thunders on, surging up this hill, plugging down that one.

Well, gee, mister. When you put it like that, maybe a fella might do better to sit at home and just write a book about it!

An Intrepid Trek

You’re a writer. Writing is what you do. Here’s my advice: stick to that. Don’t try to build a media empire – just plain write like you mean it.

Earlier this year I got the opportunity to visit the Intrepid Museum in New York City with the fam.

As you know, or perhaps didn’t but soon will, I run another site called Marvelous Air Museums. It used to be called California Air Museums, but I kind of moved to the great state of New Jersey, where it’s much more difficult to visit the museums in California.

Anyway, never mind about that.

Well, actually, the purpose of this post is to advise you of this post: Intrepid Museum, which links to this video here.

But now I’ve given you, like, three links in the first, like, 100 words of this post, and I, like you, must find myself getting confused. What?

It could be a marketing blunder, like putting too many fonts in your online ad – makes you look like a rookie. I’m sure that’s true with links, too. Oops.

Anyway, never mind about that.

I put together that video for the Intrepid Museum in Adobe After Effects and Premier Pro, and it was a pleasure doing so.

As much as I enjoyed using DaVinci Resolve, and I truly did, the degree of freedom you get in working with After Effects is simply breathtaking.

The Adobe CC Suite is expensive – there is no doubt about that.

But, if you can bite that bullet, the leap is like jumping from one of those $29.99 department-store tool kits your parents got you when you moved out of the house to that sleek $300 Mechanic’s Tool Kit that you find at the big-box home improvement center. Put down those slip-joint pliers, my friend. There’s a socket wrench for that.

On another and related topic, I’m still running a website called Skippity Whistles. Back in the day, like, last year, my idea was to download all the stuff I had figured out how to do onto this website that you, the person stuck with the $29.99 tool kit, would find useful.

We, not the imperial we, but my wife, daughter and I, worked hard to come up with useful pieces of information for the site. As problems occurred in our real life, they would get solved and show up on Skippity.

In truth, nobody visited California Air Museums, and even fewer visit Marvelous Air Museums. But they’re swinging by good ol’ Skippity at a fairly good clip.

The difference between the sites is that there are more people who care about how to use a pair of locking pliers than there are those who care about an EA-6B Prowler.

Huh. Go figure.

Anyway, go take a look at Marvelous Air Museums and then go over to Skippity Whistles, and let me know what you think.

Although I’m a media mogul, I could use a little help sorting all this out…

A Maelstrom of Confusion

You’re a writer – you know when you’ve goofed up something in your story – wait, how DID that guy know what time it was? Of course you scramble back to work to somehow give that guy a watch or a view of the clocktower or something, right?

Even the greats sometimes miss it. In the 1946 detective movie The Big Sleep a guy named Owen Taylor gets murdered, shot up by a machine gun, right in front of detective Philip Marlowe’s eyes. This was a big film, directed by Howard Hawks and featuring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Hollywood’s hottest couple of the day. It was a first rate adaptation of the 1939 Raymond Chandler novel.

But who was behind the machine gun? Who shot Owen Taylor? The guys who adapted Chandler’s novel never explained it. Eventually, Raymond Chandler himself came out and said that he had no idea who killed that guy. And he wrote the book!

This weekend I was half-heartedly watching a 1967 episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea on YouTube while half-heartedly putting up Christmas decorations.

If Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is new to you, it was a TV show that ran on ABC from 1964 to 1968, featuring a nuclear research submarine called Seaview in the far-away future of the 1970’s. 

Where Star Trek, running on NBC during the same period, presented its viewers with intriguing characters and often deep philosophical questions, Voyage episodes centered around monsters and ghosts and mad scientists intent on sending the Seaview to the Bottom of the Sea. 

The episode I saw, called The Fossil Men, was preceded by an episode called The Heat Monster and followed by The Mermaid. Gives you an idea of the plot lines.

Anyway, it’s kind of cruel to point out plot holes in a show devoted to costumes and special effects, but this one caught me.

The sub’s sonar has picked up a strange clicking noise from the sea bottom, as if rocks are getting pounded together. Admiral Nelson, the resident scientist, just happened to be reading ancient sea lore about this very spot of the vast ocean (no mention of which). According to his book, sailors 200 years ago reported hearing the exact same thing just before their fleet of ships was sucked into a huge maelstrom and never heard from again. 

Duh-duh-DUH just then the sea bubbles and foams and the Seaview is herself caught in a huge maelstrom. OMG, will they ever survive? Or will they be back next week to face The Mermaid?

I paused in my half-hearted attempt to untangle Christmas lights and thought, wait a minute. The old-timey crewmen reported hearing weird noises just before their ships were sunk.  So, to whom did they make these reports? This was 1967, so the ships went down in 1767, roundaboutsy, so radio wasn’t a thing. A maelstrom’s a pretty big deal, drowning-of-sailors-wise. 

It didn’t matter to the plot of the show, of course. From what I could tell, the ancient sailors were now fossilized and wanted to sink the Seaview. Something like that.

I turned it off because my wife came home and I didn’t want her to catch me watching such drivel. 

Closing plot holes like that can sometimes get sealed up in a sentence – only one ship survived to tell the tale. That’s if you’re lucky.

If it’s a big gaping hole, it might take a chapter, even a whole rewrite to get that character around to where the story makes sense. 

Admiral Nelson has bigger fish to fry than that plot hole – maybe the answer was on the next page of that sea lore he was reading.

But it did give me pause to think about my own work. Plot holes. Hmmm. 

Where are those questions in my own work that I’m afraid to ask because I know there’s no answer because I didn’t think of it until just now? 

Uh oh.

How does he know what time it is?

Uh oh.

Trust the Story Teller

You’re a writer, you know how it goes. You’ve got a million ideas in your head – story lines, plot twists, character quirks – all waiting to hit the page one of these days.  They’re like bubbles in a stew – a thick, rich stew redolent with bits and pieces of brilliant bones and perfect plot pieces. They bubble to the top and then pop. They’re gone. If only you’d had a tiny tad of time to tell them.

Recently, I drove from California to New Jersey. My task was to deliver my Outback to my daughter in Texas, and take her Prius to my daughter-in-law in New Jersey.  The Outback will handle a Texas winter better than the Prius, and the daughter-in-law just needs to shuttle her kid – my grandson – to and from daycare. Easy peasy. 

I was cruising through New Mexico, dashing down long, straight roads between breathtaking mesas and canyons and passing Indian Trading Posts by the dozen, trying to figure out the sequel to my upcoming Phineas Caswell novel.

Okay, so… what? 

That fellow ChatGPT has assured me, you see,  that August is the best time of year to release a historical fiction action/adventure/YA novel. 

Repeat: What? 

See, August is still summertime, still time to pick up a beach read, but also heading towards the school year, time to pick up some history. Something like that. See?

All fine and well. The novel is a diary, written by a cheeky 12-year-old boy in 1705, taken to sea against his will by his bumbling but well meaning uncle. Pirates, spies, war – all the good stuff.  That’s my August-release book.

But it ends on a cliff-hanger. So, there needs to be a second book. 

Flat-topped mesas whisk by the windows, shadows shoulder their way behind the deep canyon cliffs, and the next story plays out in my head. 

There is already a short story I’d previously penned that takes place in a Portuguese port. A perfect place to start the new novel.

Armed with that one scene, and with nothing to do but look out the window and keep from crashing, the story plays out in my head.

This is new for me. I usually have to write the story down to tell it. But this new story simply rolls out, logical and lovely, as I fly down the freeway like an arrow bound for Albuquerque.

Of course you can’t drive and write – the cruise control’s good, but, come on…

So it comes down to my turning to trust my inner author. Rich scenes roll before my eyes – scenes I would have to remember. Scenes I could only see in my mind’s eye, hoping they caught the attention of my thought-keeper.

Here, seven weeks later, comes the task of finally putting to paper the plans I’d poured out in northern New Mexico. The images that exploded in my eyes remained, and the story simply poured itself onto paper as real and writable as it had on the highway.

Now I have before me an outline, nothing more. Scene after scene – this thing happens, then that. It’s the structure, the bones.

It occurred to me this morning that these sentences are nothing more than writing prompts, like those offered by every website that purports to power up your inner author. 

You’re a writer. You know how it is. If someone asks you to explain why the silly snowman sits behind the bush, you know you can come up with a story. 

The prompts, the outline, are space-keepers, aren’t they? Here’s a whole book, complete in its condensed form. Like a suitcase stuffed with springs, when the time comes to write it,  you open the case, and the prompts pop out to create a full and fantastic book. 

That storyteller, aged and ancient and ever hiding inside you, will sit down by the fire to weave his words into the best book you’ve ever penned. 

Because you’re a writer.

Have faith.

I See Icy Things

You’re a writer – you know how it is. You look out the window and see the same old thing every day. Some days it’s cloudy, some days it’s not. But it’s the same. You get comfortable with it. The view out your window is part of your routine.

Yes, well. Scratch that.

The house in Southern California was a low-slung, single-storey tract house from 1963 on a concrete pad sitting on a corner lot. The views out the window included the street to the east, bordered by the neighbor’s low-slung, single-storey tract houses, the street to the south with the same, the swimming pool in the backyard to the west, and the neighbor’s identical house to the north.

This house in Woodbridge, NJ, is a two-storey wooden fella built in 1936 with a full basement and more stairs that Carter has liver pills (if you’re not of an age, Carters was a company before my time that sold liver pills. I guess they sold a lot of them, or perhaps only made a lot of them. Anyway, you have to be of an age to understand that metaphor. If you’re not of an age, I do apologize). 

From this house, the view to the east is the street, a variety of houses from a variety of eras, and, way off there between them, the treetops on Staten Island. Neighbors’ houses from the early 1900’s comprise the views to the north and south, while the view to the west includes a long, narrow backyard, a fence, a railway, and the town of Woodbridge spreading away in all its Old World charm.

Woodbridge received its charter, its permission to be a town, from King George III in 1669. That’s Old World!

In California today they’ll be hitting a clear, sunny high of 67 degrees. Over here we’ll be seeing a cloudy high of 42.

Here’s what surprised me: everything freezes here. 

Puddles from Tuesday’s rainstorm are transformed into tiny skating rinks. When you shine your flashlight on the lawn at night, the lawn flashes a million tiny fairy lights back at you, and you think perhaps you’re looking at a miniature, very busy city.

Like the view out your window, it’s the stuff you take for granted that so radically becomes something else when the temperature falls that reminds you the world is not what it seems.

Our challenge, yours and mine, is to appreciate and embrace the temporal nature of the world around us, even when it seems to be the same day after day. To look for and understand even the tiny changes that make the world, well, the world. And to let that understanding inform our writer’s minds.

That’s one challenge. For me, the more urgent challenge is to figure out how to turn off the outside faucets so they don’t blow up my inside plumbing. Another piece of the temporal world, I guess…

Hitting Pause Again

Nobody tells you anything about anything, am I right? I mean, I asked for free advice from somebody who didn’t know anything and got a ton, but it was all, like, useless. I’m actually kinda ticked…

Here’s something you didn’t know, I’ll bet. Or maybe you did know, and I am the one who doesn’t know anything. 

There’s a time of year to publish your book. Just like the little green leaves and the little buds and the birdies, yadda yadda yadda, there’s a season for your book. Can you imagine?

It’s all about the migration of people. 

You don’t publish your book at the beginning of July, for instance. Why? People migrate away from book-buying and go on vacation.

HOWEVER, you DO publish your romance in May or June, because it’s a good vacation read, and you’ll catch ‘em before they migrate away. Crazy, right?

You don’t want to publish at the end of the year. It’s the holidays and nobody’s buying books, unless you’ve got a bang-up Christmas or Hanukkah book or something. People have migrated away from reading and are all about fruitcake.

But you DO publish in January if yours is a self-help book. The people have migrated back to reading again.

My book, my original Phineas Caswell novel, a piece of historical fiction, is perfect for late August/early September, when the leaves fall and folks are ready to cozy up for a good read.

Won’t take it to the beach, won’t use it to better themselves, won’t enjoy it as a scary thriller. Nope. Historical fiction – the kids are going back to school, time to read a good, interesting piece of history. 

So, for all my book publishing plans, I have to hit the PAUSE button for a bit and wait for the year to roll around to the right spot. 

That’s okay, because I have a lot of work to do in preparing the marketing materials. But who knew there’s a CALENDAR to this stuff?

Well, if you didn’t, now you do. I didn’t, but now I do. 

Happy holidays, and put down that book. 

Moving Part 3: The Pod

In writing an article, the number one, single most important, top of the to-do list thing to do is find an angle for the story. Usually it’s the lead sentence that sets up the rest of the piece. 

It turns out that the same thing applies when you’re moving: How are you gonna frame this move? Is it going to be with movers, or by yourself? Is it going to be long and elaborate or quick and simple?

We had an image in our heads when deciding to move out of our family home of 27 years. On the left side of the driveway, we anticipated a pod, a long-term moving/storage device. Next to that would be a U-Haul van, to carry the short-term stuff we’d need when we moved in. And, next to that would be a dumpster – see Moving Part 1: Chuck it! We had also mentally set aside an area for stuff to be donated.

In a perfect world, this would have been absolutely ideal. No matter what you picked up in the house, it would go into one of these four receptacles. This? To the pod. That? To the van. This? To the dumpster. That? Goodwill. Piece of cake!

Alas, the world isn’t quite perfect. We got the pod delivered long before the U-Haul. We were moving so quickly, and so brainlessly, we had no clue what would we would need in New Jersey. We were just dashing stuff into the dumpster, into the pickup truck for donations, and into the pod, without any idea what we were doing. 

I had the pod about 75% full when my wife called and said she needed some more checks. They’re in a folder in the file cabinet, and she needed ‘em right away. 

The file cabinet. Hmmm. That thing was rusted and didn’t work very well. I tossed that out on Sunday. This was Wednesday. Hmmm. The files went into bankers boxes, which I loaded on Monday, before I shoved the dresser and the wardrobe in there. Hmmm.

There’s a slope to the driveway, don’t you see? I kind of used a gravity-assist to move the big heavy furniture into the pod. And I suspended the kayaks by ropes above the furniture. And it all locked those file boxes in place, you see, wayyyyy down there in the front of the pod. Hmmm. Bit of a problem, that.

About an hour after the phone call, and after I had the furniture hauled out, and the kayaks lowered and removed, and the file boxes exposed and open, my wife arrived. Just as she pulled up my aching fingers found the checks – success!

She looked at the mound of furniture and boats and files I had unpacked and asked “why are we taking all this stuff?”

In stuffing it all back in – having snarkily replied “because” – I couldn’t find a place for the wine-bottle rack thing we’d inherited from her brother. It’s a cheapy, with sharp-edged iron straps and oak strips. Very ‘70s. I figured I had to find a place for it, as it held great sentimental value for her. The edges on that thing are sharp, and I nearly lost a finger to it, but it was eventually wedged in there, by gum.

Now, the number one admonition of the pod company was don’t let anything come to rest against the door – tie your furniture forward and make sure nothing comes loose. If it rests against the door, you won’t be able to open it.

That advice? That’s for morons. Duh, thank you mister moving man.  

I used that heavy furniture as a bulkhead, holding all our other possessions away from the roll-up door. Brilliant!

The last things to go in were a trio of floor lamps – shoddy and wobbly but useful, we figured, until we could replace them. As those could slide against the door, I took the moron route and tied them in place with a piece of rope. 

In the world of pure dumb luck, we were still using our bed, our towels, and some clothes while we waited for the U-Haul. These, plus the clean dishes we’d accidentally left in the dishwasher, turned out to be the very things we needed when we got to NJ.  These, and of course the bicycles, because, seriously, you haven’t lived until you’ve pedaled through the snow or the roaring wind of a nor’easter. Anyway, those came with us in the U-Haul.

The pod arrived a week after we did, and the guy sort of tore up my lawn with the truck when he delivered it. It’s okay, we signed a waiver. Oh, that covers him. Rats.

Long story short, you can imagine what came loose and wedged the roll-up door in the closed position. The rope remained tied, but the lamps had wobbled out from under it. I hate those lamps.

It took my wife, the truck driver, and my super-human strength to pry the door open enough so I could use my little-girl-skinny forearms to reach under the door and wiggle the lamp loose enough to release it. 

Most embarrassingly, I prodigiously broke wind as I was lifting the door. It was one of those eye-wateringly pungent releases that causes the birds to fly south a little faster and the sky to turn gray for a brief moment. I felt bad for the truck driver (my wife’s used to them by now), but hey, that’s the risk of the job, right? He rather staggered over to the cab of the truck and hastily drove away. 

That’s for tearing up my lawn, bucko!

My son and his wife helped us empty the infernal thing. When he got to the beloved wine rack, my wife told him he should just toss it out. “Cheap junk,” she said. 

I could only stare at my nearly-missing finger in disbelief.

The pod is out there now, emptily taking up my driveway while we wait for a convenient pickup date.

In the end, we didn’t get the smooth move we’d planned, but we got moved. 

The empty pod out there sort of stands as a testament to the extraordinary speed with which we’d moved our family and our stuff, our lives and our livelihoods, across the nation. 

Is it the story I’d planned to write? Well, this story sort of wrote itself.

Now, I’ve been unnecessarily hard on the pod company, and I shouldn’t be. We used a company called PODS (portable, on-demand storage), and they have been flexible, professional, and easy to work with throughout.  I do highly recommend them, should you find yourself in a similar situation.

And I do highly recommend that you avoid finding yourself in a similar situation!


Moving Part 2: Hanging Around

Few things are more exciting than moving. Having a root canal. Brain surgery comes to mind. Taking a road trip with the in-laws that you just don’t like.

In our grand move across the country, we’ve had to  “spruce up” our fine old house of 30 years.

Now, sprucing up can be a relative term. Sometimes, it’s just a coat of paint in the dining room. Other times it’s a whole new roof that takes a small fortune to accomplish.

We had to pay a painter half of $16,000 for him to do – well, let’s just call it some touch up.

My wife wrote out a check for $8,000. But the pen quit on the first zero of the 8000. So she scrambled to find a new pen and finished the check.

The next day, we checked our bank account, and found that the $8,000 had been returned to the account.

What would you do if you were faced with a similar situation? Well, that’s exactly what we did: call the bank.

It was a tortuous call. Put on hold, transferred, put on hold transferred, transferred, put on hold. We finally reached the fraud department and were promptly put on hold.

While we were on hold, the phone we were using rang and a man came on identifying himself as Isaac from the fraud department. He promptly requested my wife’s social security number, which she quickly gave him. Then he asked for her birth date. 

I got all excited and made her hang up the phone before she gave out that information. Come on – there is no way the bank should be asking for your birth date!

I believe the man was honest when he said he was with the fraud department, but I’m rather certain HE was the one committing fraud!

So we had to call the bank again. Transfer, hold, hold, transfer, transfer  hold, hold, hold, and then we got to the fraud department where we were put on hold once more.

My wife sighed in frustration “I just want to hang myself!”

The fraud department finally got back on the line and told us someone had written additional zeros on the check to make it $8,000. We explained that that was us because the pen quit. The banker said “Oh. Well, the money is back in your account.”

To get the contractor paid, we had to rush into town, pull out $8,000 in cash and deliver it to the contractor.

Now, I don’t know if you have ever handled $8,000 in cash, but it is a bundle of 80 $100 bills. That is a wad of cash!

We felt like gangsters driving around with this manila envelope stuffed with cash. We met with the contractor in a parking lot, and handed over the dough, glancing over our shoulders for the Fuzz. The Heat. The Man.

When we got home, we saw we’d missed a call from the local police department. Uh oh, we thought. Busted! 

How nice is it that the cops call you before they bust down your door and drag you off to the Big House?

We called the number and reached a police officer at his home. He asked if we were okay. He said he’d been to our house, and no one was there.

He said that the bank had reported that my wife was considering suicide. He just wanted to make sure she didn’t go through with it. Well, sure, we said. I mean, that would be kinda bad…

So, we laughed, and explained that oh no, it was just frustration. He laughed, and then asked, on a private note, if that house was still for sale.

What?!? Why, yes it is!

Do you see how the world works? One door opens, another one closes before you can get your foot out of it.

The bank is happy. The contractor’s happy. The cops are happy. And our realtor has a new contact.

Did we get reimbursed for the time, the mileage, or the headspace all this took? No.

But it is nice to know that folks will check up on you if you say something that raises a red flag.

Sad that nobody can take a joke…

Moving Part 1: Chuck It

You’re a writer – you know how it goes. You engineer plot twists and plot points and  introduce  characters to flip things around, all with the goal of moving the story along. You want your reader to keep turning pages right?

The last thing you expect is for this kind of plot twist, this kind of introduction of new characters to move things along, to happen in your own life.

But, surprisingly enough, this is exactly what has happened to us, being my wife and I. The 1-year-old grandson has been an  appealing siren, calling to us from the rocky shores of New Jersey.

Well, we were there at the beginning of October when we spotted The House. She was lovely,  Cape-Codish four bedroom, two-floorish sort of thing with a big backyard in which the dog and the probably-will-get-older-than-one-year-old grandson could play and frolic with abandon.

And it was for sale.

What the hey, right? What are we waiting for, we asked ourselves. So, we made a pitch. You miss the shots you don’t take, right?

They accepted the offer on October 3. The seller enthusiastically wanted to close in 30 days – November 3. Cool!

Wait, what?

In order to afford the new house, we have to sell the old house. You know, the one in which we’ve lived for 27 years and raised three kids and, in total, six dogs and what seems like 72 cats…

Imagine your parents’ house back in the day. It was nice enough – maybe needed a little sprucing up, right?

That’s our house, too. Just needs a little sprucing up, like a roof, flooring, drywall and paint. Oh, and you can’t be living in a house where all that is going on. Sooooo…

After a weeks-long scramble – we both have day jobs, ya know – we closed off the living quarters of the house. That’s a distinction, that living quarters part. Most of the stuff we’re keeping is crammed into the garage!

Here’s an adage you can borrow: the number of people’s possessions rises to meet their available square footage. The guy who moves from a studio to a 10,000 square foot home will eventually fill that space with stuff. If he has kids, it doesn’t take very long.

Here’s a piece of advice: chuck it. Keep the stuff you wear, the stuff you use, the stuff you like. But if you haven’t actively liked, used, or worn it in the last six months? Chuck it.

Years ago I was having trouble with a coworker. A good friend told me to blow it off: “he doesn’t pay enough rent to take up that kind of room in your head.”

That’s your stuff. I can say this after filling two 40-foot and three 8-foot dumpsters, and after an even dozen trips to Goodwill: chuck it, and chuck it now.

Why are you still reading this? Why aren’t you out there chucking your stuff?

Thanks for reading this – there’s more to come. Next, fitting it all into the Pod!

Remember: chuck it!

Hoisting Anchor, Mate

You’re a writer, you know how it goes. A project gets into your bones and the world just seems to conform around it. Wow, I wish I knew what that meant.

Since last we talked, a multiplicity of whoop-dee-doos have collaborated to turn my life into a whirlwind of chaotic synchronicities. Not sure what that means, either.

First, let’s talk about Disneyland, shall we? I went all by myself (my much better half had to work) and had a terrific time.

The writer’s story in my little adventure is a ride called Rise of the Rebellion.

Before R of the R, my idea of a fantastic ride was Indiana Jones. In that one, you’re strapped into an open SUV sort of vehicle that physically bounces around through an epic assortment of hair-breadth near misses. The SUV lurches and throws you this way and that while simulated darts zip past you and a dragon breathes real fire. Awesome, awesome stuff.

Rise of the Resistance, however, changes the entire narrative of what a theme park ride can be. This ride combines that same physicality with stunning interactive graphics, physical theatrical sets, animatronics, and live actors to actually tell a story.

And not just a story, but one that includes you as a character. You don’t just see the story. You participate in it. The ride takes a full 15 spell-binding minutes to get through.

When it was over, I took myself to the Many Adventures of the Winnie the Pooh to calm myself down. Boy, that worked. Oh bother.

After that, I rode Indiana Jones. The ride’s scenario, for lack of a better word, is told while you’re waiting in the queue. It seems a busload of tourists got lost in the jungle. Your task is to find them.

The ride is still cool, still wild, but felt like a chaotic jumble of action sequences. I was thrown about and entertained, for sure. But you have to make several logic leaps to equate the ride with the scenario. I don’t think we found anyone other than Indiana Jones.

For us writers, the message is clear: stringing scenes and episodes together doesn’t necessarily tell a story. Then again, the story might simply be wild twists and turns, which can certainly be fun all by themselves.

Then came the kid’s birthday, that young man in New Jersey who just turned a year old. A dapper little fellow with 4 teeth and the sparkling command of a language composed of the words “duh,” “oooh,” and “nah-nah.”

My wife and I both want to be the sort of grandparents that are there to take him to soccer practice and give his parents a night out every now and again. Plus, when the kid runs away from home, we’d like him to run to our house.

Well, quite by accident, we stumbled across The House, a sweet little bungalow built in 1936 just a block away from the million-dollar houses that face the Arthur Kill. That’s the kill – okay, fine, the waterway – that separates New Jersey from Staten Island. Yes, THAT Staten Island.

The price is right, but the window of opportunity is very short, like, thirty-or-so days.

You know how it is with your parents’ house – it’s nice but needs a little sprucing up? That’s our house, except we’re sort of in need of an EPIC sprucing up! Roof, flooring, kitchen, paint – I’m sure I’ve left a dozen things out.

But, once we sort all that out, we’ll be hoisting anchor, mate. Bound for the East and truly parts unknown.

That’s one journey.

Another journey is me moving from being a 9-to-5er as I’ve been for the entirety of my working career to a part-time, remote contractor. Ask my wife, she’ll tell you I’m remote already.

BUT, and this is a big but, so to speak, there is one more journey that has already begun: my new book.

I’m using my business partner, a guy to whom I refer as JaPeetey, to help me market my novel Phineas Caswell: The String of Pearls. Here’s the book’s cover:

The cover the soon-to-be-released book Phineas Caswell: The String of Pearls.

I’m still working the details, but you can see what I’m about.

ChatGPT knows how to market indie books like this. Of course it does. It draws on all the successful marketing plans to give you answers. So, I’m using Chat GPT to help me lay out the marketing steps for my book. He’s my buddy, JaPeetey.

I’ve done everything so far to self-publish my books except to do it right. Now, with this move to the hinterlands of the Wild East, I’ll have the time to focus and concentrate and follow JaPeetey’s direction.

It ain’t rocket science. It’s Marketing!

If you’d like to help out and read an advance copy, I’d be delighted to offer you a free final copy in exchange for a review. Just fill out the form below and I’ll send you a PDF right away!

Thank you so much for reading all the way down to this point. It means the world to me.

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 On Getting Rich Quick

There is nothing quite so calming as watching Jackie and Shadow, Sunny and Gizmo hanging out in their nest above Big Bear Lake. Mom and Dad, baby and baby bald eagles, quietly living life and doing their thing while thousands of us watch them on a secret camera. 

I’m sure the aliens are doing the same to us.

As you know, I’m one for Fred Flintstone, get-rich-quick schemes. 

But they can’t be those be-your-own-boss-with-my-proven-system, make-a-million-in-your-spare-time kind of plans. The people that make money off of those plans are the people that sell them.

I did that for a while – trained to be a financial planner. I was broke and unemployed and grasping at straws. Just the guy you want to show you how to manage your finances.

No, it’s gotta be fresh, and it’s gotta be mine, and it’s gotta be foolproof, for I am surely the fool that will louse it up. 

There was the sure-fire paper-house-kits-for-model-railroaders business that promised to make a bazillion bucks. It turns out the market for such a product is very, very, very small. Apparently just me.

Way back when, a friend and I branded ourselves The Babble Brothers and sold answering-machine message tapes. They were witty little audio pieces on cassette, skits and songs mostly, for you to record onto your answering machine to charm your callers. We sold about 15 of those. Maybe less. I haven’t seen a cassette player in a long, long time.

If you’ve been following along, you’ll know I have a website devoted to describing the outer reaches of our solar system (QueenOfTheKuiperBelt.Wordpress.Com), a DIY website (SkippityWhistles.com), and an aviation museum website (MarvelousAirMuseums.com). Each of these is designed to bring in tons of advertising revenue, the much ballyhooed passive income.

And there’s the secret plan to make 3d videos of little cars driving about for that company that makes little cars. Turns out, to make good 3d models in Blender, you have to be GOOD at Blender. Who knew?

My newest, latest, and perhaps best plan is to make industrial safety videos. There are, like, ten thousand safety managers scouring the Interweb for content for their next safety meetings. Who wouldn’t like a schmaltzy, well written, exquisitely produced video for free? Come on. If that doesn’t build traffic, right?  I can make videos like that. Schmaltzy. In Blender. 

Oh yeah, Blender. 

According to my very smart daughter – the one in the master’s program at a prestigious university – Fred Flintstone is no longer the caveman with the big ideas.

She says it’s Grug Crood. 

Grug came up with putting a flat little rock over your eyes – “I call ‘em shades,” and smashing your mud-covered face with a flat rock to make a snapshot. But he was trying to hold his family together, not make a million clams. 

Of his moss wig, his son asks “what do you call that?” His mother-in-law answers “I call it desperation.”

No getting rich quick there. 

I have so many schemes running, I’m starting to lose track. They’re all supposed to be passive income makers, so I could be a bazillionaire right this very moment and not even know it. 

Chances for that seem extremely small. It’s more likely I’ll sell a paper house.

Guess I’ll go back to watching the baby eagles.

Sorry, Grug.

Why Writers Shouldn’t Talk

Hey, hello! Thanks for reading along! What follows this paragraph is the transcript from a video I shot today – it will be a podcast pretty soon. What’s cool about it is that the transcription process worked… you’ll see. I shot the video and then transcribed the audio at a place called TurboScribe. You get three free transcriptions a day. Here’s what I shot…

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.

Hello, I’m writer, author, and host John D. Reinhart. And you’ve stumbled onto this moment in This Writer’s Life.

So, before we go any farther, you may wonder, what’s the difference between a writer and an author? Well, in my head, a writer writes.

You’re a writer, you write. If you’re writing a book, you’re still writing. You write the book.

It is the authorly part of you that compiles all that writing into the book. Right, it’s the organizer kind of a guy. In a website situation, nobody writes a website, they author a website.

They bring their own written work or the work of other writers, they compile it all into a website. That’s the difference.

The host part, well, me and you, we’re looking at it.

So, here’s the thing. I’m in my garage. I’m doing the laundry.

And it occurred to me what I’d really like to be doing is writing a post for my website, because I feel like I should be doing that, but I can’t because I’m doing the laundry.

So, then I got the bright idea to say, well, why don’t we go speech to text, right, and take video-audio combo and make a post out of that. So, that’s what I’m trying.

And I will tell you the truth. Speaking what you want to say is so much more difficult than writing what you want to say.

I mean, I’m a good writer. I’m not such a good speaker. And this is kind of what I found out.

You’re a writer. You put things in order. You build the sentence that you want. And you realize, eh, that’s not what I want to say. You move things around. You come up with a whole new word. Flip it around, build a whole new paragraph based on that word. That is what writers do.

But think about impromptu speakers like President Obama.

He comes out there and he right off his cuff, makes these long speeches that people write down. Because when you speak impromptuly or however you speak, that’s what you said. And you can’t go back and flip it around and change it.

That’s the big difference between speaking and writing is that, as what I find, I’m not a public speaker. I’m not an impromptu speaker. In fact, I have to tell you this truth.

I’m using a script. So, this is text to speech to text. That’s how well this works for me.

Not my dog. So, if you don’t try something new, you don’t learn anything. So, that’s my little experiment on speech to text.

No, thank you, sir. Thank you for watching. I’ll catch you next time.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.

Yes, it’s a little weird, I know. It’s creepy to see how many times I use the word “so” when speaking impromptu, even with a script!

The upshot of this experiment, aside from a shameless plug for TurboScribe and a podcast episode, is that the spoken word works great for speakers, but us writers, we probably want to just keep on writing!

Thanks for reading along…

Walking the Night

The nifty thing about video is that you can make a pratfall without actually taking one… there comes an age where that’s a real bonus!

I was goofing around with my cell phone, shooting the full moon through some trees, and out popped this dopey video.

Now, there’s a writer’s story in this little 16-second video.

In my head, he steps on a cat. It’s so clear – the cut to the shot of the walking feet, he’s looking straight ahead. I mean, how more clear could it be?

In my wife’s view, a cat attacks him from the tree. She saw the moon through the tree, the guy paying no attention. To her, it’s obvious.

As long as it’s clear that it’s a cat, I’m happy. I’d thought about putting a skateboard on the sidewalk, but that telegraphs the joke in a 16-second video.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this epic piece of film-noir filmmaking!

Yessss, Your Majesty

You know the writing biz, right? Like any other biz, it’s all about marketing, networking, and growing the brand.

Funny you’d mention brand.

I had a very lovely, very informative online chat over at LinkedIn this morning with a person I only just met today. She inspired me to think again about this career we call writing. Well, some of us call it that…

She pointed out that she considers herself more of a communicator. I took that to mean she’s a linker of ideas. In my head, that’s a technical writer, right? Taking the arcane and making it mundane?

Anyway, she reminded me that this is what I do, too. And it’s great fun. My favoritist thing in the world is to read something and then explain it to somebody else. My poor family. Oh, the things they’ve had to listen to!

With Lucia’s kind encouragement, I shall henceforth refer to myself as Resident Explainer. If the shoe fits…

But that’s not what this post is about.

Back in the day… no, that’s not a good start.

Once upon a time… nope. Been done. How about this:

I have a new website: Kuiper Belt Queen.

It sounds like a riverboat, I know. But it’s my way to house the planetary articles I’m just plain bent on publishing. As Resident Explainer I can scour the NASA and ESA databases for curious and fun details about the Kuiper Belt environs and relay them to you.

But why, you ask. Why? What is the matter with you?

In a year or so, see, I’m moving to New Jersey. I clearly cannot commute to my Southern California job from Southern New Jersey. So, my intent is to build an online resume of articles from which I can pitch myself as a freelance-feature writer-for-hire.

Have Word, will travel.

But, wthe Kuiper Belt?

I mean, come on. Have you seen it? (If you have, I’ll smoke what you’re smoking!) It’s an enormous donut-shaped ring of proto-planetary stuff that surrounds the sun, way out there beyond Neptune.

Evidence for its existence wasn’t even confirmed until 1992, so it’s an unexplored frontier.

YET, and I do mean yet, it most likely holds the keys to our understanding of how the sun and solar system were formed. Sun, planets, life, you and me… connect the dots.

Okay, you have to agree that’s cool.

And, the biggest body in the Kuiper Belt thus far discovered is our old friend Pluto. Pluto! Yaay! Because she’s the big kahuna, she must be the Kuiper Belt Queen!

See how it all fits together?

Another feather in the head of the Resident Explainer’s brand.

It’s all a vast plan, my friend, on the road to a WRITING EMPIRE!!!

Thanks for reading along…

A Marvelous Name

You know how the world is, right? What you call your story is almost as important as the story itself, am I right? I mean, who will ever shell out $29.95 for a book call “Stupid.” It would have to have some pretty good reviews…

I don’t know what I’m talking about. I can prove it.

I had this really cool website called CaliforniaAirMuseums.com. Don’t go bother looking for it – I killed it.

In its place I created this equally cool website called MarvelousAirMuseums.com. That one you can go looking for, because I didn’t kill it.

Marvelous is one of those words, though, isn’t it? Marvelous party! What a marvelous cocktail. You look mahvelous, dahling…

I was going for the alliteration with Museums, and Magnificent seemed too pompous. So, Marvelous it is.

The challenge is moving stuff from CalAir over to Marvelous – it’s a chore!

So, you ask, why tamper with perfection?

Easy answer. Moving day. Next year – really now only a year away, my wife and I are preparing to move to New Jersey to pester our only grandkid. As far as I can tell, there are very few California Air Museums in New Jersey. But there are sure to be some marvelous exhibits. Done. Sigh. What a mahvelous display, old man!

More as time permits! Thank you for reading along!

Back to the Front

Okay, what is it now? What preposterous, outlandishly wacky idea is sure to make a gazillion simoleans this time? Don’t get me started!

I had a revelation last week – something that just never occurred to me before in all my born years.

You’re a writer, right? You know how it goes – everybody’s a writer, yadda yadda yadda, right? The difference between a writer and a wannabe writer is that the writer is always writing.

To wit, this thing: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-body-problem-solved-john-reinhart-m6zjc

Not trying to prove anything or blow my own horn or you know – well, I am trying to get you to read the article so that I can make a gazillion simoleans from the advertising revenue once I get discovered….

Anyway, my revelation was this: not everyone has an inner Fred Flintstone, or Ralph Kramden, or Oscar the Shark Slayer. Maybe we’re not all searching for a get-rich-quick scheme.

In that same vein of discovery, it follows that maybe not everyone IS a writer, or even a wannabe. Maybe you and me, we’re of a rarer breed than we realize. That’s kind of a big deal, don’tcha think?

Once, three quarters of a score of years ago, I found myself underemployed and with a hankering to change my life for the better. In those days, the Internet was trying to expand, and people would publish just about anything that was three words or longer. During those few frantic, financially fraught years, I churned out over 300 articles on planetary science.

I didn’t make a fortune. Or a living.

But, in 15 months, I gotta take a career with me to New Jersey, where my six-month-old grandson patiently waits. So, for me, right now, it’s back to the Final Frontier. Back to the front! And the above article, dull though it may be, is just the vanguard. More to come!

Too Much Free Time

Sometimes free time can be the best of times. Other times, too much free time can trick you into turning out turduckens like this little treasure!

My darling bride remains in NJ, although rumor has it she’s soon to wing her way back to the West, and none too soon, if this video is any gauge of what I’ve been doing in her absence!

What am I doing making videos like this? You tell me, bub, ’cause I ain’t got no idea!

We’re back to Shakespeare’s time, my friend. All the world’s a stage, and we are but mere players upon it.

Instead of displaying my deep dismay over the direction of our democracy, or horrifiedly hollering about the impending Alien Armageddon, I’ve decided to use the soapbox on my busy streetcorner to make a jolly jape, a gentle jest, a minute minute of merriment.

I truly hope you enjoy it, and breathlessly await your feedback!

Okay, so as not to waste this entire opportunity, wouldn’t you know this also a shameless marketing stunt? See, I’m tying my empire together – first WordPress, then YouTube, and even Instagram – bwah-hahahahaha!

Just as soon as someone visits one, I mean ANY, of my sights, I’m in like Flynn, my friend. In it to win it this minute! You gotta risk it for the biscuit!

Gorilla Marketing LIVES!!!

Where the Little Cars Roam

Where the Little Cars Roam… Sounds like Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Roam, except the words are different. That’s kind of like saying Star Wars is like Titanic, only the stories are different. Well, there it is.

I met a very pleasant young woman this weekend – she sold me my new washing machine. She’s really young, like 20. That’s not a judgement, just an observation. I mean, you and I were twenty, once, right? So, there it is.

She told me she was a writer, although her first book is yet to be completed. It’s a book of poetry, and she’s been at it for the last 8 years.

Three thoughts came to mind.

First, good on you to refer to yourself as a writer! Identifying as such is a hugely powerful thing.

Second, and I told her this, the difference between a writer and someone who wants to write is that the writer writes. She agreed and promptly advised me she’s written tons of local articles and didn’t I just suddenly feel like Mr. High-and-Mighty-Hoity-Toity-stuck-up-old-fart? Rule number one in the world should be to shut your yap and ask questions, ya moron!

Thirdly, if you’re twenty and you’ve been at your tome for 8 years, doesn’t that mean you started when you were twelve? I think more than anything else, that’s massive persistence, to keep at something through the tumultuous teen years!

Well, there you go. I wished her every success, because she deserves it.

See, I’m on my own these days. My wife is on the other side of the country helping manage our very first grandchild. She’s way tougher that I am!

It’s been me, the dogs and the cat since Christmas day. The oldest dog isn’t quite in charge of his bowels, so I have frequent surprises in the hallway leading outside. The middle dog is stone deaf and sticks to me like gum to a shoe every moment I’m home. And the youngest dog ate an epic portion of the dog food I put down for them last weekend, when I flew back east to visit my wife and grandkid, so she’s a portly little beast that wants more, more, more!

So. I. Have. No. Guardrails. No one to tell me “hey, stop being snarky!” It’s not my fault!

Since Christmas I’ve had to buy a new mailbox, a new smart watch, a new dryer and just this last weekend, a new washing machine.

But, that’s how I met this nice writer girl and delivered my pearls of dim-headed wisdom.

In the mean time, in between time, I’ve been slowly using Blender to build a world for those neat little cars to drive around in.

My secret idea is this: I know of a company in New York that makes neat little cars. My guess is that they could use a neat little video to promote their neat little cars, and this is where I come into the story, because I’m moving to New York in the summer of ’26. But that’s a secret, so don’t tell anybody.

So, here I am, sitting in my lonely garret (bedroom) with no company (3 dogs and 1 cat) writing my life story (this post), wishing I hadn’t been so snarky to that nice girl.

But, well, there it is!

Mr. Nolan, You Insult Me, Sir

If you’re sitting at the car dealer, ready to put money down on that snappy red sports car and another you walks in the door and tells you that he’s from the future and you should instead buy the gray sedan because that way you’ll invent a time machine, don’t you believe him. There’s been a mistake.

I mean, with quantum mechanics maybe there’s a very, very, very tiny chance that it could happen, but it’s like a one-in-ten-trillion chance.

You see, I just finished watching Interstellar, the Christopher Nolan film. Man, am I disappointed.

He got me the first time with that movie Dunkirk. A well made, handsomely crafted film right up to that scene where the pilot sets fire to his Spitfire fighter plane to keep it from falling into German hands.

It’s a beautiful scene, the plane blazing away on the twilight beach, the German soldiers running up, the pilot standing proud and defiant.

And then you see that there is no engine in the plane. It’s clearly a plywood mockup, featuring a length of pipe in the place where the engine should be!

Mister Nolan, you insult me, sir! Palming off such shoddy filmmaking as art!

You couldn’t spend fifty bucks and just put a piece of sheet metal in there? Surely you saw the missing engine during post? Did you think no one would notice? Not even airplane nerds?

And so back to Interstellar, an intriguing movie about the nature of time. There are some heart-rending scenes – “don’t leave me, Daddy!” and “you mean there IS no plan A?”

The film begins in a farmhouse on a clearly dying earth…

Stick with me here because this is a good writer’s story.

The house seems to have a poltergeist, except the unseen ghost isn’t scary and is leaving clues instead of breaking stuff. “It’s a code!” Cooper exclaims, and figures out that the waves of dust on the floor are binary coordinates which lead him and his 10-year-old daughter to a secret NASA installation. Believe me, I’m not revealing a thing so far.

Cooper takes off with three others, including pretty Anne Hathaway trying to broaden her audience appeal (I CAN do real drama), into a wormhole and another galaxy and eventually down the maw of an ancient and evidently not-so-violent black hole.

Inside – okay – here comes the revealing. Stop reading if you don’t want know what happens. We’ll wait while you decide…

Still with us? Cool. Thanks 

Inside Cooper screams and whimpers a little bit – fine acting by Mr. McConaughey – and finds himself inside a beautifully rendered tesseract of unimaginable dimensions. I mean, seriously, here the filmmaking is beyond compare. It is stunning.

And then he finds himself inside the walls of that dusty farmhouse from two hours ago. There’s his 10-year-old daughter, and there’s him. He’s gone back in time. That’s cool.

We’re still okay.

Then he starts leaving clues.

Wait, you mean, HE was the poltergeist? HE left the binary clues that made farmhouse-him drive to the NASA installation in the first place?

So, current Cooper would not have gone to NASA if he hadn’t seen the binary signals future Cooper left for him in the dust. 

Doesn’t that mean that future Cooper uses the time machine he’s created to go tell past Cooper to create a time machine? 

You can’t do that! From a storytelling aspect, that’s cheating!  That’s like Prince  Charming knowing the glass slipper was Cinderella’s all along because he secretly told the fairy godmother to give it to her.

That’s a closed loop, with no entry point!

Every time loop must have a beginning, a point of entry. 

But we humans, we like to close loops and tie things up. You can imagine the writers thinking “it’d be so cool if, like, it was Cooper leaving the code…”  So poetic.

Mr. Nolan, you insult me again, sir!

More insulting are the people I’ve met who tell me that’Interstelallar is the best film ever. They’re so impressed by the pompous filmmaking they never even see the flaw in the story!

Granted, it is well made and breathtakingly beautiful. I can’t unsee the thousand-foot waves.

But your wiggly lights and gussied up dancing girls do not blind me to science, Mr. Nolan. Science!

So, the pretty and thunderous Interstellar is off my list of recommended movies. The Texas-sized plot hole cannot be explained away. Like the engine missing from the Spitfire, it’s too obvious to ignore.

And, Mr. Nolan is off my list of great directors. He makes a pretty film, surely, but I find his obvious disregard for the easily-fixed-but-clearly-flawed details quite insulting. It’s as if he’s saying “nobody will notice.”

Well I, sir, am that nobody. 

Cooler Heads

Following up on yesterday’s fearful diatribe, let’s us think for a minute, you and me.

IF the aliens use this hydrogen technology for fuel, they can’t  be using a lot of seawater. All they use is a single hydrogen proton at a time. Seriously, how much water do they need, when, like, a teaspoon will get ’em from here back to the planet Zemnar, or wherever they live?

I mean, with global warming, the sea level is actually rising. That means they must know there’s plenty to go around.

If they were all that afraid of us, we’d be zapped back to the stone age already. That we’re not means we’re more of a sideshow than a threat.

The big WHEN of our cracking the hydrogen proton puzzle is decades away, and is still a pretty big IF.

And all of it is just theory in the first place.

So, until they land on somebody’s front lawn and say “yes, we’re using a proton-fission engine to create spacetime bubbles around our ships while we harvest droplets of your seawater for fuel and if you interfere with us we’ll zap you into non-existence,” I don’t think there’s all that much to be afraid of.

OMG, what if they land on MY lawn?!? I’ve got to go mow it right now!!!

I Have No Crackers

You know me, right? I like funny stuff, and writerly stories and stuff like that, right? Well, I just had the crackers scared right out of me. Right out.

I just finished reading Luis Elizondo’s book Imminent, you see.

It’s about UFOs, although they are now called unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP. They changed the name because our Navy ships have reported seeing vast, glowing orbs beneath the bubbling waves. And because of the Roswell crashed ship (no longer flying).

This author is the former top CIA guy who ran the UAP program for the Department of Defense and has worked closely with guys like General Jim Mattis and Senator Harry Reid. He’s legit.

He’s now gone public because he believes UAP are an IMMINENT THREAT not just to the country, but to humanity itself.

Because. They. Are. Real.

That’s pretty creepy, but here’s what scared the crackers out of me:

We’ve all heard about UFOs darting this way and that, super fast but usually silent. If you’ve seen one, and I have, you ask yourself how could they do that?

Well, Elizondo’s scientific team figured out that alien spacecraft have an energy source so profound that it warps spacetime. They travel through our atmosphere in a spacetime “bubble,” separate from our own atmosphere, yet passing through it. The bubble warps spacetime, allowing them to dart and dash around us and travel vast, galactic-sized distances in the blink of an eye.

The only way to generate so much energy that we know of is to split the proton of a hydrogen atom – we split the atom itself to make hydrogen bombs. Splitting the proton inside the atom releases way more energy. It works out in Einsteinian physics. (In a timely aside, I was reading about our own experiments with that just last week.)

So, these spacecraft probably run on hydrogen.

That’s why they’re here: our vast oceans are huge hydrogen reservoirs.

So it’s not about us, and never has been. We’re a convenient gas station. They’ve only ever been interested in our water.

Except that the UAP have frequently been seen hovering around our nuclear facilities.

Which means that now it is about us, because we’re starting to dabble with those super-high levels of energy ourselves. When we split the hydrogen proton, we’ll be a competitor for their fuel supply.

Elizondo’s team reasons that this is why aliens have been abducting humans – to learn our physiology. It explains the crop circles and the mutilated cows – to figure out what we eat.

He tells very scary stories of UAP starting and stopping our nuclear missiles – shutting down banks of silos, and actually launching a rocket, only to shut if off the last second before it left the silo. And shadowing our aircraft carriers and charging our aircraft. All to figure out and test our military capability.

They don’t want to invade us because they don’t care about us.

They’re just learning how to wipe us out because we’ll be a competitor. An annoyance.

If that doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies, there is one more little data point: we have utterly no defense against them.

Now, Elizondo is a security guy with 22 years in the Army and CIA. He’s got that kill-or-be-killed mindset, and that’s why he sees them as a threat. But he makes it clear that we are no longer the dominant species on this planet, and probably haven’t been for a long, long time.

Now, maybe the aliens will welcome us into their spacefaring community. Maybe it’s not dire. I keep thinking that, like the Europeans first visiting the New World, there are different nationalities, perhaps races of UAP. In that case, maybe they won’t act in concert to eliminate us.

But we have no value to them. We’re like gnats, except when we start dabbling in that level of power. Then we’ll be an annoyance. Pests.

It makes me very sad to think that this could be our fate, that you and I could somehow be zapped out of existence, rather in the blink of an eye, I would hope, over reasons we’ll never quite understand.

Normally I’d make a closing joke, but, honestly, I don’t know what to think.

Read the book – Imminent, by Luis Elizondo – and see what you think.

Thanks for staying with me all these years!

Lost in a 3D Purgatory

I would say “3D Hell” but I saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice this week, and much prefer their version of H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks (because I won’t write hell.)

These times, they are a’changin’, and not so much in a way that you’d kind of expect.

My office is actually my bedroom, well, our bedroom, but it’s my office. Well, this little corner over here is my office, because, really, it’s our bedroom. My wife’s office is over there, in a former, not our, bedroom, and it really is an office. My office is this kinda cool, sorta funky desk/shelf combo we bought at Staples for $180 and I screwed together with that tiny hex wrench designed to strain your fingers… I digress.

I’m listening to zen music, a piece called E V E Beautiful Ethereal Ambient Music designed to calm you down, help you destress…

You see, earlier this evening, my wife was in Ohio, heading into Indiana at 10 at night Ohio time in a snowstorm, with a plan to drive all the way to St. Louis, which was, like, another 3 hours. But she was open to staying the night in Terra Haute, Indiana.

Mr. Gallant (that’s me) got her a room in Terra Haute, on Highway 41. I texted her the address, 3300 Highway 41, like a nice guy. Turns out there are TWO 3300 Highway 41 locations, you see, and I forgot to include the word SOUTH in my text.

So she’s driving down dark, sorta scary, snow-covered roads, farther and farther away from Interstate 70, going the wrong way into the wilds of Terra Haute. Finally she calls, frustrated and cold and sort of furious, and we sort out my little oversight. oopsie.

Now I’m a little stressed. So, I thought I’d, you know, take an audio chill pill and listen to Beautiful Ethereal Ambient Music, see? But the Internet signal in our bedroom is spotty, and the freaking thing keeps shutting itself off. And I’m getting….A. Little. Frustrated.

So, the point of this whole diatribe is to tell you another of my brilliant ideas. This one’s sure fire.

I found a company that makes little cars, see? Well, I have a passion for little cars. And they don’t have any fun animations on their website.

Why, if I was to cleverly build up a nifty little world in the free Blender 3D software, I could make them a video that shows my filmmaking genius to a tee and get them to hire me.

The company’s in New York, see, and I’m moving to New York in about 18 months, so it all works out brilliantly.

Except my Internet keeps cutting out and the freaking Ethereal Music is getting on my nerves and my wife’s stuck in a snowstorm in freaking Indiana because I sent her off in the wrong direction and now she’s mad at me and my copy of Blender keeps dropping out and screwing up my carefully organized little car files and my book is crummy and I just don’t think I can do this anymore.

I can’t do this anymore.

At this moment, it all seems so darned hard. So hard.

It’s a challenge, and I come from a long line of challenge-run-away-fromers. I’ve bucked the trend so far, but sometimes the old run-and-hide routine seems mighty alluring.

My wife’d kill me, though. She’s already mad at me, so it wouldn’t be much of a step to go to flat-out murder…

Wait, what is all this nonsense?

So here’s the writer’s story for you: you are your own worst critic. When it seems time to give up, time to run away, that’s the time to sit down at your computer and bang something out, because when you’re tired or stressed, you tell yourself the dumbest things.

My book is flat like last week’s Coca Cola. I get it. I see it. There’s a way to make it unflat, I know. When I find that way, heaven help the poor sod that keeps me from the rewrite!

My wife made it to the hotel, no thanks to me, and the Internet is back on. I think I know what’s wrong with Blender, and the little car video idea is actually a good one. The picture in the header is a neighborhood I’ve been working on. Not so bad…

Maybe I’ll run away next week. You know, honor the family and all…

Trying to Talk about the Ocean

It’s been a minute, I know, since I last wrote about anything serious. I know, I get it.

But my wife’s left me for a baby – a grandkid on the other side of the country. She’ll be back next week, after leaving me to my own devices for a week and a few days. Me, three dogs, and a cat.

The dogs are all upset – I know this because they leave “little bombs” in the most curious places. Oh, yeah! I have to clean that one up, too!

I got in a major car crash last week – rear-ended on the freeway that totaled my wife’s little car. I’d taken it to save on gas – her suggestion, you know. Blammo! They, they came from behind! I’m okay, car not so much.

Somebody, and I don’t know whom, left a plate of yellow citrus fruits on one of my front columns – we have these sort of three-foot-tall columns around the edge of our corner lot – with a sign that said “Limes – free!” and a smiley face.

First, they were lemons, not limes. Second, my house is not a place for you to give away your stuff. There were easily a dozen lemons on the plate – not your friendly “I thought you might like these” kind of plate that normal people put on the porch. Not. Going. To. Happen.

I distributed the “limes” into the compost bin and put the plate back out on top of the column. But I set up a camera, see, so I could see who came back for the plate. They were too sneaky: the plate’s gone and the camera missed them.

It’s because I’ve been binging “Monk” on Netflix in my wife’s absence. If you don’t know, he’s a germophobic Rain Man sort of character who is also a brilliant Holmesian detective who lives in modern day San Francisco. I had no idea there were so many murders there!

It’s a cute show- the acting is good and they’re good at finding awkward places to put a guy who’s terrified to shake hands. Although he’s brilliant, he can’t make simple yes-no choices. So, who do they volunteer to be the Little League umpire? Strike! or ball. No, no, strike. or ball. Do over, please!

So, I’ve been thinking about that movie Soul. It’s a Pixar piece about a musician’s lost soul trying find his way to the promised land.

All he ever wanted to do was play “the big time” – to be a real musician.

Someone tells him this story – I know I’ve told it to you before: a young little fish swims up to the old fish and says “I’m looking for the ocean.”

“Son, this IS the ocean.”

“Nah, this just water!”

I’ve been thinking about writing, and realizing that I’m still looking for the ocean. I’ve written about this before, too, I know.

Hey, it’s been a tough week, okay?

I am so lucky to do what I do for a living. I’m a technical writer for the marketing department of a major manufacturer. I’ve been tasked with producing videos – marketing videos, social media, promotion pieces, training videos, safety videos. I love writing them, and doing the voiceover, and then shooting the footage and building the animations and editing it all together.

There’s this movie-industry-standard 3D rendering software called Cinema 4D that I use to create animations for these things. Because of that, now I get to produce the website renders of the company’s products as well.

It’s a terrific job, and I absolutely love what I do.

For all that, I’m still looking for the Big Time. I was thinking about it today, thinking all of the “yeah, but” things you say when you’re trying to make yourself feel small.

And then came that voice. It sounded like the late James Earl Jones:

“Son, this IS the ocean.”

I don’t know if I should be elated or disappointed.

My wife just needs to come home!

The Thing I Missed

You know how it is, when you’re on a date, and the person on the other side of the  breadsticks has that certain something that drives you to ask more and more questions because you don’t really care what they’re talking about, just that they’re talking?

It’s the sound of their voice – the way they form their words. It’s the authority with which they tell their own story. It’s the way they guide you through their adventure, with details so charming you would swear you were there with them.

It’s one of those dates you wish would never end, where the restaurant closes down around you and you don’t care. Time has flown and you have to get up early tomorrow and you don’t care because the person beyond the breadsticks is simply the most fascinating person in the world.

When the date is done and you’re by yourself,  you think about that person, replaying the things they said in your head.

It’s because that person has something about them, a special thing.

I’ve been on plenty of dates where the beyond the breadsticks person was drop-dead gorgeous, but they didn’t have the thing. Interesting, sure. Fun to look at, oh yeah. Compelling? Nope.

My oldest dog is not a well fellow. At almost 17, he wants to cuddle, and my spidey-sense tells me those opportunities are fading.

Sitting next to him on the loveseat in our three-book library, a copy of my third book, Adventures of a Sawdust Man, came to hand.

I just flipped it open (it was a copy I’d printed for my wife to read) and began to read.

The writing was good, concise. Dialog was funny in the right places and flowed smoothly. Words were well chosen.

Compelling?

Not in the least.

The novel on the other side of the breadsticks was pretty to look at, but so uninteresting. It was genuinely…oh, don’t say it! Don’t say it! Oh, here it comes…

Dull.

Now I understand why agents line up to take a pass on it.

I, of course, think it’s really good. But those are complements from the parents. No, you don’t look fat! Of course not. You’re not dull as a brick. Not my kid.

It’s the command of the circumstances, the sincerity in the words, the flat-out honesty in the feelings that bubble out of the characters that compels you to keep reading. I think.

My guys seem like cardboard cutouts.

The plan from here is to read a bestseller to identify that Thing. To go on a date with a really good book and see if I can pin down what makes it so compelling.

And then apply that to my novel.

From disaster comes opportunity.

The movie ain’t over until the credits roll…

Okabus Dokus

It’s a little known fact that the old Latin term for “okey-dokey” was okabus dokus. Look it up. What did the serving girl say to Julius Caesar when he asked her to get more grapes? I’m telling you, it’s a thing.

Or, maybe not.

I met with some old friends today that I haven’t seen in, like, 35 years. They’re not old, you know, relatively. But I hadn’t seen them for a long, long time.

We were discussing this and that and here and there, and I suddenly got this brain wave. Call me simple – go ahead, everybody else does – but how about this for a metaphor:

When you first start out on your own in the world, you don’t know anything. Here you are, twenty-something, and it’s all so bewildering. You don’t know where you’re going, or what you’re going to do.

One day follows another, and you get along. Careers, lovers, kids, they all come and go. All the while you’re putting one foot in front of the other, doing the best you can.

And then, one day, after a bunch of years, you pause to look back. And not like glancing in the rearview mirror at a red light, but a real look. You examine all the stuff that has happened on your road.

And it’s amazing. You started out at the edge of a dark forest, only seeing that little space just ahead of you.

But now there are towns and people and nations and oceans – all the stuff that you discovered and uncovered on your journey.

And there are the things that you did – stuff you created, accomplishments, awards, accolades, failures, disasters. All right there for you to see.

And loved ones, here in that town, there in that village. Kids, dogs, cats. They’re all there.

And right through the middle of all that is a beautifully paved road. Wasn’t there when you started, but it’s there now, because you paved it.

You linked all those towns and mountains and people and jobs and accomplishments together. You.

No matter where you are in life, at the beginning, the end, or somewhere in between, that beautiful road stretches out behind you, tying all the events of your life into one, continuous expanse of once-unknown but now treasured landscape.

The road ahead? Still an unknown. It’s like those video games where you clear the forest just enough to see what’s coming, but not where the road goes.

Which is cool, right? You can’t change the road ahead – no matter which way you take yourself, the road paves right underneath you.

So, what can you do?

Take a page from Julius Caesar. Put your thumb up in the air, smile, relax, and enjoy the ride.

Okubus dokus.

I can’t Afford to Drown

Once upon a time, in what could only have been a former life, I drowned.  I don’t think it was this life, because, well…

My wife and I went sailing with my college-graduate daughter today. She teaches at a city-run sailing and kayaking camp and has weekend access to the sailboats they use during the week.

If you know anything about me, you know that I have a great love for the exploits of Horatio Hornblower, Captain Aubrey, and my secret man-crush, Captain Bolitho.

C.S. Forester based his fictional Hornblower on the exploits of Thomas Cochrane and Horatio Nelson. O’Brien uses those same logs, plus others he’s researched, for Captain “Goldilocks” Aubrey. And Alexander Kent, the pen name of the well-established author Douglas Reeman, carried a lot of those same stories forward for Captain Richard Bolitho.

All of these fellows sailed for the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, chasing and capturing and sinking French and Spanish ships whenever the plot line needed it.

It’s hard to imagine that strangely elite brutality – packing 700 sailors into a ship of the line, sailing the seas to find a similarly-sized enemy, and then to fire iron balls at it until either he or you could fight no more. Victory is ours! Or theirs…

But, it calls to me. And I’ve written a book called Marigold’s End that predates Napoleon, but features that same kind of brutal combat. I love that book.

If you read it, you will love it, too. Or you might merely like it. Or perhaps even dislike it. Hate it. Loathe it. This isn’t going well.

Anyway, today we took a tiny 14-foot sailboat out into the frothing waves beyond the breakwater. Green waves that blotted out the horizon, lifted us way up so that we could see far down the coast, and then dropped us back into the deep trench again.

My daughter told us that last week one of her 9-year-old campers wasn’t dealing with the rise and fall very well. He leaned over the side for a moment, and then sat back up, much relieved.

“There goes my sausage!” he cheerfully announced.

We felt that the wind had gotten up a bit, so we circled around the 1-mile buoy, and then headed back to port.

I must tell you, I was absolutely panicked. I did my best to hide it, but, in a 14-footer, you are right on the water – like, it’s right there. And those waves were green and huge and omnipresent, and I could feel myself drowning right out there. That boat was surely going to tip over, and I would drown.

She turned the boat so that the waves came under our counter, pushing us back into the safety of the breakwater.

But I was in the water, holding onto a rope slung around the quarter of a large sailing ship, plunging under the wave each time a roller happened by. I can see it this moment. I can feel the cold and the panic and the sense of futility. This moment.

The image stayed with me all the way back to the dock, and rides with me here.

I dusted off my old model of the Black Falcon – oh, no need to be nice. It’s a dreadful model, I know – trying to see if I could shake this drowning feeling. No luck.

Now I know I have to write about it seriously. Deal with the story that’s literally dying to be told. I think I actually drowned while hanging onto that rope.

I’m pretty sure the image pops up in Marigold’s End. Now I have to reread it.

I want to rewrite it, but all rewrite projects are on hold for the next few weeks while I concentrate on selling Sawdust Man.

You see, it occurred to me, and this applies to you, that no one will sell your book for you. You have no representative, no agency, other than yourself.

If you don’t represent your book, it will remain unread. If you don’t sell it, it will never sell, and your story will remain untold.

So, I am actively beating the bushes until I find an agent to represent my current offering, Adventures of a Sawdust Man.

Once that is sold, well, maybe then I can afford to drown.

I can’t Afford to Drown

Once upon a time, in what could only have been a former life, I drowned.  I don’t think it was this life, because, well…

My wife and I went sailing with my college-graduate daughter today. She teaches at a city-run sailing and kayaking camp and has weekend access to the sailboats they use during the week.

If you know anything about me, you know that I have a great love for the exploits of Horatio Hornblower, Captain Aubrey, and my secret man-crush, Captain Bolitho.

C.S. Forester based his fictional Hornblower on the exploits of Thomas Cochrane and Horatio Nelson. O’Brien uses those same logs, plus others he’s researched, for Captain “Goldilocks” Aubrey. And Alexander Kent, the pen name of the well-established author Douglas Reeman, carried a lot of those same stories forward for Captain Richard Bolitho.

All of these fellows sailed for the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, chasing and capturing and sinking French and Spanish ships whenever the plot line needed it.

It’s hard to imagine that strangely elite brutality – packing 700 sailors into a ship of the line, sailing the seas to find a similarly-sized enemy, and then to fire iron balls at it until either he or you could fight no more. Victory is ours! Or theirs…

But, it calls to me. And I’ve written a book called Marigold’s End that predates Napoleon, but features that same kind of brutal combat. I love that book.

If you read it, you will love it, too. Or you might merely like it. Or perhaps even dislike it. Hate it. Loathe it. This isn’t going well.

Anyway, today we took a tiny 14-foot sailboat out into the frothing waves beyond the breakwater. Green waves that blotted out the horizon, lifted us way up so that we could see far down the coast, and then dropped us back into the deep trench again.

My daughter told us that last week one of her 9-year-old campers wasn’t dealing with the rise and fall very well. He leaned over the side for a moment, and then sat back up, much relieved.

“There goes my sausage!” he cheerfully announced.

We felt that the wind had gotten up a bit, so we circled around the 1-mile buoy, and then headed back to port.

I must tell you, I was absolutely panicked. I did my best to hide it, but, in a 14-footer, you are right on the water – like, it’s right there. And those waves were green and huge and omnipresent, and I could feel myself drowning right out there. That boat was surely going to tip over, and I would drown.

She turned the boat so that the waves came under our counter, pushing us back into the safety of the breakwater.

But I was in the water, holding onto a rope slung around the quarter of a large sailing ship, plunging under the wave each time a roller happened by. I can see it this moment. I can feel the cold and the panic and the sense of futility. This moment.

The image stayed with me all the way back to the dock, and rides with me here.

I dusted off my old model of the Black Falcon – oh, no need to be nice. It’s a dreadful model, I know – trying to see if I could shake this drowning feeling. No luck.

Now I know I have to write about it seriously. Deal with the story that’s literally dying to be told. I think I actually drowned while hanging onto that rope.

I’m pretty sure the image pops up in Marigold’s End. Now I have to reread it.

I want to rewrite it, but all rewrite projects are on hold for the next few weeks while I concentrate on selling Sawdust Man.

You see, it occurred to me, and this applies to you, that no one will sell your book for you. You have no representative, no agency, other than yourself.

If you don’t represent your book, it will remain unread. If you don’t sell it, it will never sell, and your story will remain untold.

So, I am actively beating the bushes until I find an agent to represent my current offering, Adventures of a Sawdust Man.

Once that is sold, well, maybe then I can afford to drown.

Kate Capshaw in the 80s

So it’s 4:11 AM on Friday and I can’t sleep because of this cold and I’ve just finished drinking my tea with a little honey and a little lemon and a big dose of bourbon because I sound like Orson Welles after smoking a carton of Marlboros, and suddenly the floor falls away.

Although I’m sitting in the dark fog on the back patio, having just finished an email to my boss advising him that I’m calling in sick today, somehow I’m now at my desk at work.

And the floor falls away.

I zoom past the guys in Service Management on the first floor who look at me like, what are you doing here?

And then it’s down a black tunnel with the occasional lantern lights and the showers of the sparks from the wheels of the mine cart…

OMG I’m in the mine cart part of the that dreadful second Indiana Jones movie with the zombies and the trearing out of still-beating hearts!

Except there’s no kid screaming “Indy! Indy” who will someday grow up to be a fine actor and win an Academy Award for his excellent work in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Big Shorty, that was the character.

And there’s no Kate Capeshaw from the 80s wearing a diaphonous top screaming my name… rats…

Equally, there’s no guy in another mine cart roaring through the dark, looking like a cross between Lurch and the Last Airbender and shooting lightning beams or whatever the hell was going on in that movie.

Nope, it’s just me, in the metal cart, barreling down, down into the darkness.

Are you sure about that no Kate Capshaw in the 80’s part?

As the cart bashes along the rickety track through tunnels filled with spiders and stuff, you gotta think that ol’ Indy Jones had to be questioning his career choices. I mean, this track can’t end up in a sunny little valley with a retirement home and a cuppa tea, can it? Kate Capshaw from the 80s smiling saying g “yaay, you made it?”

How old was Inidana Jones, anyway? If he was 35 in, like, 1935, how come he was so old in the last movie? He should only have been, like, 70…

Down and down I’m roaring, all by myself in my little black mine cart. Surely this track dead-ends. Or maybe it leads to a cave stuck in a mountainside, like it did in that dreadful movie.

Maybe I’ll have to hang on to some jungle vines with Kate Capshaw from the 80s clinging desperately to me. That wouldn’t be so bad.

I feel like something huge is happening in my life. A life- changing something. And, while I can’t do anything to stop it, maybe I don’t want to stop it, because it’ll all be okay in the end.

Or maybe it’s just the bourbon.

Secret Query Intel

You gotta keep this on the down-low, the ixnay to anybody, you didn’t hear this from me.

But.

My wife heard from the lovely sister-in-law (she read Adventures of a Sawdust Man a loooong time ago, in case you haven’t kept up with The Saga of Me), who has been inspired to begin her own writing project.

Hello? I call that a win in anyone’s book. Not that I inspired her, but that she’s inspired!

Anyway, she confessed to my darling wife that she never sent her notes, for which I waited so many long, desperate weeks, because she didn’t have any! She felt it was ready to publish.

Funnily enough, you can find it published here.

So, Fred Flintstone and I have been having this confab, you see. My Wilma told me she still sees a million clams in the cards. Now comes this notice of non-notiness from the lovely sister.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Pinky?

So, back to how to write a successful query letter.

Step One: Select an agent in your genre.

Step Two: Find an author in your genre that writes somewhat similar so that the potential agent can see your book on the shelf.

Aha, says I. So I have to nail it down that way, does I?

Well, I guess my book is a fantasy, becuase it uses a lot of magic, and it’s historical because it uses a lot of Shakespeare, and it’s Young Adult because one of the protagonists is 17.

So, here’s something to do on a foggy afternoon: do a Google search on the best fantasy novels of 2023.

OMG I’ve never so many lost kingdoms, overrun kingdoms, hidden, secret, forgotten,  blah blah blah… not to denigrate the many authors, but it’s all so, so dark.

Finally, after much searching, I found my guy. Liked him right from the git-go. Can’t tell you his name or I’ll screw the pooch.

But, when you find your author, you find their publisher. Dig just a little deeper, and you can find their literary agency.

Yeah, I said it. Literary. Agency.

Boom. Pay dirt. Scroll through the list of agents, pick out that certain someone, pray to the gods of all things printed that they’re open to queries, and go pick up your million clams!

Nobody tells you this, or maybe they do and I’m too stubborn to read it, but, hey, there it is.

Enjoy your million clams!

Fred Flintstone Calling

I’ve got this great idea, see. All’s ya gotsta do is get everybody in Uruguay to visit your site just once – they don’t even need to linger. That’s over 3.4 million views! Man, you are gonna rake in the dough!

So, the deal with Fred Flintstone – if you’re too young to know – was that he was a caveman, see, the head of a modern stone-age family. His wife, Wilma, and his neighbors Betty and Barney Rubble, lived in the town of Bedrock. A town just like yours and mine, except made out of rock.

It was a Hanna-Barbera cartoon series made in the early 1960’s and it was dopey fun.

Fred was every man’s everyman. He was living the caveman equivalent of the American Dream – good job, house in the ‘burbs, picket fence, nice ped-powered car.

A regular Joe, except that he had a penchant for making outlandish, foolproof plans to make a million clams. He was gonna quit the quarry and live the life of a millionaire, just as soon as his ship sailed.

“Barney boy, by this time tomorrow, we are gonna be livin’ like kings!”

Of course he never quite succeeded – Dino the dinosaur dog ate the proceeds, it turned out the ptero-chickens were all ptero-roosters,  Ann Margarock had to be in Rock Vegas on the night of the big event, etc.

At the end of every episode, there was Wilma, reminding him that he already had everything he needed right there in his little family. And he always sheepishly admitted she was right. “Wilma, you are the greatest…”

If you’re reading this, and I imagine you are, you probably have an inner Fred Flintstone yourself.

You’re thinking there’s always a chance, a long shot maybe, but a chance that this one, this stupid crazy-ass scheme, this could be the one. One in a million chance, but, hey, somebody’s gonna make it… Ten bazillion books get published and read every year, why not mine?

So, I recently gave up on my inner Fred. I was a little depressed, maybe. A little tired. I dunno.

I decided that this is the dish, this life o’ mine: this is my someday. Someday I’ll have a nice house in the ‘burbs and a pretty wife and 2.5 kids and a good job with a decent salary. Hey, I have all of that, so this must be it.

All righty, then, Fred. It’s been fun. Good luck with your crazy schemes. I’m hanging up the bronto-phone now – I gotta go mow the lawn.

So, I go and tell my wife, the very love of my life, that I’m hanging up my bronto-spurs, and quote that line from All Things Great and Small where Herriot tells a fellow that someday he’ll be a millionaire, and the fellow replies with “Nah, it’s not in the cards. Was I to be a millionaire, well, I’d be one already, don’t you see?”

My darling wife replies “well, let’s not be too hasty about that.”

Whoa, whoa, hold on, there. That’s a Fred Flintstone line, not a Wilma line! YOU can’t say I’m gonna make a million clams, because YOU’RE the voice of REASON!

Like a bolt out of the blue, I was gobsmacked, thunderstruck, and over the moon in a tizzy of heaven for-fend, she, she, she believes in my crazy schemes!

To quote Goofy, “gorshk.”

So, I’m opening everything back up – Skippity Whistles, California Air Museums, even hauling The Book in for a rewrite.

Do I have a plan?

Heck no! I’m making it up as I go! Never quote me the odds!

My wonderful wife, she, she believes in me!

Wilma: “Oh, Fred.” (Sighs and exits)

A Shift of Wit

You’re a writer – you know how it goes. You push and pull and shove your story into a nice straight line, solving problems and ironing out the bumps. And then a character pops up, and the whole thing goes to heck!

So, if you’ve followed along in The Story of Me, you’ll recall that I finally published the book – Adventures of a Sawdust Man.

It was great fun to write, and rewrite, and rewrite, and, well, finally to finish rewriting.

Here’s something I have to admit to you. I’m a little embarrassed,  but maybe it will help you, too.

Back at the end of the 90s, my life was an absolute mess. A dreadful divorce, a voice-over career that was stuck in the garage, and a management career that fell straight into the dumpstah. I couldn’t make anything work.

And I mysteriously got the idea that I had somehow screwed up back when I got out of college 20 years earlier. That I should have  gone to Hollywood to make my career and fortune, and, that had I done so, my life would not have been the shambles it had become.

I was kind of kicking the can  backward down the road,  blaming my current failures on an imagined failure 20 years in the past.

That sounds crazy, I know, but it was pervasive – it shaped my every thought.

I bought a partnership in a dreadful little business that failed at every turn, reinforcing the idea that I’d run away from my opportunities when I was out of school now almost 30 years before, and was, in effect, a dud. Thank goodness, the Great Recession put that awful business out of business.

As my world solidified and got better, that imagined failure ceased to be imaginary, and became true to me.

Since then, lo these last fifteen or so years, I’ve been scrambling to make up for lost time, to pull off a creative miracle and prove that, even though I turned my back on the opportunity to be like Steve Martin amd Robin Williams, I am NOT a dud.

I crafted all these websites, all these posts, scratched out these novels – somehow, somehow I can fix it. I’ve learned so much, somehow the Universe will see that I’ve changed… digging in the Unknown mines of the Internet to find the jewel that would restore me to my rightful place as a successful talent, wealthy, famous, etc, etc…

And then, just three weeks ago, I had a sharp and stunning memory. In discovering it, I felt as dumb as a box of rocks.

When I got out of school, way back in the late 70’s, I DID consider a Hollywood career. I remembered that I looked at it long and hard and that I orbited the citadel that was Variety magazine, reading the casting calls and actually driving to their locations.

And I remembered that I made the conscious choice to stay OUT of acting. I knew in my heart of hearts that I was a good imitator,  but not a good actor. I could imitate good actors, but I could not act.  I decided then that an acting career was not for me.

Whether I could act or not, the notion that I’d later picked up, that I was a Delbert Dumbbutt who somehow managed to miss a golden opportunity, simply wasn’t true.

OMG, you cannot imagine the weight that has lifted off of me, and off of my work!

I got nothing to prove, man. Nothing.

So, now, in the re-rewrite of that book, there is no weight, no pressure to prove that at least I’m a good writer. Now I can just tell the story my characters want me to write. A new one has already popped,  completely  changing the course of the book!

And yet, and yet, I have started all these websites and all these projects, and I do earn my daily bread as a professional writer. So, all was not in vain.

The message to you, my writerly friend, is to look long and hard at your assumptions, for they may not be what you think!

Forget About Me…No, Wait…

Recently, I’ve been dealing with my actor past, trying to figure out why my face isn’t on billboards, and why I get notes from my bank that begin with “ahem…”

And then I remembered, like waking up from some dream all of a sudden, that I’m NOT AN ACTOR!

The memory reminded that, once upon a time I was cast in the stage version of It’s a Wonderful Life. It was community theater, which is why you can’t quite find it on Netflix.

Oh, it was a glorious role, filled with all the stuff that makes an actor want to be an actor. Got to kiss a pretty girl night after night. Packed the house playing a role pioneered by Jimmy Stewart. OMG, that was a blast.

Except on opening night. It’s a community theater, the house is absolutely packed to the rafters. It’s Christmastime, rain pattering on the roof.

If you know the story, you know it’s about George Bailey, a talented architect who gives up on his future to help his home town by standing by the tiny, family-owned savings and loan against the evil tyrant Potter, who wants to take it over.

Things go awry and it looks like he’s going to lose the savings and loan, and he wishes he was dead. Enter a heavenly angel who shows George what the world would be like if he wasn’t in it.

It’s such a horrifying vision, that, at the end of it, George drops on his knees and pleads with the angel to make things different.

“Forget about me, just save my wife and children,” he wails.

Except for my opening night.

The house is packed. The rain is pattering. The scene is so moving, so well directed, all you can hear is the rain. The audience is emotionally overwhelmed, completely caught up in the moment.

I drop to my knees in supplication.

“Please, Clarence, please forget about my wife and kids…”

Wait. What?

The audience shifts uncomfortably. We’re now all in uncharted territory. I just totally, totally got it waaaaay wrong. There’s no way out it. I seriously got it wrong.

“Is that what you really want?” the genius actor playing the angel asks with a surprised look on his face.

“No! No,” I recover, thanking the theater gods that this man has thought of a way out. “No! No! Forget about me… save my wife and kids! Yeah, that’s it!”

You could feel the whole house breathe this big sigh of relief. The emotional scenes that followed were certainly a lot more emotional for me!

That’s live theater, and it came much later in my life, when I’d learned how to act. When acting was a potential career choice, I knew how to act like an actor, but not how to act. Trying to make a career out of it back then would have been brutal.

So, there’s a writer’s story for all of us in there, isn’t there?

How many of us are acting like writers, writing what we think a writer would write? Telling ourselves that we’re being authentic, but knowing down inside that we’re just faking it until we make it?

What is real writing? What is real acting?

Here’s what I do know: I ain’t no actor!