Author: jdreinhart73@gmail.com

Waiting for Permission

My wife and I have sorta gotten hooked on reality TV shows – not Desperate Housewives, but…

So, it started with 100 Foot Wave, on HBO. We were totally stressed out over some now-tiny-but-in-the-moment-seemingly-huge crisis, and just wanted to watch the pretty pictures of the ocean.

If you haven’t seen that show, be prepared to be blown away. These tiny little humans throw themselves off the top of these 60-, 70-, eventually even 100-foot waves. Oh, they prepare, of course, and they work out, you know, and they’re all, like buff and stuff.

But, still 100 feet is way, like WAY up there!

The surfers all have sponsors, of course, and that’s who pays for the show. Garrett McNamara, kind of the focal point of the show, is never on camera unless he’s surfing, or he’s wearing his hat with the Mercedes Benz logo on it.

But he does it – he and a small team of die-hard big-wave tow-surfing fanatics go at the huuuuuuge waves at Nazare, Portugal, year after year. It’s pretty awesome to watch.

So, there’s another show on HBO called Edge of the Earth. There are only four episodes, and each features a different extreme sports fanatic doing something crazy, like skiing down a granite spire in Kazakhstan, or rafting the headwaters of a river in South America that’s never been rafted.

The last episode features these two guys who set off to surf their own 100-foot wave.

They drive their Land Rover up the west coast of South Africa and find themselves a beach with epic waves. And they set up camp, and they surf these waves.

Sounds like a snorefest, but the photography is heart-stoppingly beautiful.

And one of the guys casually says he didn’t know you could quit your career to do something like that. He always thought you need, like, permission or something.

For me, that was a huge revelation.

OMG, what have we missed because nobody told us it was okay to go do something? What adventurous roads did we not travel because we didn’t have permission?

Now that my hair is less brown (and his band renown) than it used to be, I find myself more addicted to security and financial safety, so my adventure roads tend to lead to places from which I can rapidly retreat.

But you? You’re younger, right?

If you want to quit the daily grind and go surf mondo huge waves, it’s totally and perfectly up to you!

It turns out NO ONE GIVES YOU PERMISSION to go on an adventure.

Because you don’t need it.

Ditching the 9-to-5 and throwing yourself off cliffs of water is not safe, of course, and your insurance agent might have a word or two about that. But, it it’s what you wanna do, splish-splash, amigo!

The revelation for me was that, although no one tells you can’t do these things, no one tells you that you can, either. Nobody says “yes, if you would like to do that, please go right ahead.”

For what it’s worth, here’s what I’m telling you: if you would like to do that, please go right ahead!

There, now you have permission to go be wild.

For my adventure, my wife and I visited the Santa Maria Museum of Flight. Yes, it’s off the beaten path, and we got caught in the rain and mud and dark.

But, hey, it was an adventure, and we didn’t have to ask anyone if we should do it.

Wow. Big adventure…

Searching for Los Alamos

Over the weekend my wife and I drove up to the Central Coast town of Santa Maria to shoot another California Air Museums episode.

The day was blustery, with rain squalls rattling the roof of the old hangers that house the Santa Maria Air Museum. It’s a fascinating little museum, more displays than airplanes, but, if you’re a movie buff, it’s one to not miss.

We got there late in the afternoon, just an hour before they closed at four. Once done, we weren’t quite ready to rush back to Ventura, and decided to visit a little burg called Los Alamos.

Now, here’s a story: back in California’s stagecoach days, a bandito named Solomon Pico stored his loot in a bunch of caves near Santa Maria. Of course, the loot’s never been found, and now the caves are buried under the Main Street of Los Alamos – oh, to have a sinkhole!

We got lost trying to find that little town and found ourselves in the even littler town of Casmalia.

A town so small that it literally has more letters in its name than it does buildings on its main street.

A post office, a boarded-up feed and grain store, and a big building that used to be a hotel back in the stagecoach days, rather swank from what we could discover. Now it’s a high-end steak house.

Having postponed our search for Los Alamos and Solomon Pico’s gold, we decided to find Point Sal Beach, and Point Sal Road turns out to be the main drag in Casmalia. In fact, it’s the only drag.

Jutting off from Highway 1, Point Sal Road quickly becomes one-and-a-half lanes, and takes you straight through Casmalia’s sleepy downtown, and, just about half a mile later, dumps you out in front of a Dead-End sign.  

It has nothing to do with Point Sal.

We dove into the steakhouse to answer the call of nature and spotted a lady sawing away on a steak that was easily the size of a baseball catcher’s mitt, except much thicker.  We tried not to stare, but, shoot, lady. What part of the cow was that thing?

And, here’s a stunner, there was no cell service in Casmalia! Like a scene from the Twilight Zone – we could get in, but couldn’t find our way out. Picture, if you will…

Eventually, after we figured out that Point Sal Road had nothing to do with Point Sal Beach, we retraced our steps back out of Casmalia, found the real Point Sal, and followed the looooong road to get to the parking lot at the bottom of the hill.

A hill? I thought Point Sal was a beach. Yes, yes it is. But you have to hike 5 miles over the hills to get there! Well, now it’s six o’clock, and the wind and rain and setting sun, and the… still, we gave it a go.

And got a mile and a half into the hills before the rain came and the clock hit seven and we realized that it would be dark before we got back to the truck.

Cold, wet, windblown, and muddy, we dragged ourselves into the truck in the moonlight that squeaked out between the rapidly moving clouds.

Trying to find our way home, we found Los Alamos, and had a lovely and elegant dinner at the only place open, a place simply called Pico, in the lobby of what was the rather swank Los Alamos Hotel. You know, back in the stagecoach days.

Is there point to this ramble about our ramble?

Yes, and the point is this: no matter where you are, you are always just minutes away from some far flung, wacky adventure.

Our jobs, yours and mine, as writers, is to seek out this crazy moment and use them to illuminate the worlds of our characters.

You know, like they did back in the stagecoach days!

On Being Who We are Not

I find it funny that we spend most of our lives figuring out who we are. Like Tigger in Winnie the Pooh – “that’s what Tiggers like best!” Only to find that we’ve generated what could be a rather longish list of things we are not.

My house reminds me every day of things that I am not.  It looks at me and whispers things like “you sure ain’t no plumber!”

Who made that patch in the wallboard, there? How come the orange-peel texture doesn’t look right? Did you replace the glass in that window? ‘Cause it kinda looks like it…

I noticed over the weekend the scars on my right arm, left over from when I had to replace the spark plugs every month in my Ford van. Because I am surely no mechanic!

Okay, be fair, now.

It was the heart of the Great Recession, and the company I owned had gone belly up. And that van had almost two hundred thousand miles on it, and needed serious work that just wasn’t in the budget. And that van, that thing was a Freestar, and had that transverse-mounted V-6, and you couldn’t even see the plugs on the rear side to get them in or out.

And you couldn’t reach ‘em from underneath, so you had to sort of hug the engine and stretch waaaaay down there into the dark first with your right hand to probe for the spark plug with your fingers, and then again with a wrench to get it out. Torque? Forget about it! And there were, like, the sharp ends of a hundred or so bolts sticking out of the firewall – oh it was tough, and it was bloody. And then you had to do the same thing again to put the new plug in!

Nope, not a mechanic.

So, my Honda Ridgeline ran out of windshield washer juice, see. And it seriously needs to be washed. And I can’t even see out of the windshield.

Now, in December we invested in kayaks, see, and put a set of racks on the truck to haul ‘em around.

But you can’t put the truck through the car wash with the racks on.

And now it’s March, see, and our schedules are soooo tight, there’s no chance of the boats seeing any water until at least May.

So, I’m out there with a 17mm ratcheting-box-head wrench, and my wife is looking at me, asking “why don’t we just wash the truck?”

I look at her for a long moment.

Our front lawn looks shaggy because we can mow it ourselves, thank you very much, but can’t find the time. The gate that leads to the side yard has new boards in it, but they aren’t painted yet, because, well, now I fixed the gate – and one of these days I’ll get around to painting it. And we just invested a huge pile of money in reworking our plumbing because, hey, it’s easy – alls ya gotsta do is buy one of them snake things, see?

“Because we never WILL wash the truck,” I reply sadly. “We will EVENTUALLY get to the lawn. SOMEDAY I’ll finish the gate. It turns out, we’re not those kinds of people. It’s not what we are.”

She looked at me thoughtfully, and then smiled.

“Do you need help taking the racks off?”

Just a quick note – the image for this post was generated for free at Craiyon.com. The prompt was “blue ford freestar with hood open and smoke coming out.” Sort of missed on the hood thing, but it’s pretty cool! Just thought I’d give them a shout out because their AI made the image for free.

Oh, uh, One More Thing

You probably remember Columbo’s trademark like “oh, and one more thing…”

It always came right near the end of the Columbo murder mystery series, back in the 1970’s. Peter Falk played this sort of bumbling detective who appeared to be misguided throughout the whole episode. But then, at the last, just as the murderer is about to get away with it, Columbo turns and says something like, “Oh, and one more thing. I thought maybe you could help me understand how, if the bedroom door was locked, your fingerprints are on the bedside lamp.”

Sometimes the murderer would say “Oh, you’re a clever one, Columbo,” or they’d stare at him, or they’d run. Sometimes they did all three. Of course, Columbo had all the exits covered.

So, I’ve been putting together a video review of the Estrella Warbirds Museum in Paso Robles for California Air Museums.

It’s a good video, featuring sections of our interview with author George J. Marrett, and looking at all kinds of stuff.

I got it all done, all buttoned up, and uploaded it to YouTube. If you haven’t done that, you have about four pages of questions to answer about the video, and you have to wait about 20 minutes for it to upload. You have to type in tags, and a description, and all kinds of stuff.

And then my daughter said: “You know, it should have subtitles.”

Ah. Subtitles. 

So, for a five-minute script with lots of voice-over and interview, it takes about an hour to add closed captions. YouTube presents you with a transcript of your video, and the AI is pretty good, although it couldn’t figure out the name Paso Robles. Pasa Rubbles. Pa saw rabbles. So you have to correct it, and you have to manage the timing so that the words show up as they are spoken in the video.

Now we’re in for a buck-and-a-half, timewise, at YouTube.

“I think you should refer to the author’s books,” my wife suggests.

In thinking about it, I realized she was right.

Back to DaVinci Resolve to edit the video. Dug up some graphics, added some voice-over, inserted 30 seconds devoted to the books, reworked the music at the end, rendered the video out again.

Went back to YouTube, downloaded the subtitles file so I could add it to the new video, deleted the video I’d just uploaded (it actually warns you that this video will be deleted forever – I’m kind of surprised it doesn’t go FOREVER-ever-ever-ver-er-r….), uploaded the new video, answered the four pages of questions, and was just about to push the PUBLISH button again, when my wife cleared her throat in that way that she does when she has an idea that she thinks is brilliant but you might not like but you should because it really is a good idea.

“One more thing…”

All right, Columbo, what is it?

“What if we cut the guy’s the clever comment that opens the video and put it at the end instead.”

As she explains it,  I’m nodding thoughtfully, although I’m thinking OMG you want me to shuffle the entire contents of the video ahead by, like, fifteen seconds? But my captions’ll be screwed! Don’t you ever want to get this published?

It took FOREVER to shift everything around in DaVinci. And I had to start all over again with the captions in YouTube.

But, it was a brilliant idea, and the video has a ton of charm that it wouldn’t have if she hadn’t played the role of Peter Falk.

All of this has a writer’s tale in it, as you can imagine. Even though we think of our writing as a closed-loop system: we sit in our cold stone garrets, frantically typing away, knowing they’ll never understand our sacrifice, in truth it can only ever be a system of give and take. Suggestions, comments, ideas come in, grudging changes go out, and the work is always, always better for it.

Oh, and, uh, one more thing… Thanks for reading!

Never Quote Me the Odds

So, I was shooting the breeze with this guy over the weekend… actually, he wasn’t just some guy, he’s a decorated test pilot, hero, and author, and I didn’t just shoot the breeze. It was an in-depth interview. Man, you can’t believe anything you read these days!

One of the best parts about being the author of California Air Museums, as well as being the host… just a quick stop here to point out to you marketers that, son a biscuit, that’s a nice link right there, right? See? Cross-platforms. It’s the way to go! Okay. Moving on… is that you get to visit some great museums, and meet some sincerely fascinating people.

George J. Marrett is the historian at the Estrella Warbirds Museum in Paso Robles, CA. An amazing individual, he worked for Howard Hughes, has written at least half a dozen books, has test-flown nearly every jet the United States produced since World War II, flew death-defying rescue missions in Vietnam, is building homeless shelters in Paso Robles, and happens to be just about the nicest guy you’re ever going to meet.

My wife and I spent a nice trio of hours talking with him about the museum, about Howard Hughes, and about the many aircraft he’d test-flown. The man is remarkably sharp, and, at 88, still flies. He said he’d keep flying until nobody wanted to fly with him anymore.

So many of the stories he told stuck with me, but there was one in particular that I’m still pondering.

During the Vietnam war, he flew fourth position in a flight of four A-1E Skyraiders – big, propellor-driven fighter planes produced right after the end of World War II. They were slow compared to the jet fighters, but they were robust, and they carried lots of weapons.

His job, along with the other three Skyraiders, was to clear the jungle around a downed American pilot by firing at the Viet Cong soldiers intent on making a capture, so that the Huey helicopters could come in rescue him. The big fighter planes would lumber over the jungle, firing a spray of machine gun bullets at anything that moved towards the downed pilot.

The Viet Cong often fought back. In one flight, George watched the plane in front of him get hit, watched the pilot parachute away, and then actually watched the plane spiral down to crash among the trees.

“It was an amazing sight,” he grinned. He had accidently applied his own air brakes, and was flying too slow to be safe. But it gave him time to watch the crash.

When he returned to base, his crew chief, the guy who takes care of the plane when it’s on the ground, told him he’d been hit.

“You got a couple of bullet holes in the wheel well,” the chief said. “You wanna see ’em?”

George thought about it for a moment, and then said “No. Don’t even tell me that.”

Focus on the success, right? Let’s not recount how close we almost got to failure. His first book, the one about those rescue missions, is called Cheating Death.

That’s a profound way to look at high-risk tasks, isn’t it?

I’m always, like, whoa, I almost crashed right then. Wow, I almost messed that up.

It reminds of the Star Wars line when C-3PO starts to tell Han Solo his chances of success…

“Never quote me the odds!”

So, how does this apply to us writers?

Well, the chances of your book getting picked up, or your article selling, or somebody reading your blog, are pretty much one in a…

Never quote me the odds.

Focus on where you’re going, not where you’ve been. I know George may have meant something far more profound that this, but we always apply the things we hear to ourselves, right?

So, when you’re submitting your book or your screenplay, or that magazine article, or whatever it is, and you hear that voice that starts to doubt the odds of your success, now you have an answer.

“Don’t tell me that. Never quote me the odds.”

You can learn more about the amazing George J. Marrett on Wikipedia and his many books on Amazon.

Happy flying.

No Guardians at the Gate

Cops and robbers. Parents and kids. Bosses and employees. There’s an hierarchical order to things. Officers and crew. Master and Commander. Editor and writer… Wait – not so fast.

Back in the early part of this century, I was the owner of a struggling business. It was awful. If you’re not a business person, and you find yourself owning a business it. is. the. worst. Dreadful, I tell you.

Luckily, the Great Recession wiped us out! I was so thrilled!

But that’s not the point of this post.

Back in those days, the Internet was unfolding like a reverse-engineered origami swan, and it was desperate for content. Desperate!

Guys like me, without any nerve or experience, suddenly found themselves writing articles on this, on that, how to do this, how to make that, how to create… you get the idea.

And we were paid – sometimes a tenth of a penny per word – but we were paid. My weekly paychecks ranged between fourteen dollars on a good week and about 38 cents…

But that’s not the point of this post.

So, the world wide web was a wild west for wily writers. You could get published same day for just about anything.

I became the science editor for two or three sites – my favorite was a site called Triond. Oh, we got along famously. I wrote over 200 articles on the Moons of Jupiter, the Moons of Saturn, the Mo… you get the idea.

I’m sure you’ve heard the word churnalism? If you rewrite stories that have been written by someone else and add your own special spin to them, you’re not a journalist. You’re just churning up somebody else’s work – you’re a churnalist.

Ah, those were heady days, being a seriously underpaid churnalist, cranking out somebody else’s ideas and expected huge rewards. Sigh. How I miss them…

Fast forward to the Roaring Twenties, and now it’s all about books. You can publish your book for free!

I know, I’ve published two!

Smashwords, the company through which I’m publishing my books, has merged with Draft2Digital, a company that distributes your books all over the English-speaking world.

I’m enjoying the experience so far. Haven’t sold a copy, but mighty oaks come from tiny acorns.

And now D2D, as they refer to themselves, has offered to print my book.

What? Print? My name and likeness, right there on a paperback book? What? FINALLY?!?

My brilliant wife and I talked all about it, me on the oh-please-oh-please-oh-please side, she on the let’s-think-about-this side.

Publishers have editors that read books and decide what is and is not crap.

Who edited my book? What about yours?

E-books are often free, making them comfortably less than a dime a dozen. They consume digital resources, but that’s all.

Literary agents will tell you they get 10,000 queries a year. Based on what I’ve written, I know that by far the highest majority of those queries are from crap books.

Crap books.

So, D2D will print my book. They’ll print your book. They’ll print that guy’s book.

But that guy’s a crap writer (not like you and I).

So, here’s his shiny new book, right on the shelf next to ours. His opens with “This is how I spend my summers, over at uncle Bob’s house where my cousin Larry has like a big dog and this blue Toyota that doesn’t run so good. Anyway…”

Our books are good, earnest efforts with great plots and wonderful characters and creditable dialog.

But there’s nothing to separate them, no differentiator between our brilliant work and that guy’s joke of a junk book.

The buying public picks up that guy’s book, mutters in dismay, and quickly backs away from the book rack.

“Good heavens,” they gasp. “What a bunch of junk books!”

You and me, our books are great! Don’t judge us by that guy’s cover! But you know they will.

There we sit, side by each, our pearls, his swine.

My thinking is this:

In digital publishing, caveat emptor. Let the buyer read the description and download the free chapters and choose from there.

In physical publishing, that book had better be worth the ink and the paper and the resources to produce it.

Sadly, we know that that guy thinks his book is that good. But you and I know much better.

My wife is right. If there is no longer a guardian at the gate, no Random House holding sway over what gets printed, if the individual writer sets the standard for what shows up in paper, doesn’t it sort of feel like all is lost?

D2D doesn’t charge you anything to print your book. They make their money when the copies actually sell. But what happens to those copies that don’t sell?

I would imagine they go on sale, and then on super sale, and then on deep discount, and then on closeout, and then on clearance, and they finally sell for, like, a dime or something. Better that than throw them in the dumpster – at least D2D makes a little money on it.

Is that what awaits our books, yours and mine? We end up selling every printed copy for a dime each to some clearing house that shreds them up for the paper they’re printed on? All because of that guy’s crap book?

Congratulations! Your book sold 200 copies! Your share of the profits comes out to 6 dollars and 41 cents, because D2D took the first 15% of the dime and the bulk-book aggregator took the next 25%. Oh, and you won’t get a check until you sell $100 in books, but, hey, congratulations!

Call me a dreamer, a starry-eyed hopeful, but I’ll be building my audience the old-fashioned way – through digital publishing and advertising and doing nothing – until I’m discovered by an old-school publisher who has a strong editorial voice and a marketing staff that will just set the world on fire.

Wait, that guy sold 400 copies?!? Hey, wait a minute…

Skip the Workout

I rewatched Conan the Barbarian a couple of weeks ago – Thulsa Doom: “People have no sense of what they do…”

Yessir, that Conan is one tough cookie. If you haven’t seen the movie, the first one from 1982, you don’t need to. Oh, it’s good, but it’s rough, and just downright dumb in places.

Conan gains his freedom, finds his ancient sword, and then comes across a scantily clad, beautiful witch who lives in a hut between some rocks. These were ancient times, like before the Greeks, so, you know, it could totally happen.

They get briefly entangled, so to speak, and she gasps out in happy little spasms the name of the town to which he must go, and then turns into a werewolfy/wildcatty monster sort of thing that he tosses into the fire. She rolls off the other side of the fire and dashes out the door, now a bright shining energy ball that clings and clangs off of stones like something from a Miyazaki movie, dashing out of the scene with a sped-up giggling laugh like a chipmunk. Again, these were ancient times: it could happen.

But, for the rest of the film, we never hear from that character again, we never visit the town she mentions, and we’re left wondering, okay, so, like, what was with the witch? You know, beyond a cameo performance for the director’s cousin or something?

If you read Arnold Schwarzenegger’s book, he goes on and on about how he did all the workouts, all of the reps, all of the leg-lifts, etc., etc. to become Mr. Universe by the time he was 20. Then he took acting classes and diction classes and dancing classes and fighting classes and ballet classes and horseback riding classes so that he could become an action-hero movie star – Conan.

After closing the book, I set about busily busting my own chops over not taking the writing courses and the English courses and the writer workshops and the, I don’t know, writer workshops… wait, I already said that one… I could have taken so that I could become the Mr. Universe of writers. 

No wonder it’s tough to sell my books. I didn’t do the workouts!

But then there’s that scene in Conan with the witch, and you start to go hey, wait a second. Arnold didn’t direct or write the movie, of course, but the film grossed over $79 million – you could say it did all right – and it had that wretched, confusing, gratuitous scene in it.

So, maybe it aint the workouts.

You and I, we’re writers. We work on crafting sentences – each paragraph is our workout.

When we string all those paragraphs together into a screenplay, or into a novel, I imagine the finished piece is our Mr. or Ms. Universe kind of thing.

So, I think it’s safe to say that, by constantly writing, you and I are NOT skipping the workouts.

So, for whoever penned that witch scene, you and I are witnesses to that person’s Mr. or Ms. Universe victory (given the nature of the scene, I’m pretty sure the writer was a guy). He won the contest! And I hope he made a bundle of money – maybe sent the kids to college or something.

You and I know that if we don’t do the workouts, we cease to be writers and just sit around, taking up air.

The message to us here must be that we gotta keep doing the workouts, keep writing, and keep submitting our stuff, because you never know when you’re going to Mr. or Ms. Universe.

I mean, it worked for the witch!

It’s Published!

What’s published, you ask? And by whom? Why, it, and by me!

So, I’ve been slogging through the demeaning task of writing query letters to literary agents. OMG, that IS a slog!

Acquiring a literary agent is a sisyphean task on a good day.

Okay, I had to go look up sisyphean because I’ve only ever heard it said. Sisyphus got condemned to roll a boulder up a hill, see, only to have it come tumbling back down, each and every day for all of eternity. One assumes getting it up the hill was a somewhat arduous task, sooooo…

Here’s a good literary put down:

Knock, knock

Who’s there?

To

To who?

It’s to whom, actually

None of this is the point! Here’s the point:

My newest novel, The Adventures of a Sawdust Man, is PUBLISHED!!!

Yes, I published it myself. No, it’s not Random House, or Penguin, or Disney.

Yet.

I’ve already sold three copies – and it’s only been up for two days. If you do the math… lemme see, carry the one… uh huh, yep. By my calculations, at this rate, I’ll have sold at least two dozen by the end of the year!

But of course, it’s not about making money.

Yet.

The thing is, even as I was writing those insipid query letters, I could see that no agent would touch my book.

It’s a fairy tale without any fairies. It’s a romance without any love scenes. It’s a tale of unrequited love that never quite gets resolved.

Who wants to publish that?

So, for my book to see the light of day, for it to get discovered as a valuable piece of the Canon of human literature, I had to publish it myself.

And I am so excited to share it with you! Here’s the link. Don’t pay the five bucks – set the price to $0 and have at it. And lemme know whatcha think!

Another reason that I’ve published the book is because I seem to have gone mad over the sound of my own voice, and my best friend and darling wife have both suggested it would make a good audio book.

Can you spell Podcast?

Thank you for traveling along with me on this wild adventure. Maybe, by publishing my work, you might be encouraged to publish yours? I truly hope so.

I wish you every success!

Trying to be a Giant

Did you ever notice how the Jolly Green Giant says “ho, ho, ho” kind of the way Santa Claus does? Could this be in error, or are they related? Maybe they’re the same guy. I mean, you never see them together…

Santa Claus is kind of a giant at Christmastime – not in the Fee Fie Foe Fum way, but, you know, what with his mug on cards, in stores, standing outside houses, sitting in the mall dealing with squirmy little kids that really don’t want to be there, he kind of owns the retail end of the holidays. 

Yeah, Santa Claus is a giant. 

I’ve been thinking about that. About being a giant.

You and I are writers, right? We have our different styles, our different preferred genres, but, at the end of the day, we both put words on a page, or into a document. It’s what we do, right?

So, I have a secret mantra. When I get scared or stressed out, I have this set of seven platitudes that calms me down. 

It’s calming because of the words, of course, but also because it takes so dang long to get through all seven.

Next time you have to go wee and you just can’t possibly hold it in for another second, count backwards from 5 before you go. It sounds loony, but you’ll be surprised that you can do it. You absolutely just have to go this very second…5, 4, 3, 2, 1… and now go. How is it possible that you can hold it long enough to do the countdown?

It’s mind over matter. You give your brain a little puzzle – it’s super easy to count up, but counting down takes a little thinking – and your brain stops focusing on going wee while it solves the puzzle.

I think that’s how this long mantra works. Here it is:

Be of good cheer. Keep working. Keep an open mind. Keep an open heart. Have faith. Have confidence. And don’t forget who you are. 

Self-explanatory, yes? As time progresses, we’ll go into each of these with a finer-tooth comb, but you get the gist, right?

Have faith -I’m not a religious guy, so my faith is that the universe is not evil (neither is it benevolent), so dark forces are not working against me. That’s dumb, I know, but it’s where I live.

Have confidence – that’s about your work. Have confidence in your work, because it’s what you do.

Even if I’m not a spectacularly good writer, and I’m truly not, I can still take confidence that my writing is done to the best of my ability. I’m confident that I’ve done my best.

We can always learn to write better. You can know for certain that even Hemingway flipped his sentences around to find better ways of saying things. It’s just what we do.

So, here’s my question: was Hemingway a giant? Of course he was – we don’t even use his first name. Just like saying Santa, the world knows who we are talking about, right?

Why am I, then, not a giant? Well, fame, of course, which is a result of not getting my work into the right hands, and also perhaps of my being a crummy writer.

Now, I am in no way comparing myself to Hemingway. I mean, the guy was truly a literary giant. He had a unique and compelling voice that could not be replicated.

But here’s my thinking: no one in the universe – no one – writes the way you and I do. No one. When we write something down, some sentence cleverly crafted to the very best of our ability, have we not added to the canon of human literature?

The canon of human literature. 

Wow. But isn’t that what we do? Don’t we add to this vast body of written works, making it richer and more diverse with our points of view and choices of words? With our thoughts. 

Does that not make us giants?

Alas, Santa gets the credit, but the elves make the toys and fill the sleigh, right? Santa is a giant, but what about the elves? Maybe each one is an unsung giant in their own field – a giant of a little wooden wheel hammerer. Nobody does it like Snoggnar – she’s a tiny little giant in her field.

So, now I’m thinking about adding another phrase to my mantra: Be a giant in your work.

I know. Adding an eighth platitude kind of messes up the symmetry of the magical seven, and I’m not ever sure what being a giant means. 

I think of Dr. Malcolm in Jurassic Park: “they’re, uh, standing on the shoulders of giants…”

Lemme know what you think!

And thank you for reading.

You big ol’ giant, you!

My Kingdom for a Scorpion

You’re a writer – you know how it goes. You get fixated on this idea, and it just won’t go away until you finally get it sprawled out on a piece of paper.

Same thing with videos.

During our visit to the SoCal Wing of the Commemorative Air Force for the California Air Museums project, Ron Fleishman, the Wing’s historian, told us this great story about something called The Battle of Palmdale.

The story’s about the powerful and massive Grumman F6F-5 Hellcat fighter, a single-engine airplane that can rightfully claim the lion’s share of air victories in the skies over the Pacific during WW II.

Like the compact disc, the cassette tape, and the LP vinyl record, technology bypassed these remarkable airplanes so quickly that they were obsolete within two years of the war’s end. By 1956 they were used as radio-controlled drone targets for guided missiles – they didn’t even rate a pilot.

So, anyway, this battle story involves one of these remote-control Hellcats that goes haywire and flies, completely out of control, over Los Angeles in 1956.

The Air Force dispatches two state-of-the-art F-89 Scorpion jets to shoot it down, but they fail. And not just fail, but, COMPLETELY fail, firing a total of 208 missiles at the lumbering old timer – every single one of them miss.

It’s a great story, and I think it would make a terrific video. Now, of course, you can’t quite get your hands on real airplanes, but, hey, what about 3D models?

You can score a good-looking Hellcat for five bucks on Turbosquid.

But an F-89? Fogeddaboudit!

I scrolled through literally thousands of models, wishing, and a’hoping, and a’praying that somebody mislabeled their model when they uploaded it. Hey, it could happen!

F-4s, F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, 22s,35s, 84s, 86s, 100s, even F-101 Voodoo fighter jets aplenty were to be found.

But an F-89 Scorpion? No, sir, not to be found in this man’s 3D universe. What’s up with that?

Actually, I did finally find one, and it was for free, but you had to sign up for this guy’s website, and that was, like, $65. Uh, no, thank you.

So, yes, I did find one. And, although I’d gladly trade my kingdom for a good model, I’m not uh idiot!

And that means the story has to stay on hold until I can figure out another way to shoot it. There are several videos on The Battle of Palmdale, but they all use old stock footage from the DOD.

Surely we can do better!

Hmm, how to acquire a Scorpion… and evil plot unfolds…

My Kingdom for a Scorpion

You’re a writer – you know how it goes. You get fixated on this idea, and it just won’t go away until you finally get it sprawled out on a piece of paper.

Same thing with videos.

During our visit to the SoCal Wing of the Commemorative Air Force for the California Air Museums project, Ron Fleishman, the Wing’s historian, told us this great story about something called The Battle of Palmdale.

The story’s about the powerful and massive Grumman F6F-5 Hellcat fighter, a single-engine airplane that can rightfully claim the lion’s share of air victories in the skies over the Pacific during WW II.

Like the compact disc, the cassette tape, and the LP vinyl record, technology bypassed these remarkable airplanes so quickly that they were obsolete within two years of the war’s end. By 1956 they were used as radio-controlled drone targets for guided missiles – they didn’t even rate a pilot.

So, anyway, this battle story involves one of these remote-control Hellcats that goes haywire and flies, completely out of control, over Los Angeles in 1956.

The Air Force dispatches two state-of-the-art F-89 Scorpion jets to shoot it down, but they fail. And not just fail, but, COMPLETELY fail, firing a total of 208 missiles at the lumbering old timer – every single one of them miss.

It’s a great story, and I think it would make a terrific video. Now, of course, you can’t quite get your hands on real airplanes, but, hey, what about 3D models?

You can score a good-looking Hellcat for five bucks on Turbosquid.

But an F-89? Fogeddaboudit!

I scrolled through literally thousands of models, wishing, and a’hoping, and a’praying that somebody mislabeled their model when they uploaded it. Hey, it could happen!

F-4s, F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, 22s,35s, 84s, 86s, 100s, even F-101 Voodoo fighter jets aplenty were to be found.

But an F-89 Scorpion? No, sir, not to be found in this man’s 3D universe. What’s up with that?

Actually, I did finally find one, and it was for free, but you had to sign up for this guy’s website, and that was, like, $65. Uh, no, thank you.

So, yes, I did find one. And, although I’d gladly trade my kingdom for a good model, I’m not uh idiot!

And that means the story has to stay on hold until I can figure out another way to shoot it. There are several videos on The Battle of Palmdale, but they all use old stock footage from the DOD.

Surely we can do better!

Hmm, how to acquire a Scorpion… and evil plot unfolds…

My Kingdom for a Scorpion

You’re a writer – you know how it goes. You get fixated on this idea, and it just won’t go away until you finally get it sprawled out on a piece of paper.

Same thing with videos.

During our visit to the SoCal Wing of the Commemorative Air Force for the California Air Museums project, Ron Fleishman, the Wing’s historian, told us this great story about something called The Battle of Palmdale.

The story’s about the powerful and massive Grumman F6F-5 Hellcat fighter, a single-engine airplane that can rightfully claim the lion’s share of air victories in the skies over the Pacific during WW II.

Like the compact disc, the cassette tape, and the LP vinyl record, technology bypassed these remarkable airplanes so quickly that they were obsolete within two years of the war’s end. By 1956 they were used as radio-controlled drone targets for guided missiles – they didn’t even rate a pilot.

So, anyway, this battle story involves one of these remote-control Hellcats that goes haywire and flies, completely out of control, over Los Angeles in 1956.

The Air Force dispatches two state-of-the-art F-89 Scorpion jets to shoot it down, but they fail. And not just fail, but, COMPLETELY fail, firing a total of 208 missiles at the lumbering old timer – every single one of them miss.

It’s a great story, and I think it would make a terrific video. Now, of course, you can’t quite get your hands on real airplanes, but, hey, what about 3D models?

You can score a good-looking Hellcat for five bucks on Turbosquid.

But an F-89? Fogeddaboudit!

I scrolled through literally thousands of models, wishing, and a’hoping, and a’praying that somebody mislabeled their model when they uploaded it. Hey, it could happen!

F-4s, F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, 22s,35s, 84s, 86s, 100s, even F-101 Voodoo fighter jets aplenty were to be found.

But an F-89 Scorpion? No, sir, not to be found in this man’s 3D universe. What’s up with that?

Actually, I did finally find one, and it was for free, but you had to sign up for this guy’s website, and that was, like, $65. Uh, no, thank you.

So, yes, I did find one. And, although I’d gladly trade my kingdom for a good model, I’m not uh idiot!

And that means the story has to stay on hold until I can figure out another way to shoot it. There are several videos on The Battle of Palmdale, but they all use old stock footage from the DOD.

Surely we can do better!

Hmm, how to acquire a Scorpion… and evil plot unfolds…

Managing the Empire

I’ve been reading The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan. So much of what he details revolves around maintaining empires – Roman, Ottoman, Sassanids… but he forgot to mention mine.

Now, before you scoff and mutter some obscenity-laden little comment under your breath in the “who does he think he is” vein, let me just toss you a couple of wait-a-minutes and then we’ll see who’s what, know whatta mean?

Let’s talk about you for a moment. You have a cell phone, and probably a computer. You probably have a car, a dwelling, some furniture. Maybe a significant other, and perhaps a child or two, wandering about aimlessly. Coupla books, some pots and pans. And clothes. You’ve got a job, a career, a large pile of hopes and dreams. You’re a writer, after all…

Face it, my friend, this is your empire.

You gotta read The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu. Not to give anything away, but his premise is this: the resources of the universe are finite, and all civilizations must grow. Ultimately, there’s only room for one.

Chilling, am I right?

That has NOTHING to do with what I’m actually writing about, but it’s a cool book. I enjoyed Three Body Problem, the first book in the series, more than The Dark Forest, but both are excellent, excellent reads.

Anyway, the stuff you own, the stuff you are, the stuff you dream about – that’s your empire. And you know it’s all important because you spend your days defending it, making it grow, keeping it vital.

And, really, isn’t that the point? Isn’t that why we wake up in the AM? Not just to lay it back down in the PM, but to better our empire, move our lives forward, each and every day?

Sure, the Mongols had armies and swords and stuff.

At the end of the day, though, aren’t we all just doing the same thing – managing the empire?

On Ruins and Wreckage

I’m sitting in my kitchen on a terribly uncomfortable chair. We replaced the frumpy chair pads with nifty red ones for Christmas. Alas, the holiday ended, and the pads are packed away. O, how I long for those frumpy chair pads…

I hope your holiday was glorious and that your new year holds  nothing but grand promise.

My holiday ended finally just this last weekend, with the return of my daughter’s stuff to her college dorm. She’s officially ensconced in her small liberal arts school in what is right now the frigid wasteland of Central Oregon.

Oh come now, a frigid wasteland? you say with that subtle tone of parental correction, surely it cannot be as bad as that.

Listen, mister, or sister, I know what I know, and saw what I saw, see?

Actually, the ice storm was really quite beautiful, the trees, the fences, even the blades of grass perfectly outlined in ice.

We were stopped long enough on the freeway that I got to mess around with the quarter-inch thick sheet of ice on the K-rail divider. What was so amazing to me was that the vertical surfaces were just as coated as the flats and tops. How could this be?

My fingers are still cold.

We met some lovely people while stranded in Grant’s Pass – a guy from Hawaii and a girl from Denver, both of whom used to be in the oil business, but who now run a farm and sell pies. A guy from Baltimore who works at one of only four biodynamic wineries in the whole world.

Wait, where’s the writer’s story in this, you ask with that tone that really moans are you ever going to land this plane?

Okay, okay, okay, here we go…

Because of that mega ice storm that laid flat Central Oregon, why, I haven’t scheduled a fourth shoot for the California Air Museums project.

…crickets…

Yeah, see, we were both so wiped out from battling the ice storm (oh please, you moan) that I haven’t even turned on my computer since getting home Monday night.

…crickets…

And I haven’t put out a single query letter on my novel this entire year!

…yawns…

Well, there it is, isn’t it?

Central Oregon in ruins, my hosting career at a standstill, my novel in the dumpster.

…sad violin music…

Marketing-wise, I did plant a link to the California Air Museums site in this post. That’s pretty cool.

And, like my mom used to say, “Life ain’t beer and skittles, you know.”

Although I still don’t know what that means, let us remind ourselves that out of calamity comes creativity, out of ruin comes rebirth, and it ain’t over ’til it’s over.

Or until the fat lady sings, although I don’t quite get that one, either…

Of Captions and Mattresses

Hey – I discovered something you should never do! Well, I’ve actually stumbled upon quite a few. Phew. What a year!

So, the kids came home for the holidays – well, two out of three. The youngest daughter and the son and his wife. All was warm and cozy and happy, and the day after Christmas the son and his wife flew off to Omaha to embrace the balmy winter snow storm that dropped six inches…

The youngest daughter decided she’d like to stay the rest of her holiday vacay on the same bed the son and his wife had used. As the daughter’s bed had been brute-hauled into my wife’s office to make room for the son and his wife, no hearts were broken.

But, what to do with the daughter’s bed? The thing was easily 25 years old, and not worth a plugged nickel. We’ll call the garbage man!

Sure, says he. Put it out at the curb tomorrow morning and I’ll pick ‘er up for free. Won’t cost you a plugged nickel.

Well, my wife and I both work, see. So, we dutifully hauled the beast, bedframe, box spring, and twelve-ton twin-sized mattress down to the curb that night. What could go wrong with that?

Enter the Atmospheric River. Dang if it didn’t POUR on that poor mattress.

Two o’clock in the morning and I’m listening to the rain pounding on the roof, and I get the wise idea to put a tarp over this enormous marshmallow of a bed at the curb. OMG it rained and blew, and I had to lug the entire bed… thing… out a little into the street because it was blocking the gutter!

Now, I know the thing was already sodden, but I thought, maybe, if I could just keep extra water from coming in, maybe it would drain off into the now-unplugged gutter.

Just as I finish tying down the tarp, soaked to the bone, the rain lets up.

Sigh.

Also during her holiday vacay, my daughter suggested I add closed captions to the YouTube videos at California Air Museums.

Sure. No problem. Piece of cake. Alls ya gots ta do is tell YouTube that you want to use the closed-captions, and their AI does the rest.

Great!

I didn’t look until just last night, and OMG, they’re a MESS!

The AI tries to match the rhythm of the soundtrack, but just plain doesn’t spell or understand context or know placenames worth a plugged nickel.

Google counted spell Mugu to save its life! Mcgoo, Mago, MGOO…

And me, Mr. Professional, sent emails off to other museums, offering to come shoot videos at their facilities, unaware that I’d added these whack-a-doodle, nonsensical captions to my professional work!

I’ve spent the last two evenings fixing and correcting and spelling and spacing and timing… in truth, now they look pretty good.

But, note to self: do. not. trust. ai. It does some stuff pretty well. But closed captioning? Eh…

What ties these two stories together, of course is my daughter, who has jetted off to Hawaii, yes, Hawaii, to finish out her holiday vacay.

Probably ran out of helpful suggestions…

Right off the Pier

Hey, it’s a new year. Why not make it a new you, too? All it takes is a couple of new year’s resolutions, a little elbow grease, and some stick-to-it-iveness. You’ve got all that, dontcha?

You’re a writer, you know how it goes. You best days are those spent, keyboard at hand, stirring the creative pot and letting stuff fly. My goal was to tap into that bliss.

So, one of my resolutions was to write a good piece of fiction every day. Every day, Louie, and let no day pass unwritten.

Well, let’s see. Today is 4 January. I’ve been busy, working at work, writing non-fiction promotional stuff, making videos, building 3D models. And now I’m sitting here, writing this.

Yesterday was 3 January. Worked at working, you know, working at work. Got home, was kinda tired. Didn’t do much beyond play solitaire.

Before that was 2 January. Worked at work (are we sensing a theme yet?) and came home and messed with the boats.

Boats? Yes, boats. Yachts. Seacraft. My darling love and I acquired two kayaks, yes, paddle-your-keester-around-the-sea kayaks. Really nice ones.

The little boat, a 10-footer, was on sale at Dick’s Sporting Goods. The salesguy was himself a kayaker, but seemed to have been hit in the head by a paddle one too many times. How much is this boat, he repeats our question. How much? Let me see, here. I should be able to figure this out… I figured it out, and he agreed with my assessment.

The other boat is a lithe 14-foot beauty. Man, she’s nice. The owner was asking a lot of money, but dropped the price to a third without any haggling. He was like, just take it – I’ve got to get rid of it. In thinking about it, now I rather hope it floats…

FYI, I am the worst haggler in history. I mean, bad. I bought a car once, and asked the salesman if it would be okay if I paid the price that was in the windshield. He said only if he could add a ten dollar consultation fee, to which I readily agreed.

Idiot.

Anyway, last year my wife and I acquired a Honda pickup truck. My lovely, trusty Ford was just beginning to shift on its own, without waiting for me, which was a sure sign that the constant-variable-transmission was just about to become inconstant. I donated her to one of those cars-for-causes charities – they looked at the battered paint, and the 248,000 miles on the odo, and said “gee. thanks.”

To get the boats, I had to fit a rack in the back of the Ridgeline, which is no mean feat, whether you have mean feet or not. But, now that we have the truck, we have no excuse not to get the boats, which we did.

And that’s how I spent the night of the second – installing the racks on the truck.

I am most sorry, but I’ve lost the thread.

Oh. Fiction. Write a piece a day. That was my plan.

Not a word so far this year. Every day, every shmay, I say.

This is sad. Even as I sit here, writing this, I’m thinking man, I should be writing fiction. Here goes:

I thought she loved me, but she didn’t. She was interested, but only in the reaction she caused in me, not in me myself. It took a few terse conversations, filled with misguided inuendo, for each of us to see that simple truth. I think of her, sometimes.

There. Fiction. Well, not really…

Anyway, good luck with YOUR resolutions. As far as mine go, I seem to have driven right off the pier.

Lucky for me, I’ve got yachts!

F***K Plan B

That’s a headline, right? Plan B? You know Plan B. It’s the one you always have because you always need a backup plan, right? Maybe not so much…

If you really want to listen to something fun on your long holiday drive, you might listen to Arnold Schwarzenegger read his book, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life. As an action hero kind of guy, he really doesn’t pull any punches.

The book is meant to help you find a way to be happy. My guess is that he’s kinda preachin’ to the choir, as the people who will go buy his book are already somewhat self-activated.

But, if you’re unhappy, maybe it will help. Perhaps you will find some degree of self-activation.

That’s the point of his book: get yourself activated. Don’t sit around wondering what to do. Figure out your vision, write it down. Make a plan to go get it. Don’t have time? He shows you how to find two hours a day to accomplish your vision.

But, he warns you that napping is for babies. And that you can only rest and relax if you are old and tired or something. He’s kinda hard on those who aren’t hale and hearty…

My favorite takeaway? F**k Plan B.

According to Arnie, the only reason you would come up with a Plan B is if you plan to fail at Plan A. Why do you need a secondary plan if your first one is good? If you are careful with Plan A, you’ll never need a Plan B.

Plan B is just an easy way out of accomplishing your vision. It’s an escape clause, which means you never planned to accomplish your vision in the first place.

F**k Plan B.

To that end, I finally released the third installment in the California Air Museums series. It’s a visit to the Commemorative Air Force, Southern California Wing.

That’s my vision: to build a library of videos, in a fun and easy-to-navigate site, for the parents of STEM students, that they might see these videos and take their kids to these museums and get them interested in engineering. Tomorrow’s engineers today! There is no Plan B for this project. Just do it. Get in the chopper!

And, the novel I’ve written. You’re a writer. You know how it goes. Do you seek a publisher, or do you publish yourself? Either way, you’re in charge of marketing. Either way, sales are up to you, bucko.

I’ve approached a few agents. They’re now mostly using a standardized submission form, which is just so de-humanizing.

Demoralising.

The farther I travel down this road, I’m starting to think that maybe self-publishing isn’t all bad.

But now I wonder: is that just a Plan B?

A Fun Little Video

So, it turns out, if you want to do something, or need something done, sometimes the best way to do it is to actually do it. How weird…

Here’s a new video on the Point Mugu Missile Park, in beautiful Port Hueneme, California.

My wife did the camera work while I did the yammering. It’s such a tiny little museum, you can’t make an epically long video about it! But it was great fun.

This California Air Museums project is both a lot of work and great fun. It rather encompasses all of the things that I like to do, beyond sleep in and enjoy a bagel and a cup of coffee with my lovely wife on a weekend morning out on the patio.

There’s a writer’s story in all of this, and that’s why I’m sharing it with you.

I’ve always felt that a writer writes. A writer who dreams of writing isn’t a writer. That’s a dreamer.

My mom and dad were great parents, and we had a great growing up. After he passed, I was cleaning out my dad’s closet and found a gorgeous half-painted painting.

It was one of those Southwestern style jobs, with flat-bottomed clouds and zig-zag lightning that were so popular in the 1940’s. Beautiful colors scrolled across half of the canvas. Only half. The other half was penciled in.

He had put the painting aside to raises his kids, and never quite got back to it. Life got in the way.

That painting absolutely broke my heart.

And it drove home to me the point that if you want to do it, you better go do it. Nobody but you is going to live your dream.

So, if you’re sitting on the fence, get off the fence. Just get off the fence and go do it.

Oh, and don’t forget to watch my video first!

The Ship is Launched

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

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

Anyway, you can view the first episode here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zoom!

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

A New Venue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The key finally fit, and the door finally opened.

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

Plus, I got cool business cards!

Surrounded by Red Herrings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know.

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

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

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

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

I have Fridays off.

How To How To

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll stick to How to Make Scrambled Eggs…

Thanks for the help!

10 Ways to Make Yourself Feel Stupid

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmph.

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

At least I didn’t think so.

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

Ten Euphemisms for I Feel Like a Dummy.

Hey! I got one!

Done Once More

I have rewritten the rewrite of this rewritten novel so many times, I believe I may never need to write a new book again. I shall just rewrite the rewritten rewrite!

You’re a writer. You know how it goes. There comes that moment, when, way down there in your writerly guts, you know there is nothing more to say.

Here’s a little passage from the book:

“There is nothing more to be said,” the princess stated coldly.

Auric stared at the princess, his mouth hanging open in surprise, his fists working in frustration, his eyes meeting her cold, determined, green-eyed stare in disbelief and anger. 

“Nothing more to say,” she said firmly.

“No, I imagine that there is not,” Auric replied haughtily. “When you change your mind, I am quite certain that you know where you may find me.”

It’s done, my writer friend. The rewrite of the rewritten rewrite of my current novel. D-O-N-E, finito.

And this done is done. You know, the one that’s finished as in there is no more to write. No words to say. It’s all out. We laugh, we cry, but we finish.

And, well, there it is.

Now it’s off to my readers, as a thanks-and-see-how-your-input-matters sort of a deal, and then off in search of an agent.

Oh, sit down, I must, for surely this is exciting, isn’t it?

Truly?

Express to Geezerville

So, like you, like every writer, like anyone and everyone who spends a great deal of time at a keyboard, I have eventually found myself stuck in the Carpal Tunnel.

My neurons, upset about the traffic, actually switched lanes and tried to take the Guyon Tunnel across town instead. No good. Blocked. Probably holiday traffic. So, I had to get them fixed.

One of the great mysteries of life is why stuff that is so easy to do is so very hard to undo. Perhaps the Pyramids were a vast mistake, which is why they’re still here.

Anyways, out from under the knife, one more day before the dressings come off, my puppy firmly wedged in my lap and absoLUTELY determined NOT to let me use the voice keyboard on my fold-phone, my mind reels back to things the nurses said to me…

“Don’t worry, sweetie”

“Oh, you’re a funny one”

“Put on your clothes now, cutie…”

Wait a minute.

These are not the words nurses say to virile men of a certain age. Those are not terms of respect.

We use those terms on GRANDMA!!!

OMG! They see me as a GEEZER!

They thought I was a feeble old man!

Sweetie? Dearie?

Pat your hand while you sit in the park and watch the birdies! Feed you milk-toast from a TV tray while watching Matlock! Shoes? Don’t you mean slippers?

How did this happen? How did I slip from cool video producer to vintage cracker-sucker in just one day? Successful writer and author to elderly gent in his jammies in just an hour? Cool guy goes under the knife, wrinkly old geezer comes out. Whaaaaat?

What kind of hospital is this?

I wasn’t scared of the surgery, but I’m sure as hell not getting anything else fixed! Not now that I understand the side effects! The risks are just too great!

Sweetie, indeed…

A Fantastic Twist

Oh, the Saga of Me continues… wait, don’t sagas usually have a dramatic grand finale? Uh oh…

So, in the meanwhile that I’ve been re-working the half-maligned-yet-quite-ballyhhoed rewrite of a previously published novel, I happened to mention to my OWN lovely sister that I was rewriting a book.

My sister the psychologist! I’d written much of Droppington Place with her in mind! How did I not send her a copy?

She asked to read all three novels (Sawdust Man, Droppington Place, and Marigold’s End), and I apologetically sent them along.

What a knockhead was I to have excluded her from my reader’s list in the first place. But now all was fixed.

She picked out precisely the themes I’d intended in the first two novels, but get this… Ready?

Okay, a touch of backstory:

Droppington Place is the story of a twelve-year-old kid who gets trapped inside a magical realm made entirely of paper, overseen by a silly-yet-kinda-maniacal Elizabethan playwright overlord made of sawdust. What? It could happen.

Sawdust Man makes the playwright a sympathetic lead character in a bittersweet love story that takes a thousand years to tell. Same guy, different story.

So, here’s the really cool twist:

My sister the psychologist saw that Sawdust Man was actually a SEQUEL to Dropington Place!

Holy cats! Do you see what this means? My sawdust playwright just might be a recurring figure in any number of magical realism stories!

Why had I not seen this before? Many, many thanks are owed to you, dear writer friend, for riding with me on this crazy adventure, and certainly to my lovely sister the psychologist for her unflinching support and her crazy, zany, utterly brilliant idea!

It’s the Founding of an Empire!

But Wait, There’s More…

You know that saying “the hurrieder I go the behinder I get?” Howzabout “the more I think about it, the confusider I get…”

As you’ll recall from the Saga of Me, I’d been waiting and waiting for first my lovely wife, and then her lovely sister, and then, well, ANYONE, to roll out some valid feedback I could use on the novel I’ve just rewritten.

Well, after much haranging and ballyhooing on my part, my lovely wife, who had already begun reading it without my haranging, finished it. Despite her quite justifiable frustration with the author, she felt the book made it all the way to page 70 without falling apart.

For one of my books, that’s epic.

Upon our return from the recent drive-the-kid-to-Oregon trip, what waits upon our doorstep but notes from the lovely sister-in-law.

She read it no less than 4 (spelled f-o-u-r is you skeptical), yes, four times. Four!

She really liked it! Pointed out some themes and metaphors that I have to nod and smile knowingly to rather than say what I actually thought, which is “I did?”

Her notes are concise and well organized, and just plain breathtaking.

She liked the book.

She liked the book enough to actually want to read the upcoming final rewrite.

Over the moon. Gobsmacked. Thunderstruck. That’s me.

With Lovely Sister’s tempering of the notes given by Lovely Wife, I believe I now see a way forward that will make everyone  happy, and that will produce a good and marketable novel we can all enjoy.

Four times!

Over the moon!

Writing the Wrong Story

So, when I lived in Sacramento, I had to move from my apartment because the guy upstairs would be pounding on the floor at, like, 2:00 in the morning, totally interrupting my trombone practice… Ba-dump-bump

My wife, puppy, and I just returned to southern California from having helped our youngest daughter move in for her fourth year of university in central Oregon.

My lovely wife and I had a long and lovely chat about a number of things, including the structure of the book.

Say, when you were a kid, do you remember telling your parents what you wanted to be when you grew up? Ballerina, heart surgeon, astronaut, CPA…

When I got out of school, my dad asked me what I was going to do.

School didn’t end well for me. I was too much of a knucklehead to link the coursework I was taking in radio and television with getting a job. Internships? You mean actually work during the summer? No thank you, buddy. Not for me!

Idiot.

So, when I got out of college, I could have, and often was, correctly and completely considered to be Count Clueless.

My dad asked me what I wanted to do, and I said, “you know, I think I’d like to get into acting.”

My mom said “That’s my boy!” and offered a firm handshake and a round of applause.

My dad said “Acting. Huh. You should get a day job, and once you have a day job, don’t quit your day job.”

Anyway, in downtown Salem, Oregon, at the corner of Liberty and State on Saturday evening, my daughter, lovely wife, puppy, and I sat down on the sidewalk patio of a very pleasant little place.

We brought the puppy along on this extended road trip because we have three dogs. The other guys are so old and doddery that the puppy, being 75% chow hound, would gobble down all of the food we left out before they even knew we’d left.

Anyway, across the street from us on this busy downtown street corner on a warm and sultry Saturday night, cooled by the gentle breeze wafting in off the Willamette River, and where you have to speak loudly because yahoos in their jacked-up pickup trucks roar down State Street trying to impress girls, or guys, but ultimately only themselves, stood this maybe 14 year-old girl.

She quietly switched on her battery-powered amplified and plugged in a pale-blue electric guitar that was nearly as tall as she, set a microphone in her portable mike stand, and proceeded to belt out her version of a seemingly endless set of tunes.

The glorious chords from her guitar echoed up and down the canyon of building fronts and off the sides of the passing pickup trucks and deep down inside our eardrums with equal indifference. And then she began to sing…

“Buuuuuuusted flat in Baton…………… Rouge, as ragged……….as……….my jeans,” she worked her own stylized way through Janis Joplin’s Me and Bobby McGee (or, as Martin Mull called it, You and Bobby McGoo), in a brave contralto that was full of oomph and intensity but totally off key, and with a timing that would challenge even the most avant garde jazz musician.

She. Was. Awful. And she had a huuuuuuge repertoire of songs, some current, some classics, some her own, that were nearly indistinguishable from one another.

Seated about ten feet away, in one of those little beach kind of folding chairs that are super low to the ground but have a nice little canvas backrest, sat what we finally figured out had to be her mom, watching this 14-year-old girl’s performance intently and applauding after every dragged out, whiny tune.

The restaurant’s service was slow, and the wall o’ sound was agonizing, but there was something kinda cool about it.

This kid told her parents “I don’t want to be an astronaut or a CPA. I wanna be a blues singer.”

Instead of Dad patently saying “you’ll make better tips as a waitress,” or maybe he did, Mom said “let’s try it!”

Because you think something you created is pretty good is not reason enough to put it on the street corner to sell. This is my fear about my work. Well, maybe benignly selling it is okay, but trying it out on the rest of the world without their permission might be a stretch.

Still, though, her parents supported her in fulfilling her dream. Good luck with that.

Anyway, that’s not the point of this post, not by a long shot.

My wife, who has forgiven me and allowed me out of the dog house (much to the relief of the dogs), told me a number of amazingly helpful things about the book, and about my writing itself.

For example, she pointed out that this friendly, folksy style in which I write was, well, friendly and folksy, and had an appeal that I should be exploiting by writing articles in. It. I think I got lost in the sub-clauses, there. All those commas…

To the book, which is far and away the best thing I’ve written, she said it’s a great book until about page 70 (of 135), at which it loses its thread a little and becomes more like a movie script than a novel.

And, she said, you’re telling the wrong story.

See, the book is about a grimoire, a book of magical spells, which is created by a 10th century prince for the purpose of wooing a 10th century princess. Sadly, he dies before he can give it to her, but his spirit takes up residence inside the grimoire. It takes a thousand years, but the prince, still trapped inside the book, maneuvers and manipulates 5 men, (a sawdust manikin, a lovesick seventeen-year high-school junior, and three sorcerers desperately seeking to own the book), into creating a sawdust manikin of the princess, so that he can profess his love to her. It’s a tricky and adventurous path, but he eventually succeeds. Sadly, things go awry once the job is done.

That sounds fun, doesn’t it? Yeah! It’s just not the story I wrote.

My story is about the sawdust manikin and the high-schooler trying to outwit and escape the three sorcerers. When the five ultimately do meet, the prince, hidden in the book (surprise, surprise), connives them into creating a sawdust the manikin princess. Just in writing it down, it seems kind of disjointed.

You’re a writer. You can see the difference, yes? I couldn’t when I was writing it. I had teased around the idea of having the prince recreate the princess for a long time, and ultimately decided to bite the bull by the tail and put it in.

And that, my friend, that turned out to be the point of the story.

My wife said that this was the good story I should write.

So, here I sit, like that kid boldly and badly belting out blues tunes to an indifferent world, actively telling the wrong tale.

Maybe I shouldna fired my wife as my editor…

The Chase Renewed

You’re a writer – you know how it is. Writing is the best thing in the world! New ideas, new chapters, maybe new characters! It’s like taking that Shelby Cobra onto the Pacific Coast Highway with the top down… unless it’s on blocks in the driveway.

So, the Saga of Me continues. The lovely wife and editor did in fact read the book. Got all the way through with some insightful notes and suggestions. More suggestions followed after page 51, which is the point at which I harangued about how long it was taking.

But the notes are good and very helpful. Another month under the hood and the thing’ll be ready to submit for real. For real.

Under the hood, which is fortunate, for I find myself rather living in the garage. You know, temporarily. It’ll blow over. It’s all good. Everything’s fine. And I seem to find myself with a lot of time to myself here at home.

Ups and downs. Rises and falls. That’s the way it works, right? I’ve been terribly blessed so far. Sometimes storms brew up, right? Even the noblest ship on the sea can expect a right blow once in awhile, eh?

I’m not really living in the garage. But never have I felt such coldness in a summer.

The thing is, the thing is this: you ARE a writer, and you know what joy there is in tapping out exactly the right words. You know that rush and sense of oneness as you make the literary pieces fit in place.

That’s the thing, isn’t it? But writing is such a solitary business.

And, the real pain of it is that those who don’t write really don’t understand, do they?

Well, I’ve got the book back and much to do to get it ready to submit, so I’ll be rejoining the hunt, the race, the chase… there’s a correct word, I’m sure.

From the garage.

From the Land of No Brains

I’ve done some stupid things in my time – once I was offered a job at Jet Propulsion Laboratories. JPL! But I turned it down. No brains…

So if you know the Saga of Me, you know that I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for my lovely wife to read my book and give me some feedback. Waiting and waiting.

I got it in my head last week – Thursday morning at 2:34, to be exact – that I can wait no more.

This book is my dream – it’s The One. I know it instinctively.

And I just can’t toil away in the day-t0-day endlessly waiting for my darling editor to get around to helping me make it come true.

So I fired her.

Read it if you want, I’m moving on .

She counters with “my goal was to finish it this weekend.”

Ah.

Oh.

Oops.

No brains.

Just Shoot Me

Say goodnight, Dick. It’s over. The ship has sailed, the fat lady has sung, etc, etc. I’m out.

Here’s why: The Saga of Me, Chapter 918: The missus, love-of-my-life, brilliant editor, dozed off on page 51 of her first read of my 135-page novel. Dozed off. Zzzzzzzzz…

Okay, that’s it: just shoot me. I just can’t handle this pace. I’m starting to crack. I’m not a patient guy in the first place…

My boss significantly over-uses the phrase “death of a thousand cuts.” Like says it four or five time every day. I feel ya, man!

To fill the time whilst waitin’, I’ve been working on building a database of the historical aircraft in museums here in California. I just wrapped up recording the huuuge collection at the Planes of Fame museum in Chino, finishing with record number 268. That’s a bunch of airplanes so far.

The next museum, if one records them by their home city as I’m doing, appears to be right across the street, and has 190 planes. A HUNDRED AND NINETY?!? That’s like all the work I’ve done so far, and it’s just on one museum!

Just shoot me!

And this is only the data-entry portion of this project. In the next phase, I’ve promised to visit each museum.

How long is THAT going to take? The rest of my life? And I don’t have that much time left!

All seriousness aside, I’m just goofing around. Things take the time that they take, right? I mean, we’re busy folk, she and I. I get it. I get it. I can handle it. I can. Right?

But, I mean, really? The book can’t be that dull…

OMGeezies!!!

The impossible has happened, and I don’t want to jinx it, but, hey, right?

The girl of my dreams. The very love of my life. She’s on Page 29 – yes, 29! of my 135-page manuscript.

What do you mean that sounds short? You’re short!

Anyway, the point is… SHE’S READING IT!!!

And she’s lika-likin’ it!

You’re a writer, you know this feeling. It’s like pins and needles and empty-headed confidence and bravado and you want to go hide in the closet until it’s over.

The thing is, well, it’s been in the “reading phase” for almost two weeks. So that hiding in the closet thing is right out.

But, hey! She’s reading it, and I am soooooooo happy! I can hardly wait to see what she thinks of the chapter that starts on page 29.

I once worked with a wonderful lady, from the lovely town of Oxnard, who used to say “OMGeezies,” when she thought something worthy. Kind of violates the acronym, kinda.

Here’s a piece of useless trivia: the first time OMG was used? 1917! An English admiral wrote it in a letter to Winston Churchill, First Sea Lord at the time. And, to make sure it was understood, the admiral wrote “(Oh My God)” after it.

Watch this space… more to come!

OMGeezies!!!

Researching Madness

Researching madness sounds like a noble cause, doesn’t it? Me? Why I’m researching madness. Except in my case, I’m experiencing researching madness!

You’re a writer. You know how it goes. Before you write that piece, you’d best know what you’re talking about, right?

Whilst waiting and waiting and waiti… wait, some news! My lovely editor/wife said, without my prompting, that she’d read my book THIS WEEK! Granted, that was Sunday evening, after a promise to read it that weekend, and here it is Wednesday and the dust on the cover hasn’t been moved… but, hey, I can hope!

Anyway, I’ve started that Aerospace Museum project by building a database about the many California Air Museums I plan to visit.

Yep, a database. Here’s the museum, here’s their list of aircraft, here’s the history of each one. Ah, the Internet is a wonderful tool. It’s gonna be so cool…

Except, I mean, like, come on, you know? Castle Air Museum has 90 different airplanes. Ninety! OMG, how much can a fellow cut and paste in one lifetime?

Wait, that North American SNJ is the same thing as the North American AT-6, isn’t it? What do I do now? Isn’t the F-4J the same as an F-4? What the hell is a Ryan Navion, for crying out loud?

I’m an airplane nerd, among oh so many other subjects, but, holy cats, this is crazy-making!

So far, I’m on my fifth museum, and I’ve cataloged over 130 aircraft. My head, oh how she spins!

There are only 60 museums to go.

But, when this is done, I’ll have the supreme record of ALL the museum aircraft in California, including their complete histories and other cool stuff.

When I finally go and visit a museum, I’ll be able to point and say “isn’t that a BF-108 Taifun?” and the proprietor will give me an admiring glance and say “why, you are a discerning writer, aren’t you?”

And then it will all be worth it.

And then I’ll say “that’s a nicely restored A-6,” and the proprietor will shake his head sadly and say “that’s an AT-6, you whistlehead,” and I’ll have to leave the museum. Sigh.

And, to be fair, the museum in Boron, CA, away out there in the middle of the desert, has only one airplane. That was pretty easy data entry…

Researching Madness

Researching madness sounds like a noble cause, doesn’t it? Me? Why I’m researching madness. Except in my case, I’m experiencing researching madness!

You’re a writer. You know how it goes. Before you write that piece, you’d best know what you’re talking about, right?

Whilst waiting and waiting and waiti… wait, some news! My lovely editor/wife said, without my prompting, that she’d read my book THIS WEEK! Granted, that was Sunday evening, after a promise to read it that weekend, and here it is Wednesday and the dust on the cover hasn’t been moved… but, hey, I can hope!

Anyway, I’ve started that Aerospace Museum project by building a database about the many California Air Museums I plan to visit.

Yep, a database. Here’s the museum, here’s their list of aircraft, here’s the history of each one. Ah, the Internet is a wonderful tool. It’s gonna be so cool…

Except, I mean, like, come on, you know? Castle Air Museum has 90 different airplanes. Ninety! OMG, how much can a fellow cut and paste in one lifetime?

Wait, that North American SNJ is the same thing as the North American AT-6, isn’t it? What do I do now? Isn’t the F-4J the same as an F-4? What the hell is a Ryan Navion, for crying out loud?

I’m an airplane nerd, among oh so many other subjects, but, holy cats, this is crazy-making!

So far, I’m on my fifth museum, and I’ve cataloged over 130 aircraft. My head, oh how she spins!

There are only 60 museums to go.

But, when this is done, I’ll have the supreme record of ALL the museum aircraft in California, including their complete histories and other cool stuff.

When I finally go and visit a museum, I’ll be able to point and say “isn’t that a BF-108 Taifun?” and the proprietor will give me an admiring glance and say “why, you are a discerning writer, aren’t you?”

And then it will all be worth it.

And then I’ll say “that’s a nicely restored A-6,” and the proprietor will shake his head sadly and say “that’s an AT-6, you whistlehead,” and I’ll have to leave the museum. Sigh.

And, to be fair, the museum in Boron, CA, away out there in the middle of the desert, has only one airplane. That was pretty easy data entry…

Get Thee to the South Sea

When I was a young man, I was swept away by the movie Mutiny on the Bounty. Not the Mel Gibson one – ew, no. Not the Clark Gable one – I mean, come on, I’m not THAT old.

No, no, it was Marlon Brando as Fletcher Christian and Trevor Howard as the salty Cap’n Bligh. Oh, a good pair those two made.

I tell you this in secret, because it’s kind of embarrassing: I spent the bulk of my days the summer that movie came out way up high in a neighborhood castor bean tree.

I climbed up as high as I could go, and the wind would blow, and the tree would rock, and the leaves would sigh like the open sea, and the sky was so blue, and I went a’sailin’ away towards romance and high adventure in the Great South Sea.

Stupid story. Sadly true.

Anyway, the book Fragile Paradise, written by Glynn Christian, a great, great grandson of Fletcher Christian, revealed that Fletcher Christian bellowed “I am in hell with you, sir!” at Captain Bligh.

“I am in HELL with you, sir!”

Mel Gibson kind of squeaks it out in his version of the story. Fortunately, Brando was spared the opportunity as the book was published after his version on Bounty debuted.

Why are we poring over all this old film rubbish and nonsense, you ask? Because we took my globetrotting daughter to LAX this morning, and drove not once, but twice through Malibu.

I know, Malibu, blah blah blah. But it IS beautiful, and the weather was epically gorgeous, and we spotted not one, but three container ships in the inside channel, laden deep and headed north. Three!

Not one was the converted collier Bethia, purchased by the Royal Navy, and renamed Bounty. But then again, neither seemed to be undergoing a mutiny. See? Never change a ship’s name!

So, our drive up the coast, from Santa Monica, beneath the rugged Pacific Palisades, through Malibu-Barbie Malibu, up into Ventura County, past the ginormous Mugu Rock, and around thorny Point Mugu felt an awful lot like driving alongside the Great South Sea.

Duh. Same ocean.

My book remains unread by that certain someone, the very love of my life, whilst her sister, the one who read it twice and said I had done an amazing job of creating a splendid fairytale, has yet to send me her notes.

Every day, when I get home from work, I rush to the mailbox because maybe today, today is the one. Nope. Just bills and junk mail.

I am in hell with you, sir! Or, well, madame…

The Writer’s Life

For all my days, I’ve wanted to be a writer. To live the writer’s life, and be known as John D Reinhart, the writer.

You’re a writer. You know how it is. You need time to perfect your craft and space to let your ideas unfold. Oh, how cool would it be to live the writer’s life, huh?

So, what exactly IS the writer’s life? How do writer’s live?

Like Hemingway? Fighting in civil wars, bringing down wild fishies, smoking cigars, and drinkin’ hooch in dives?

I don’t smoke, and have to avoid hard liquor because of acid reflux, and I get seasick. And I’m a little old to go fight in a war.

Maybe Dickens up there in his garret? Freezing cold and doped up on laudnum? Gee, that sounds glamorous.

On the Fourth of July, we drove up to the seaside town of Cambria and walked the dogs along Moonstone Beach. My wife-who-still-hasn’t-read-my-book and daughter went tidepooling while the dogs and I ate the cookies I’d brought in my murse… I mean European Man Bag.

As I watched a portly woman in a too-skimpy bikini waddle past, the most amazing feeling overwhelmed me. It wasn’t the lady in the bikini, or the sun on the sea, you know, like heat stroke or something.

Nope. It was much more metaphysical. It felt as if the Universe was telling me that I was supposed to be there at that very moment. That everything was okay. And it felt like the very long road I’ve traveled pointed me right to that time and place. It felt like the Universe was telling me that this life I am living is the right life. The right life.

And then I got it.

Hey, knuckle-nose, you’re LIVING the writer’s life! Duh! Hello? Anybody in there?

YOU are a writer, right? How you live? That’s how writers live.

Did you see the movie Soul? In it someone tells the story about the little fish who swims up to the old fish and says “I’m looking for the ocean,” and the old fish says “you’re in it. This is the ocean,” and the little fish says “nuh uh, this is just water.”

For all my life I thought that some magical curatin would one day open up, and that on that most wonderful day I would finally get to live a writer’s life.

Did you ever see the movie The Odd Couple, with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau? One of my all-time favorites. In it, those guys are BOTH writers! And they’re just regular guys, like you and me.

Just like you and me. Which means that this, my friend, this is the writer’s life.

Thank you for reading my stuff and taking this journey with me. It really means so much to me.

And, take heart! You’re living the life of a writer!

Mursey, Mursey Me

We’re trendsetters, you and I. We’re writers, creators, pavers of the road forward. We gotta try stuff out and see if it works.

Take, for instance, the murse. The man purse. The European man-bag. Like the line from Madagascar 2: carry your stuff and still look tough.

Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe carried purses. So did the Three Musketeers. They were all fashionable gentlemen of their day.

I work with a bunch of engineers – eggheads the lot of ’em. Not one, zero, not even a percent of one, would ever be caught DEAD with a single-strap backpack. Because it’s a cross-body bag, like ladies wear. Eeeew, icky. Lookit me, I’m a girl!

That’s the mentality that keeps society stalled. The kind of thinking that drives us backwards.

But we’re writers, you and I. Our job is to move the world forward. We can’t leave it to the homophobic eggheads to do it.

In truth, it’s the fold-phone from Samsung that has driven me to the murse. I absolutely love the phone – in fact, I’m writing this post with it.

But it’s heavy – like two cellphones glued together! So heavy that my pants fall down when it’s in the pocket. So I have to carry it.

But the murse carries the phone, and my wallet, and my keys, and some gum, and a couple Granola bars… you know, critical stuff.

I got it from Amazon at a net cost after discounts of about $8. So, for the price of a Happy Meal, I get to be fashion-forward!

I took it with us on our trip up to the trendy beach town of Cambria. While my wife and daughter went tidepooling, the dogs and I sat down and enjoyed a cookie, pulled from the back pocket of my handy-dandy, Uber useful murse!

Icky indeed…

All Right, Something Else…

Hey, here’s another idea. Something New, Totally New, and it won’t cost a dime and it’ll make big bucks and, hey, where’re you going?

If you’ve been following the Saga of Me, you know I’m still waiiiiiiting for my beloved editor wife to read my lovely novel. It’s been three months. Come on. I wrote it in less time… just kidding. She’s been arduously studying for, and actually passed, some big human resources qualification dealio, and I am in fact super impressed and super proud of her. I’d be even more so if she read my book…

Whilst waiting, I’ve come up with a number of ideas, most dumb, some good, of how to further my writing career whilst waiting. Because waiting is what I do. A lot of. Wait. Like a Disney movie: wait, what?

So, this is it: California Air Museums. Wait, what?

I have a keen interest in aviation, don’t you know. So, who wouldn’t be interested in a website wherein the author (mois), visits and reviews the aircraft in the aviation museums here in the Golden State?

But wait, there’s more. Howzabout said author writes a touristy sort of review for the local tourist magazine, like The 805 Eats, or something, in the town of which is where the museum is. In. And makes a nickel for the review, thank you very much.

Wait, what? Makes a nickel?

Howzabout this: said author also writes a review with a more aviationary feel for the aviation-minded magazines, like Me and My Airplane, or something. And makes another nickel for that piece.

That’s two nickels plus a website post from just one visit. And California has 65 museums! Wait, what? That’s, like, maybe fifteen bucks in nickels!

All of this reviewing, etc., however, is aimed at what said author is really working on, which is a coffee-table book called… wait for it… wait a little longer… pause for effect… California Air Museums! Huh? Right? Ya with me?

My camera takes pretty good pics, so I’ve got that part covered.

And I’m building a database of the kinds of airplanes one might find in said museums, so it’s kind of like the website will be a resource. Yeah? High-five! Down low…

Wait, what?

This is not a project – it’s a career! All of this, all, to sell my book. Well, actually to get my name out there into the larger world at large so that, when my book finally gets approved by my lovely editor wife, publishers will be clamoring to get the rights.

Wake up, you’re dreaming again! Wait, what?

Best Not to Visualize

Whilst waiting and waiting for my notes to arrive on the new book, I took to 3D modeling the cast of characters. Big mistake.

You’re a writer – you know how it goes. You work so hard at creating a mental image of your characters, you always wonder what it would be like to actually see them.

I’ve got this goofy software that lets you create 3D models. Actually, it creates the model, starting with a base figure, and lets you customize the physical attributes.

Whilst a’waitin’ for mah notes, I thought I might just sorta mock up a book cover that has the whole cast in it. Ehhhh. Bad choice.

In the mind’s eye, the big guy is a giant – he’s huge, like a bear. When you go to cast a person like that, however… that’s a different story. He’s the guy on the right.

One of my characters is perpetually drunk – it’s not his fault. He is having a rough night in the tavern. Having drunk too much ale and run out of money, he gambles away a grimoire, a book of magic spells. Throughout the rest of the story, whenever anyone opens the book, it calls this poor fellow straight from his table at the tavern to wherever the book is in space and time. Worse, when the book’s done with him, he get put back, right there in the tavern, until the it’s opened again.

The other characters have this big adventure with the grimoire, but for him, it’s just one long, inebriated night. He’s the guy on the left. He looks like a little kid!

The old wizard, Shelburne, looks like a Martian in this image.

And let us not discuss the pants on Penrose, my main character, there in the center. I chose them because they’re knickers, and seem vaguely Elizabethan. But they’re meant to fit a huntress, and simply look… go ahead and say it… stupid with two o’s.

The kid and the girl came out all right, and the fellow in front of the giant is supposed to be a 10th Century prince – he looks okay. The girl is from that same time, but looks more like you’d meet her at the mall.

Emminy-way… you know who loses the argument, right? The first one to say “anyway…”

Anyway, I rendered these super quickly – so quickly that you can see the green-screen around the prince and princess. eh.

When the book is published, oh, this shall be a lovely cover, for certain.

For now? Best not to visualize…

Nothin’ Doin’

You ever have one of those days when you don’t wanna do nothin’?

I had to go to the doctor’s this morning. He’s a good guy, but after hearing my tale of woes, he kinda split. “Uh, the receptionist will take care of you…”

After I finally dragged my draggin’ carcass into work, I found out that nobody… noooooo body… was happy with the 3D renders I’d made. Nobody. Show of hands, happy with the renders? Crickets.

Had to fool with danged renders all stinkin’ afternoon. I hate them, and I believe the feeling is mutual.

Finally made it through the door  – the promised notes from my reader still haven’t come – and my wonderful wife is sequestered away, taking an online test.

Not the test for which she’s been studying all this time and, once completed, she’ll have all the time in the world to read my book, give it her blessing so that I can send it off and find a literary agent and a publisher and become rich and famous and be known as the author John D Reinhart, such that people in restaurants whisper “did you see him? That was the author John D Reinhart!”

Nope. Some other test.

But.

But one little ray of sunshine crept through it all. One bright little beam that said “hey, wanna play?”

And then she licked my nose, and somehow it turned out to be a pretty good day for the author John D Reinhart.

Crazy Talk Lives!

You know me – caterwauling about every. little. thing.

But, hey – great news!

Great!

Crazy Talk 8, the fun and insane lipsync software from Reallusion, isn’t as dead as I thought! It just doesn’t work in Windows 11. Ten, yo! Eleven, not so!

What does that mean?

That means you can do silly stuff like this: Who Ate THE FISH?

Yeah, it’s clunky, and kinda stooopid, but I gotta do something while waiting and waiting and waiting for my book to get read, don’t I?

Oh – I have news on that score, I think. I’ll let you know!

Thanks for following along!

Writing the Hard Stuff

I’m terrible at transitions, you know, moving characters from scene to scene. My wife the editor tells me so all the time. Maybe I’m bad at them because I just plain hate writing them.

You’re a writer, you know how it is. There’s always something your just not good at writing, and typing it out is always a painful chore.

For me, it’s the laborious task of getting characters from here to there so that they can meet up with each other. It takes so long and is so hard to not write a transition scene that is empty-headed and shallow because really it’s not a scene at all. It’s just movement.

I read a piece of e-fiction this week that has a great story. You could tell the author was having a blast.

But to get to the actual story, you had to wade through pages of uninteresting setup, with throw-away characters and dull, half-hearted descriptions. You could so easily tell that the author didn’t enjoy writing that part, but felt it had to be in the book. You can hear him whispering “don’t worry, the good parts are really good!”

You and I are writing in a time much like that of William Shakespeare. In his day, there were no mega-publishers. Just small-time patrons to help you sell your work.

Most of the publishing and the selling was done by you.

And won’t you now take a look at the online marketplace for books? Are you not writing posts on your blog to sell your book?

Is it not the same, Iago?

I mention that because of this e-fiction I read.

This author published his book, hoping you’d see past the heartless parts and enjoy what he really wanted you to read.

Like dancing with a wooden leg, I ask you to watch my arms and my torso and my good leg and enjoy the show. Wooden leg? Oh, just ignore that.

I suck so completely at writing transition scenes that my wife the editor told me to stop trying.

“You’re no good at them, and they ruin the flow of the story.”

So, I quit writing transition scenes, and my story is muuuuuuch better. The new novel, which is waiting to be read by a certain my-wife-the-editor, has none. Zero.

He braved the dark and frightening alleyway, his heart in his throat, finally breathing a sigh of deep relief as he entered the warm, cheerful pub. See? No long description. Just get him in there!

Better yet, ignore the transition altogether and start the scene with the character in the pub. He can explain the transition in dialog: “Oh, I came down the alleyway – a dark and frightening bit of roadwork was that!”

No transition. No hard, stupid scene. Bye bye.

If it’s painful for you to write, you can believe that it’s painful for your reader, too.

I enjoyed the e-fiction, and so entirely hope this author writes another.

And, although I haven’t said it before, I truly do thank you from the very bottom of my heart for following me!