Category: Writing

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…

A New Venue

My wife tells me that I have two problems: I don’t listen to her, and, uh, something else.

The one time I DID listen to her recently, she suggested a great idea.

See, I’m a nerd. I get all excited about dopey stuff that doesn’t mean anything, and then I have to do something with it.

Enter California Air Museums, a site dedicated to inspiring young parents to bring their kids to California’s many air museums by presenting video tours and stories about the museums themselves.

All good and well, but the Holidays and the wintry weather have rather put a hitch in my museum-visiting git-along, so to speak. What to do?

“You’re a nerd,” she tells me. “You get all wrapped up in weird little pieces of information and details. Write about that.”

Enter One Motor, Many Planes, the first blog post in the new Stories feature on the website’s front page.

Casting the article as a story rather than a blog post gives it more gravity – more bottom. That’s a sailing term. See, sailing ships have a presence in the water, and the deeper the hull the more bottom she presents… eh.

I digress.

A funny side note to Motor story: the museum’s historian told me two entirely different aircraft, a hot combat bomber and a lumbering transport made use of the same engine. Isn’t that fascinating?

I began writing the story with that fact as my premise, only to find out in doing the research that he was not correct. Much digging and figuring out resulted in proving that he was correct, but not in the way he thought, and a much more interesting story.

Anyway, now I have to go try and remember what else my wife told me. Something about a fire…

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…