writing – John D Reinhart

Trust the Story Teller

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

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

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

Okay, so… what?

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

Repeat: What?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because you’re a writer.

Have faith.

I See Icy Things

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

Yes, well. Scratch that.

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s what surprised me: everything freezes here.

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

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

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

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

Hitting Pause Again

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

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

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

It’s all about the migration of people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy holidays, and put down that book.

Moving Part 3: The Pod

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s for tearing up my lawn, bucko!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hoisting Anchor, Mate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s one journey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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On Getting Rich Quick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh yeah, Blender.

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

She says it’s Grug Crood.

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

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

No getting rich quick there.

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

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

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

Sorry, Grug.

Why Writers Shouldn’t Talk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But think about impromptu speakers like President Obama.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading along…

Yessss, Your Majesty

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

Funny you’d mention brand.

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

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

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

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

But that’s not what this post is about.

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

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

I have a new website: Kuiper Belt Queen.

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

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

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

Have Word, will travel.

But, wthe Kuiper Belt?

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

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

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

Okay, you have to agree that’s cool.

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

See how it all fits together?

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

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

Thanks for reading along…

Back to the Front

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I didn’t make a fortune. Or a living.

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

Where the Little Cars Roam

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

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

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

Three thoughts came to mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, well, there it is!