You’re a writer. You know how it goes. You work your keester off writing something that you just think is the bee’s knees, the cat’s pajamas, the Maharajah’s… uh, well, you get the idea.
But life happens and stuff happens and somehow it just doesn’t seem to be the big hit you expected. And then, one day…
Continue reading “Twinklings of the Past”When is giving up really giving up?
You’re a writer. You know how it goes. You work your keester off to create what you think is a great piece of art – and it is a great piece of art because you put your heart and soul and God knows how many hours of mindbending labor into it. And then you burned a gazillion more hours rewriting it – getting the characters just right, moving scenes so that it flows just as smooth as butter on a hot bun.
Continue reading “On Giving Up”Damn their eyes, these characters!
They say things you didn’t expect, do things you didn’t think of, steal your gosh darn story right out from under you.
Continue reading “Character Thievery”I grew up in the pre-digital age, spending many an early adolescent hour at the worktable, building plastic model kits. Airplanes and ships – those were my specialties…
Wait, wait, wait… don’t go skipping away thinking this is some nostalgic, back-when-I-was-a-kid kind of thing. Just hang tight for just another couple of paragraphs or so and you’ll see that this applies to you – yes you.
Continue reading “The Curse of the Black Falcon”So, here we are at Year Five, the Year of Independence. This is the goal, the island to which we’ve charted our five year course, the one thing we’ve focused on and worked on and planned on.
So, like, what is year five?
Continue reading “Five Years to Independence: Year Five – the Year of Independence”You remember that dorky sci-fi movie from the ’50’s “When Worlds Collide,” right? If you don’t, count yourself lucky. Earth was gonna get smashed by an asteroid, see, and so the scientists build these giant spaceships to fly away into space, see, and, well, you get the drift.
You’re a writer – you know how it is. You’ve got your work out there, doing its reader-generating thing, and you’re looking at your pile of ideas, wondering what’s going to call you next.
Same thing here.
Except, well, the ideas and facts work in funny ways, don’t they? Check this out.
My next book, please don’t tell anybody, is all about Blackbeard the pirate. Very in-depth, but fun, too, because, well, hey, it’s what I do. I’m still knuckle-deep in research, but I ran over a really cool, really helpful set of truths.
Was you a pirate in the early 1700’s, you were a rough-and-tumble sort of chap. Climbing rigging, whacking people with cutlasses, yelling “arrrgh”, that wasn’t for oldsters.
So, Captain Charles Johnson, in his book A General History of Pirates, which he penned in 1724, may have made a goof when he wrote that Blackbeard was born in 1680. Kevin Duffus, in his recent book The Last Days of Blackbeard, reasoned that such a birth year would have made the pirate 38 years old at the height of his career – quite old for an active in those days.
More likely, Duffus writes, that he was born in 1690.
Record skidding noise…
Wait. My character Phineas Caswell, from my novel Marigold’s End, was born in 1694. Er-ma-gersh, I can see the next novel to follow this Blackbeard piece: how cool would it be to get Phineas aboard young Blackbeard’s ship, before he turned pirate? Phineas is twelve, Blackbeard is 16, both are fresh to the sea… this will be great!
So, chasing one idea leads to another. One novel collides with another… when worlds collide!
Nah. It doesn’t work for me, either.
Stand by to eject bathwater on my mark.
Standing by, sir.
And…mark.
The bathwater is terminated.
Nice shooting, Lieutenant.
Roger that. The baby is outta here. Repeat: the baby is out of here.
Big ten four. Stand by for towelage.
Uh, negatory. Sorry. No can do.
Disregard that. Stand by to commence towelage on my mark.
Uh, sorry, skipper. No can do.
All hands, stand by. What’s with this gloomy Gus guff, Lieutenant. I believe I gave you an order.
Ten four on that, skipper. But, we don’t have, a, well…
Don’t tell me you ran out of towels.
Negative, sir. It’s just that, well, we ejected the baby with the bathwater.
Mongo Santamaria! You’re telling me we tossed the kid out the window?
Like a bullet, sir.
Well, there goes the towelage. All hands, prepare for battle stations. Angry mom at eight o’clock!
It turns out, writing a book is great fun. And it is great fun. Even though your imaginary friends, all those little voices in your head, drag you through the very depths of despair and pain and agony, the fact that you share that with them, that you are a witness to their travails – is an honor and a delight.
Oh, sure. That’s the cat’s pajamas, that part. Like ice cream for dinner every night of the week. Best of all, you tell all your friends that writing is the pits, it’s the worst – you feel like a zombie…hour after hour, typing, thinking, scribbling, coffee, beer, whatever. While, actually, your inner you goes “teehee, this is the best!”
Welp. The party’s over. They ate the pretty balloons. It’s crying time again, and you’re gonna leave me – I can see that faraway look in your eyes. Why must we get offa this cloud?
BECAUSE I PUBLISHED MY BOOK!!!
Yes, there is one more moment of glee, and that is when you join the Club of Shakespeare. All the world is a willing audience, hungry for your written words, longing for your thoughts, your ideas… and, once the book is published… Yo, lookit me, feedin’ the masses!
It’s a cerebral joy, and stunningly short-lived. I found no Disney at my door. Discovered Dreamworks dreaming of someone else. Ran across Random House randomly choosing someone else’s house.
No, the party’s over. Now comes the drudgery, the mind-numbing torture, of figuring out how to market this darned thing for real. It’s no longer a game, or a funny idea. Now it’s work, work, work, to get this product sold and out, into the sunshine where it belongs.
What? What’s that? How can you find it? Well, bless your generous soul, you have come to the right place. Let me pull your chair closer to the fire. Move it, dog. Make way for this most spectacular person.
Because you are you, and you’re a friend, I’ll let you have the book…for free!
No strings attached. Freebie. You go. Although, if you found it in your heart to write a dazzling review, I’m sure no one would be opposed to that…
Find DROPPINGTON PLACE here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/618049
Now, this is important: type in the coupon code NJ38D. When you do, the most wonderful book you’ll download with your free coupon will be yours – for free!!!
Of course, you could also visit the author’s site, PhineasCaswell.com.
Now, to find that baby…
Well, I don’t suppose it’s true that tomorrow never comes. If that happened we’d all be sorta stuck in a perpetual Groundhog’s Day scenario – say, haven’t we met, you know, today?
Disneyland of the late ‘60’s had The Carousel of Progress, a huge, revolving theater that brought you scenes of an exciting future life. The song that thrummed between the scenes told us “there’s a great big, beautiful tomorrow, waiting at the end of every day.”
At the end of this day, I’ve got to clean out the cat box – I hate cats – and do the dishes, and fix the pool pump. At the end of the day that follows this one – I won’t say tomorrow – I’ll have to fix the pool pump again, clean out the cat litter box – I hate cats – and catch up on the roughly 714,000 other little things that need doing every single day.
If, like me, you work a nine-to-five, those magic windows of sit down and think time, of play with the words time, of what-if time, well, they’re sort of like the windows of the apartment building across the street – you can look into them from here, but they are oh so hard to open.
Tomorrow is just like today, and will just the same as yesterday and the one that follows. Trudge, trudge, trudge right into the grave. Sigh.
Waaa-waaa-waaa-waaa
That’s the dinkey-toons answer. That’s the gee-I’d-like-to-be-a-writer-if-I-could-just-find-the-time answer. That, my dear writer friend, is the excuse.
The truth is that you’re a writer, and you know what that means. What time is it? Time to work, day in, day out.
Why are you changing the cat box – I hate cats – when you could be working? The dishes’ll get done, they always do, and the pool pump is a Sunday afternoon item. What’s the rush? Why put those mundane things ahead of your important, life-giving work?
Tomorrow comes when you make it come. It will be the best tomorrow you can imagine because you earned it – you worked hard and busted your knuckles to build it.
A tomorrow in which you are a passenger is just another day. The tomorrow that finds you creating, crafting, working – that’s the one to live for.
So, my literary friend, tomorrow doesn’t come. You have to bring it on.
I know you know this, so I guess there’s not much point to telling you about it. But, well, there it is, isn’t it?
I’ve been hating on my book, DROPPINGTON PLACE. Okay, well, not on the book itself, but on the writing of it. Some days it’s a blast, and the words flow like sweet cherry wine. The next day comes the roadblock, the stumbling block, the block of ice that freezes our soul and stalls us just plain dead in our tracks. I hate that block, too.
In my story, the characters explore a surrealistic world made entirely of paper. Their path takes them down, well, a path. So, how do we walk down this path?
Walking, and walking, and walking becomes so dull that even I can’t stand to write it.
Instead of walking and walking, the camera drifts up into the sky and looks down on them, telling us where they’ve been and what they’ve seen.
And THAT, my writer friend, is exactly where the roadblock landed. Flooomph, like a big rock in the highway to Interesting Storyland, we stepped out of the lives of the characters, the story became wooden and dull, and no fun to write. And, if you don’t have fun writing a piece, however is your reader going to enjoy it?
Ding-dong. Hello, Mr. Dimwit? Your brain is calling.
It’s a scene, of course. The answer is to place scenes along the path. Scenes that move the story forward even as they move the characters down the road. Cool, huh?
Biggity-big-big-bigger question.
Why do this? Why do you care about great paragraphs, and storylines, and why is it so important for you to put your thoughts on paper?
Why? Why must you publish your book? If writing is so important to you, why don’t you just write and write and let it go at that.
Okay, so maybe it’s not the writing, is it? It’s the reading.
You write your ideas and stories so that others will enjoy, will learn, will see the world in a new way. Isn’t that so?
So, here’s the rub: if you are so concerned about your reader seeing the world in a new way as a result of your work, why put your name on it? Okay, so it’s not just the reading. It’s the fame.
Before we go too far into our writer’s tools and processes, let us get this straight:
You and I are reaching for the brass ring of immortality.
Think about Shakespeare, a household word. Shakespearian theater. It defines a whole category of acting, of playwriting, of presentation. Why isn’t that you?
It could be. If your book is successful, if you find the right combination of story and character, you, my dear reader friend, could be the next Shakespeare, your name whispered and hailed and venerated for generations to come.
That’s immortality for us.
But it’s more than that, isn’t it?
Writing is a business. Success is not measured by finished works. It’s measured by works sold. Sold. Sounds bad, but it is the business.
Sell a million books and you’re doing good. Sell a million books a year and you’re on your way. Sell a million books a year and get a movie deal, and household wordism isn’t far away.
Isn’t that what you want? That’s what I want. I don’t think it will happen, but that doesn’t make me want it any less, or make me work any less hard in trying to get there.
So, go finish your book. Write well. I’m finishing mine. Maybe you’ll read it – maybe I’ll read yours. Maybe yours is so good that Disney is dialing the phone this very instant to make you the next Stephen King.
Hey, it could happen! Immortality could be that close. I’m sitting by the phone.
Oh, Bill… whatever would we have done without you? Can you imagine tapping out a novel on an IBM Selectric? Or on a rusty old Underwood? Or, gasp, scrawling it out longhand? That Dickens, huh? Now there is dedication!
When you tippy-tap your messages out on your cell phone, you don’t use words like ululate, or hypertension, or Zoroastrianism. Too tough to tippy-tap out on that tiny keyboard. Yet Mr. Dickens scrawled out deliciously delightful words longhand. In truth, most people find it easier to block print letters than to try to spell on those itty-bitty keys. Someone, probably aliens, must be laughing their dang-fool heads off – look what I got the humans to do!
In Phineas Caswell’s world, the wind she blows us aback, and we can sail forward no more. We brace the yards around to catch the wind. We loose the heads’ls. We work the rudder and bring her head around to pick up the breeze. We change tack, gather speed, and off we go.
Mr. Gates’ spell-checker has finished MARIGOLD’S END, something few humans have yet to do. The rough-and-tumble Englishmen in this book all drop their aiches, as in “‘ow was I to know?” And Louise, she is French, and she drops ‘er aiches, and she uses French words. And Red Suarez espeaks Espanish…Ay, caramba! But, for all that, the spell checker found out those embarrassing oopsies we try to hard to avoid. Next comes a grammar checker.
Software can never replace the human eyeball and skill set and judgment, but it can certainly point you towards questionable work.
So, thank you, Mr. Gates. Your PC has revolutionized the world, and your spell checker has brought a change of tack to an otherwise stalled project. ‘ats off to ye, lad!
John D Reinhart 