The Gentleman from Indiana

In Memory of Us

2011-12-26T20:40:00.000-05:00

Tonight I write to bid a fond farewell to something dear. The something in question is us. For so long we’ve been together and shared so many things. Remember the time we played scrabble for hours, just the two of us arguing whether “behoove” is a word or not over a board full of letter tiles? Or how about the hot August afternoon when we walked to the public swimming pool and got caught in a thunderstorm. And there was the Christmas when we sat in the back room while the adults drank coffee and talked until midnight? Remember watching Saturday Night Live together, something we never got to do but on Christmas and New Years when we stayed up late? We have so many memories, so many moments the two of us shared.

I mourn the loss of these little moments, these slivers of time and tiny events. I mourn them because they’ve been wantonly murdered and replaced by a stand in, a doppelganger. The name of the interloper varies. Sometimes it’s IM, sometimes simply text, occasionally Twitter, and in its more formal moments it’s called Facebook. Please don’t think of me as a Luddite and don’t mistake my obituary as coming out against technology or social media. I keep two blogs, have a Twitter account, and maintain no less than two Facebook pages. What I’m mourning is the loss of the face to face, private, relationship between two people with all its depth and nuance. A tweet can’t sign and a Facebook account won’t whisper a secret, you’ll never stay up late comforting a friend via text message.

Over the Christmas holiday, while having a meal at a local restaurant, I noticed a group of friends out celebrating the season together. They sat around a table, half of the celebrants glued to their iPhones texting away while the season spun away from them. As I looked on I wondered what they were missing, what tiny moments came and went without leaving its gift of memory. What connections weren’t made? What could have transpired but didn’t for the sake of a glowing screen and the preference for electronic reality over flesh and blood.

My New Years wish for all my friends is that you find yourself stranded with a long-time acquaintance in some out-of-the-way place without internet and with zero bars of signal strength for every electronic communications device you possess. May you be blessed with dead batteries and no ear-buds for your MP3 player and iPod. May you be temporarily fogged or snowed in, stuck in a quiet, nearly deserted airport lounge together. May you talk for hours, discover new things, share reminiscences, and when you part, may you be much closer than any text or status update can convey.

The International Thriller Writers

2011-11-11T20:27:00.000-05:00

Some exciting news! I’ve been accepted into the International Thriller Writers. The ITW is a great organization dedicated to writers of thriller fiction and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to meet some fellow genre writers.

National Novel Writing Month

2011-11-11T19:58:00.001-05:00

Have you been sharpening your pencils and limbering up your typing fingers, maybe doing a few keyboard calisthenics to avoid a nasty sprained phalange? November is National Novel Writing Month, a month supposedly dedicated to creating that novel you've always meant to write but have put off for whatever reason. You know how it is with excuses, it seems I remember a saying about excuses…but I digress.

I’m all for people finding their inner novelist and following their muse. There are no barbed wire fences, no passports, and no border guards along the borders of the Land of Creativity. You don’t need to be vetted or qualified to write. Just pick up preferred writing implement and begin. That’s it, just write.

There does seem to be a certain cultural thing about writing. If you’re a published author there’s an easy experiment you can perform to experience this phenomena first hand. Simply choose a group of individuals and casually mention you’re a novelist. There’ll be a few questions about the profession, maybe even some circumscribe words about buying your book, but eventually you will hear “I’ve thought about writing a book…” It seems to be a constant across the conversational landscape. Whether you’re in a restaurant, at a party, or any other get-together formal and informal, the scenario plays out in the same way. Nobody would respond to Bruce Jenner with a “I’ve always thought about winning a decathlon…” or tell a surgeon “Just last week I was saying how I’d like to do an appendectomy” but mention writing a novel and suddenly everyone’s Steinbeck.

Maybe the root lies in the part stories play in everyone’s life. We grow up with them, starting with story time in kindergarten and maturing into the various book circles and young reader contests that have become a part of the grade school landscape. Stories have a place at our hearths too. If you’re like me, you had uncles, aunts, grandparents, parents, and siblings who spun tales that knitted the family together and formed a shared history. I think it’s this second sort of story, the lived story, which convinces everyone they could be a novelist. I break the family-centric story into two classes: the Guess What Happened and the Family Legend.

The Guess What Happened story is, well, exactly what it sounds like. It’s a retelling of an event, usually focused on how dumb/irritating/difficult some person/task/place was and the way the teller brought it to a satisfactory or unsatisfactory conclusion. In my youth these everyday stories were as utilitarian as melmac, they conveyed emotion and explained day to day realities. They lived in our kitchen, around the dinner table, and in the family car, lifted into the back seat on the warm breeze that came in through the driver’s side wing-glass. Looking back I can’t recall any of them in detail, they came and went, beginning as thoughts and breath and then returning to nothingness.

Family Legends are a different class all together. A legend tells of an extraordinary event (at least within the bounds of family life). There are no legendary tales of the price of gas going up or how many people were at the bank. In my family, legends (at least the ones I remember) usually it had a humorous element. I recall stories of exploding rocks, gunpowder rockets, attic ghosts, mousetraps that caught humans, and a dozen others. These stories ritually appeared at the holidays, repeated by their traditional tellers as a way of reaffirming bonds and confirming rank within the pack. To this day I miss the tales of my grandfather and grandmother and a part of the holiday season for me is the anticipation of hearing my father’s tales of his youth. Whenever I hear one of the family legends it makes me feel settled feeling, at peace.

The point I’m trying to convey is that we all have these types of stories and though some of them can translate into key elements of a novel or a short story there is more to being a novelist than having a seed of an idea. Being a novelist is the hard (and often thankless) work of growing and pruning the seeds of ideas into a topiary that can be appreciated by many. The nuance that is easily understood within our families doesn’t always translate to a larger audience who are bereft of the experiences which are integral parts of who we are. Not everyone is a novelist and that’s okay. NaNoWriMo seems to imply all it takes to create a manuscript is time spent in front of a screen or page of paper, sweat long enough and a novel will pop out. There’s also the implication you should be able to complete your manuscript within a month. I suspect that the time limit turns as many (potentially good) writers away from the art as it inspires to “try harder and focus” but I think the concept needs a little analysis. For the purpose of this thought experiment, I’m assuming the author will be writing a pretty basic (possibly even short) science fiction novel of 100 thousand words.

November has 30 days, at least according to the childhood rhyme, and to accomplish our goal we will need to write approximately 3300 words/day in order to be successful. Thirty days comes to 720 hours, however not all of them are available. We’ll assume a healthy 8 hours of sleep a night, taking away 240 hours off the top and bringing the time left to us down to 480 hours. We also have to take out the 8 hours a day spent making money to pay the bills (since the vast majority of authors also hold down a job to support themselves), that removes another 176 hours bringing our available writing time down to 304 hours. Now, if we break down our 100 thousand words over 304 hours we get a rate of approximately 329 words per hour, not an unmanageable wpm even for a one-finger typist. However, you must also remember that you must keep this rate up for every waking hour of every day of every week in the month. I also didn’t take out meals, bathroom breaks, taking the kids to school, grocery shopping, taking a shower, or generally living a life. Oh yes, and let’s not forget Thanksgiving, that holiday where you’ll share the quality time with your family which inspires you with the materials you’ll use to fuel your writing sessions, that will take a day out of your writing schedule too! You probably have caught onto the fact I don’t think this is a reasonable goal. It’s simply my opinion, though.

Many people, authors among them, promote the idea that cramming through NaNoWriMo makes you a better writer. They’re entitled to their opinion; maybe it does help them. Personally I don’t believe cramming equates to an increase in quality. I doubt that there’s objective evidence or statistics showing people who participate in NaNoWriMo are published more often than those who don’t. To me, NaNoWriMo sounds like a gimmick.

You should write because you love it. That should be your only motivation. Sure, you’ll want to be paid but let me assure you there are far more authors out there who aren’t making a living off their work than are. You must love to write, that’s the primary driver. A writing career isn’t a contest and there’s nothing magic about having a taskmaster standing over you as you type. You must love to write because writing the words down is one tenth of getting a novel published.

Getting the Word Out

2011-11-06T20:51:00.000-05:00

Dear Reader,

When I started the “life of a writer”, I had imagined it as a life where I’d, well, write. I’d just sit around, writing, story after story and novel after novel. That’s the writing part, you know, creating worlds and peopling them, and then putting life into both. The problem with this idyllic picture of the life is it omits a very key aspect of the author’s existence, selling and promoting your work.

If you’re an author or aspiring author, you know the deal with selling your work. To put it gently, it can be a nightmare. There are probably a thousand blogs, magazine articles, columns, and podcasts offering advice on how to successfully sell your work and I’m absolutely certain I can’t add much to the dialog that hasn’t already been said. It’s all about finding the right place for the right piece at the right time. Though that sounds like a simplification, especially after you’ve had a few disheartening rejections, it’s the unfortunate truth. Sure, you should strive to improve your skills, attend seminars and go to writer’s groups, and find a beta-reader who will give you constructive criticism but in the end its about persistence and research.

The more interesting and difficult subject, at least with novels, comes when it’s time to market your work. If like me you grew up in the Midwest, the thought of self promotion probably carries a less than flattering connotation. You may have the idea that you shouldn’t talk about your accomplishments too much, that it’s conceited or self-important to go around telling everyone “hey, I’ve published a novel!” That’s a feeling that, to some extent, you’re going to have to manage. While major publishers promote their authors, setting up events, running ads, and assisting in getting the word about a new book out to the reading public, small and medium size publishing houses don’t have the funds or personnel to engage in this sort of promotional activity. In short, you’re on your own, my friend.

What to do? There are options. Before your novel is released, I recommend seeking sights that will do pre-release reviews. Publications like The Bloomsbury Review do pre-release reviews of fiction. I suggest doing a web search for similar publications, but be sure to identify ones that accept books that haven’t been released.

Once your novel has been released you have other options available. I recommend approaching local newspapers and local publications. Also, check with local booksellers and independent bookstores to see if they have newsletters and might be interested in reviewing a local author. If your book is being sold on Amazon.com, I recommend reaching out to some of the site’s top reviewers (Amazon even has an article on how to approach potential reviewers). Also, don’t forget to reach out to bloggers, some might be willing to give your book a review.

With reviews, though, you must be prepared to roll with what you get. Certainly, you should address any inappropriate reviews that appear on bookseller sites but be aware that readers have opinions and they are entitled to say what they feel.

Beyond reviews, I recommend you reach out to writer’s groups for your genre as well as local writer’s groups. Just like any other business, it’s important to make contacts. If you write science fiction, look into the SFWA or if, like me, you write thrillers, look into the ITW (a great organization where it’s also free to become a member). Also, look into reading groups and anywhere else you can get your title in front of the reading public. Good word of mouth is your best friend.

My final recommendation comes in the form of a reminder that very few authors have a best seller on their first go. The hard work of promotion isn’t really what you sign up for as an author but it is the reality when you’re starting out. When you hit it big and land a contract with a major publishing house, you’ll have a staff promoting your work. But, I hate to say even then the work won’t end at seeing your book in a bookstore!

Autumn

2011-10-05T09:04:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

Ah autumn. Autumn is one of my favorite seasons. The heat of summer subsides, the windows are open again, and cool breezes invade the bedroom late into the night. It’s a season of layers and Sunday afternoons, of smoke and fleeing leaves, of purple sunsets and the trembling thought of frosts to come. I love autumn.

Fall is the summing up, the clearing away, the stowing of the freewheeling dreams and aspirations of summer in preparation for anticipated snows. Nobody starts fall with resolutions, nobody says “With the turning of the leaves I’m going to…” followed by a grand statement of renewed purpose or desire. It’s a time of potato soup and warm bread, a natural outgrowth of our agrarian past when that which couldn’t be preserved would be eaten and the heard thinned to make ready for the hard, long cold to come.

I remember clearing out my parents’ garden after the first frost, uprooting the tomato vines and raking the stalks into a heap with dry leaves from the sugar maple that grew in our back yard. Once the heap had been built, a crumpled page of newspaper would be buried in its heart and then the whole thing would be set alight. Clouds of smoke would rise toward the pale blue sky, drifting lazily over the suburbs and heading southward in pursuit of the summer on whose work the fire fed.

Ode to the West Wind
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave,until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!

Seven Days to Go

2011-10-05T08:58:00.000-04:00

Dear Readers,
In one week, Time of Death will ship to book stores and become available for order online. Is it possible to get stage fright in anticipation of the release of a book?

I’m not sure I’d call the nervous energy I feel, fright. It’s an energy, anticipation and curiosity about what’s to come. I can tell you that I’ve channeled that energy into working on a new novel featuring Melody Rush. I’ll keep you updated on its progress!

Indiana State Fair Memories

2011-08-18T18:30:00.001-04:00

Dear Reader,

In 1851 the Indiana General Assembly created a State Fair as “An act to encourage agriculture”, the sixth state to hold an official agricultural fair. Since that date, through times of joy and sorrow, there have been 155 Indiana State Fairs, three wars (Civil War, Spanish-American War, and WW II) intervening to cancel fairs. The fair has roved the state since its creation, initially being held in Military Park (downtown Indianapolis) and visiting, Lafayette, Madison, New Albany, Indianapolis (Camp Morton), Fort Wayne, Terre Haute before finding a permanent home in 1892.

In all this time the Indiana State Fair has remained relatively true to its roots – it is an agricultural festival, a celebration of the people and products that essentially are Indiana. The cattle might no longer arrive via the Monon and fairgoers might not travel to the fair primarily via the Nickleplate or interurban but the heart has remained true. I remember this every time I walk among the prairie style pavilions, smelling the elephant ears, funnel cake, and popcorn and listening to the discord of music combining with distant sounds of the midway.

I think that’s part of the reason I like going to the fair. Yes, I like seeing the animals and I won’t pass up the opportunity to try the latest, deep fried abomination the vendors are hawking but at its root my love of the fair is a love of the past. I like to think about what might have happened there on any particular evening in any particular year. What threads of life intertwined in front of the Coliseum in 1924 with the unraveling of the Teapot Dome Scandal? What about on the midway in 1939 with World War II waiting in the wings and the Great Depression choking the life out of the economy? What about the thousands of other lost moments scattered around the fairgrounds?

I thought about those moments while sitting on a bench across from the makeshift memorial to the victims of the Saturday, August 13 stage collapse. The fairgrounds are no stranger to tragedy; on October 13, 1963 an explosion in the Coliseum killed 74. That loss, like the recent losses, will be incorporated into the grounds; the memories of the departed will mingle with the summer air, remaining as long as memory allows.

So there is a tinge of sadness mingled with music and laughter. Wistfulness seems to be a good part of nostalgia. Pain can color memory. Hopefully those impacted by this latest disaster, once the tears have subsided, can reach back beyond their pain and remember a summer day when they might have walked the midway, laughed, and basked in the humid Indiana heat. If they can capture that moment, jar it like a firefly, then they’ll have its light for the rest of their lives.

Supporting the Fellow Expats

2011-08-17T20:39:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

I’ve been lucky enough to know a few local artists. I’m fortunate enough to be married to a writer, someone who understands the process and the pains of writing, editing, and trying to get published. But I also know others in the art community - everything from television personalities to art teachers to video artists. Though we all don’t work together, we do make a sort of family. It’s like we’re expats, encountering one another in some smoky bar in a foreign land. We recognize each other, we share a few stories, we find comfort in what we share, and even though we go out to face the hard and alien landscape alone we still support one another.

Today I have the pleasure of supporting one of my fellow artists. Earl Harris has to be one of the most stylish gentlemen I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. He’s got three videos out, supporting a hip-hop radio station. Take a look!

Video 1

Video 2

Video 3

I'll share more of Earl's work when I get the opportunity!

Galley Artwork for Time of Death

2011-04-22T15:24:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

This morning I received the galley artwork for Time of Death. The artists at Five Star did a great job capturing some of the imagery of the novel without giving too much away. Hopefully you'll pick up a copy when you see it in your local bookstore or Amazon.com when it becomes available in September. Seeing the cover art makes the novel seem more real than it has before this moment. Then again, it also reminds me that I've neglected my main character. I need to get to work finishing The Changeling's Brother (the sci-fi novel I've been editing) so Mel Rush's next adventure can begin!

My interests have always collided with getting things done. For those who know the Myers Briggs personality typing methodology, I'm a classic INFP. Interested in everything and focused on nothing. A bird landing on a branch a hundred miles from my desk can draw me into a day's musing over the reasons birds land and trees grow. The mental wandering is good for concocting subject matter but not so great for getting it down on paper (virtual or otherwise). It doesn't help that there have been some very real distractions in my life for the last couple of months. I promise to discuss these distractions at length when a more opportune time presents itself - for the moment let it suffice to say that I've been distracted.

With a Good Friday off and nothing to occupy me but the rain falling outside, it's a good day to do a bit of catching up. I'm putting on my editor's hat and sharpening my red pencil. Soon I'll be nailing down the first chapters of Mel's new adventure, tentatively entitled The Inner Fire.

Second Life

2011-04-15T16:44:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

As a writer, I'm a curious person. I think it's probably part of the writer makeup - without the desire to turn the world sideways, upside-down, a writer is shackled to exploring the "IS" instead of the "MAYBE". Is-World isn't a bad place, in fact I wish more people in the journalistic field dwelled within its somber and hard hallways. I could use less "opinion-casting" and more "news-casting". However, I'm veering dangerously away from my chosen topic. Lately I've been dabbling in Second Life, the virtual world of chat rooms that are constructed within a virtual space made to resemble a fantastic, often cartoonish, version of real-life.

Initially the chance to create objects (clothing, houses, and so on) drew me to SL. I play The Sims from time to time and I've applied my modest Photoshop skills to creating garments for my characters. I've also dabbled in cartography, making maps for the various imaginary worlds I write about as an aide to my writing and (possibly) eventual illustrations. SL offered an opportunity to get into the world I created, to walk about inside it, and to share it with others. So, I opted in and downloaded the SL software.

The first time I opened the software a metaphysical question vexed me. Perhaps it is a symptom of over thinking, but when the interface opened the first question that confronted me was what I'd like to register as my user name. I started with simply entering my name - and found it taken. Then I tried my initials with the same result. After that I sat for a moment, staring at the blank page, and pondering. What would you call yourself if you couldn't use your own name? Should it be something descriptive? Maybe I should select some word that embodies the essence of me-ness? Or should I embrace the idea of Second Life and create a new entity, a new me unlike the real me in every way? I fought with this idea for a long time before discovering that practically everything I selected, meaningful or meaningless, had been taken in the 9 years since the first resident signed up. Eventually I made the decision to go to a "weird words" page and randomly selected a name that seemed appropriately dark (I happened to be in a dark mood) and therefore my first alter ego, Chthonic came to be.

With the big hurdle of name selection behind me, however unsatisfying it might have been, I dashed straight into the next quagmire, physical appearance. Eventually, after navigating the standard sets of avatars, I came up with something acceptable. I quickly found that using a base avatar amounted to something like wearing a blazing neon sign that says "I Don't Know Anything". I hobbled about long enough to find out how to customize my avatar enough to be passable. Now I'm a week into limping around the environment and feeling like a total klutz most of the time.

The big question that came to me through this process, though, is how do we recreate ourselves? What makes one person choose a stylized human form and another an anthropomorphic cat? What does that re-rendering of ourselves into the pixel-world say about who and what we are in the physical world? Or is it all fancy? Is it just good fun, signifying nothing? Perhaps I'll come up with an answer to that question in time. Until then, if you're in SL, look me up. Maybe I'll be hanging out somewhere.

Weekends in March

2011-03-28T09:42:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

I ventured out to celebrate a good friend's 60th birthday this Saturday. Per form, the weather proved to be cold and blustery but there are plenty of things to do on a Saturday in March when you don't have to be anywhere in particular. So, giving my friend his choice of where to have lunch, we found ourselves at the Rathskeller, sitting in the Kellerbar under the mounted moose head with the sun pouring in through the high windows. Between the spirits and the sunlight, one could forget the outside temperature hovered somewhere barely north of 30 degrees and a twenty mile-per-hour wind whipped through the streets. We ate a good meal of less-than-healthy food, drank, and discussed work, politics, and the general state of humanity in the modern age for a couple of hours under the roof of the building Vonnegut's ancestors designed then gathered our coats and set out on the downtown of Indianapolis.

From the house of Vonnegut we made our way to the Eiteljorg to catch the Red Black exhibit. For those of you who aren't Indianapolis natives, the Eiteljorg is the local museum of Native American and Western history. It's a lovely building that (by design) seems to rise out of the ground, kiva-style. The exhibit, like many good museum installations, left me feeling enlightened and troubled. My Cherokee heritage has always been a source of pride however, learning that my people kept slaves reinforced the realization that native peoples are just that - people. They have all of the same flaws and shortcomings no matter what their genetics.

From inspecting the past we made our way to the big downtown mall to discover another of the mega bookstores, Borders, is closing up shop in downtown Indianapolis. It was my wakeup to the fact that the chain had gone bankrupt. Had I waited ten more days I would have missed the entire thing and been left knowing something had been on the corner of Meridian and Washington Street but unable to remember what it had been. We shopped the remnants and it felt a bit like attending an estate auction while the viewing was still underway in the parlor.

I have the distinct feeling birthdays shouldn't come in March. It's too depressing a month, filled with rain that wanted to be snow but didn't make it and ceaseless, restless wind. Even the ground is wet, swollen and sick with too much rain. A lot of people would say the month of my birthday is just as inappropriate, January is a frozen and unforgiving month of bitter cold and driven snow - equally depressing. Still, I think March is worse. It's the season of promises on the brink. Of hints at warmth that turn out to be misleading; the weather version of red herrings. This March has come in like the proverbial lion but, in the hearts of every Hoosier, we know there's little guarantee she'll leave like a lamb.

I don't mean to leave you depressed! Looking at the facts, the days are getting longer and the average temperature is climbing with each day. Spring has arrived, harbinger of summer's long, languid afternoons and temperate nights. All is not lost - it's just a bit uncomfortable for a while.

An Honest Loaf

2011-03-21T11:18:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

Of all things cooking, the baking of bread has come to stand in for the home. Actually, more than the home, it has come to represent a certain kind of home. Some would say it stands for the kind of home most of us either don't feel like we have time for or have forgotten the value of in our busy lives. These people see bread as a symbol of a time gone by; a gentler, simpler time when the day provided time for kneading and proofing, for punching down and rising, and for baking. Others see the baking of the daily loaf as something just about as anachronistic as the horse and buggy. Possibly worse, it can be interpreted as the ball at the end of the domestic chain women wore (and some still wear) around their collective ankle, a chore that required long hours of work and tending and forbid the pursuit of happiness endowed all our citizens. Personally, I can see both sides of the argument, though I grew up in a Wonder Bread world and never knew an unsliced loaf before I started buying my own groceries.

It might have been during those first solo excursions to the grocery store that I got the bread bug. Walking through the bakery section after working a split shift, just as the baker started taking loaves out of the oven and the warm smell permeated the entire store. I started out with "basic loaves", that is to say white bread. At first they came out like bricks - dense, hard, and tasteless - but something kept me from giving up. Now I'm known for brioche, focaccia, and gingerbread. Until now, however, I hadn't found a certain recipe that I'd always wanted to make.

Salt rising bread holds a special place in my heart and those who know me well might be able to guess why. To clue you in further, you should know that salt rising bread is especially popular in the south and Appalachia (the Carolina's, Virginia, and Kentucky). No clue? The answer goes back to an episode of The Andy Griffith Show titled Dogs, Dogs, Dogs and a scene in which Barney mentions salt rising bread. I tried to find a video snippet for the blog entry but couldn't. Regardless, since I saw the episode I've been looking for a copy of the recipe and during my perusal of The Gourmet Cookbook I stumbled upon the very recipe. Of course afterward I managed to find the recipe on the net in just a few seconds. Regardless, here it is.

I strolled through the bread section and it contained most of the usual suspects - rye breads, baguettes, brioche, and the sort. There are the bad 50's pictures and unholy combinations such as pate en brioche or duck liver pate baked inside of a brioche crust. Modern bread baking has turned more toward the "country" or "peasant" loaf, recipes like focaccia and other rustic loaves that focus on herbal notes, unbleached and specialty flours, and rustic textures. What I found most interesting about the bread section was the preface shown below:

The idea of a baker being pilloried for a "bad loaf" seems pretty harsh considering the lax laws regarding the quality of foods in the past. I did a search on the web but the only thing I came up with was an unsighted article stating that in medieval times there were laws regarding bakers cheating customers and that the term "baker's dozen" emanates from this period when exceptional bakers gave their customers thirteen of an item instead of twelve to separate themselves from the rest of their profession. I hate to think what would have become of me for all the bad loaves I baked while learning! My sourdough still comes out plain and dull, doubtless a crime worth of the stocks! It also worries me that the authors seem to be lamenting that they can't nail their baker's ears to a post when they feel their whole wheat isn't up to snuff. It seems to go beyond quality control to institute corporal punishment for sub-standard bread. Then again, maybe I'm just soft.

Old Cookbooks

2011-03-09T18:44:00.000-05:00

Dear Reader,

Over the weekend we took a little one-tank-trip to the lovely berg of Berne, Indiana with a couple very good friends. While we were preparing for a nice stroll in the 35 degree pouring rain, my friend presented me with a tattered and yellow book.

"It's a gift." He said, handing the tome over. "You don't have to keep it if you don't want it."

Yeah, giving me a book is a commitment thing. I could start my own hoarding show, just me sitting in my hole of an office surrounded by teetering piles of print, muttering "I don't have a problem…" What's doubly bad is this particular book is titled A Taste of Texas, a 1949 Neiman Marcus giveaway containing recipes "culled from over 2000 submitted by N-M customers…" as the flyleaf says. I really can't fathom sending a recipe to a department store. Neiman Marcus probably had a contest or something of the sort with thousands of post-war home makers vying for a brand new fry-o-lator or something equally gadgety. Needless to say the book hasn't gone anywhere but into the "do something with me" pile.

Staring at that pile today I thought, "Hey, why not post a few snippets from these unwieldy books that nobody but me would even consider keeping? It's not a good or original idea, but what else are you going to do on a gloomy, Indiana Monday in March when the finals aren't on TV?

So, though I started out talking about A Taste of Texas I hope you will pardon the curve I'm throwing when I start with a totally different cookbook. The biblical the Gourmet Cookbook volume I came out in 1950. After a decade of circulation, the editors at Gourmet Magazine decided they'd better secure their spot in the cooking pantheon with a hardback cookbook for the epicure. The result is a weighty 781 page book bound and printed in Italy to ensure its panache. Like a good Italian roadster, the Gourmet Cookbook is impractical - hardcover and as thick as an unabridged dictionary, hardly the sort of thing you want nestling between the flour and butter while baking cookies. My copy came from my wife's favorite aunt and it looks nearly unused. Since she was an excellent cook I imagine she found it just as unwieldy in the kitchen and opted for something a little more counter friendly.

Regardless, paging through the book gives an overview of the rarified mind of the late 40's gourmet. There are the aspic-molded horrors you'd expect along with some truly odd stuff. Aspic referres to a jelly, usually formed from stock rendered from some sort of meat and then clarified. If you've ever taken a piece of roasted chicken out of the fridge to find a gelatanious goo pooled in the bottom of the container, essentially that is an aspic. The use of aspic in American cookiery rose to its pinnacle in the 50's before plummeting from the dinner table and into kitsch ridicule. The following two examples show how Gourmet Magazine suggested plying the edible shalack that was aspic:

For those who don't possess a culinary dictionary, this dish is a jelly-mold made with goose liver pate, aspic from chicken or some other fowl, and mayonnaise. It's difficult to imagine this falling in the appetizer section of the book. I can't fathom the thought of jellied liver and mayonnaise as appetizing! I'm also left wondering how this recipe ever came to be. I mean who thought, "You know what this chicken and liver jelly needs? Mayonnaise."

If jellied goose liver isn't to your taste we have an alternative. Jellied cheese! Actually it's jellied cheese and mustard. I'm struck by the difference in terms here. Notice that the cook is advised to add a few 'grains' of cayenne and salt? You'd never see that language in a modern cookbook, probably because the concept is utterly ridiculous. As someone who dabbles in cooking, I can't ever imagine picking out three grains of salt and adding them to a dish. What would be the point?

Well, I thought I'd conclude the first batch of appetizers with a dish that doesn't involve meat jelly. The Lorraine Custard is akin to the popular in kitchen and song, Quiche Lorraine. The Lorraine in question refers to the Lorraine region of France where the German-influenced locals concocted an open pie consisting of an egg custard with smoked bacon or lardons. Later cheese was added to the mixture to create the quiche that is popular today. The custard version shown in this section of the Gourmet Cookbook is, essentially, the filling of a quiche Lorraine without the pie crust. It seems like an odd selection, one that might be interpreted as the author padding this section of the book with a partial recipe given a new name.

I think a lot of the focus on cooking from the fourties and fifties is on the oddities of aspic. Maybe it's the freak show aspect of jellied foods or the fact they're so uncommon on the modern table. Regardless, the number of aspic recipes in the cookbook is very limited. The next portion of the cookbook's hors d'oeuvre section deals with vegetables. When I say vegetables, don't think vegetarian. The cheff of the fifties seems as incapable of imagining vegetarianism as the cheff of the middle ages would be of imagining the microwave oven. Nearly every dish involves meat and those which don't rely on salad dressing. An example would be cucumbers dressed with french dressing, salt, and pepper. Not all are as bland, there is a recipe for Eggplant Caviar that I plan to try.

Maybe the most interesting things in the Gourmet Cookbook are the few photographs of the food described by the recipes. I'm not sure if the way we think of food has changed since the fifties or if the technology and techniques of photographing food has evolved sufficiently to make the old photos look absolutely hidious but I've yet to find a 'classic' cookbook that makes a single dish look remotely appetizing. Anyone who is familliar with The Gallery of Regrettable Food by the genious James Lileks will be fully aware of the mayhem that can be wrought by a recipe and a camera. The odd pairings of props with dishes, the off colors, the bizzarre geological formations are all apparently part and parcel of the 50's gastronomic landscape. I imagine in sixty years someone will be looking at Paula Dean's creations and thinking "What must she have been smoking..." so I'm reluctant to be too hard on the food of the fifties. Of course, that doesn't mean I'd want to see it served to me!

Origins

2011-03-02T19:18:00.000-05:00

Dear Reader,

There's been (at least from my limited prospective) a recent upsurge in interest in genealogy. Ten years ago I couldn't have imagined seeing television ads for websites that specialize in family trees. Now you see them all the time, common looking people touting how they didn't know great granddad lived next door to the famous Mr. X or that great-great grandma had a fascinating career as a secret agent spying on the Confederates and passing the info on to Grant in the form of coded tatting. They're very persuasive commercials, offering the possibility that the viewer springs from uncommon stock - that you are special because someone you are related to was special. That in this world of conformity and ever contracting borders, there might be someone in your family tree who struck out into the wilderness, tamed the unknown, tested themselves against the world and came out with more than a six-figure paycheck to show for their efforts.

I'm not knocking genealogy. My mother spent hours behind a humming electric typewriter, carefully recording information she found in the dusty back rooms of various libraries. Women of the 19th century told their story in quilting and mom told hers in leaf-thin pages of type held together in scavenged three-ring binders. For all of mom's typing and researching, I don't have a single spy or famous neighbor to talk about. Oh there are a few scoundrels (bootleggers and petty criminals including my grandfather who's been accused in family lore of 'borrowing' automobiles from alleyways as well as cooling pies off windowsills) but there are many more average folks running stores, planting corn, and working in factories.

The truth is that most of us spring from 'common' folk who lived simple lives. Consider that in 1910, a little over a hundred years ago (a couple of generations), the most common occupations were farmer and farm laborer. People either owned land that they tilled or tilled land that someone else owned. They worked hard to support their families, scratching a living out of the land and living by its rhythms; heroic in its own right without the necessity for famous neighbors.

Still, in spite of the heroism of the common man and woman, the desire to be special remains. I feel it every time I see one of the commercials I mentioned earlier. I feel it even more in March due to St. Patrick's Day and my family's (at least purported) Irish lineage. So, I did a little searching and came up with the following hopeful tidbit:

"Recorded as Madain, Madden, Maddin, Madigan and MacAvaddy, this is a famous Irish surname. It derives from the pre 10th century Old Gaelic name O'Madain, translating as the descendant of the son of the hound. The hound is famous in Gaelic heraldry having the virtues of speed, endurance, and loyalty. Most Irish surnames originate from a chief's nickname. O'Kennedy, for instance means the male descendant of the ugly headed one! The O'Madain's originated from lands on the River Shannon in County Galway, at one time holding over 25,000 acres. Even today name holders are still numerous in that part of Ireland. The Madigan branch of the clan are regarded as almost exclusively a Clare-Limerick family, although a branch are to be found in Counties Antrim and Derry in Ulster. Richard Madden, (1798 - 1886) was the author of the book 'The United Irishman', whilst many name holders emigrated to either America or England during the infamous 'Potato Famine' of 1846. Walter Madden, his wife Mary and their children Richard aged five and Alice, a baby sailed from Galway, bound for New York on the ship 'Junius ' on May 1st 1846. The first recorded spelling of the family name is believed to be that of Dermot O'Madadhain. This was dated circa 1100 a.d. He was chief of the Ui Maine, Connacht, during the reign of King Henry 1st of England, known as 'The Just", 1100 - 1135."

Being an aspiring writer, the bit about Richard Madden struck me most. There, of course, is no concrete connection between myself and the doctor, writer, abolitionist, and historian of the United Irishmen however the romantic in me would like to concoct one. One writer bridging himself to another writer, a writer who penned works 123 years ago during a time of turmoil and change. That's the sort of thing that can either inspire you or make the fiction you compose seem tawdry and pointless! Maybe I shouldn't go looking too hard for the ancestral wellspring from whence my literary desire flows. Maybe I'll find Niagara Falls and be so intimidated as to turn back to the shallow, current-less lagoons of a tamer life. That possibility is doubtful. I've never found comfort in fitting in (come to think I've never fit in) so under the glassy surface of the familial harbor lay sharp reefs on which to flounder. Better to point myself toward the horizon and all the unknown wonders it holds.

February Update

2011-02-22T10:54:00.000-05:00

Dear Reader,

Months have passed since we last spoke and I hope they've all went well for you. Here's hoping January brought a happy New Year and Valentines a love to see you through the dreary cold of March and into springtime's bliss. Looking back at the blog I see that I posted a December update but nothing since - my apologies for being so incommunicative! I will strive to correct the situation immediately.

Steady progress is being made on the latest novel, though I have to admit the thing is stubborn. At ninety thousand words the harsh realization that a good amount of pruning will be required has settled in. Added to that, the work itself has become thicker - first edits are always that way for me, a critical eye sieving through the initial creative tailings to find the worthy material and discard the waste. In the case of the current novel there have been some fairly hefty plot changes which have required a lot of in-depth editing just to get out of the first draft stage. Next comes what I like to call "the bloodying up" of the document - a read-aloud with a red pen in hand. Usually a pen sacrifices itself on the altar of editing during this stage. It's sad and slow but a necessary process.

Time of Death is slated for release this September. Currently it's working through the shadowy halls of the publisher, going through whatever dark rituals are required to make it a book. Sometimes I think of Kevin Bacon pledging Omega Theta Pi in Animal House when I imagine what a book goes through to be released. I imagine hooded figures in candlelit rooms flogging the manuscript…thank you sir, may I have another. Regardless, somewhere out there the first installment of Mel Rush's adventures waits to be sprung on the public. Hopefully it will be to at least moderate acclaim!

Indiana in February is a gray and gloomy place. Even someone like me, who loves the whole winter scene, gets a little burned out on slate-gray skies and bare trees by this time of year. I find myself checking the bed where we planted lilies last fall, looking for the first signs of life pushing through the soil. It's an over-eager impulse since the last frost date for Indiana isn't until early May. Still, there's a fluttering in my heart each time I look out the window at the swath of soil we worked last year. I hope the squirrels haven't undone most of our work!

Long before the lilies come up, though, will be the 'official first rite of spring' - morel mushroom season. In Indiana the season kicks off right around my brother's birthday, a handy reminder for me to get my hiking boots and best stick ready to prowl the ravines and woodlands. I am absolutely no good at this outdoor activity, not that I'm any sort of woodsman per se. My father has returned from his mushrooming haunts with garbage bags full when the fates align and there's a good season. Myself, I'm lucky to see a single mushroom (in fact I think that's my record in recent years). Still, there's been a lot of snow this year; if the weather doesn't turn dry we might be in luck.

That's the way things are going at the moment. I will provide you further updates on the book's progress as September draws nearer and I hope to have my second manuscript ready for hard editing within the next month. Wish me luck!

December Update

2010-12-26T23:55:00.000-05:00

Dear Reader,

December is nearly over and I haven’t managed to get my fingers on the keyboard to write a single blog entry. In fact I owe an apology for my lack of activity of late. I haven’t set pixel to paper since October and that’s not the sort of rate of correspondence I’m hoping to maintain. I will say that I’m still getting used to a new job and there have been a trio of holidays to contend with – Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Yule to name names.

Regardless, there is news from the writer’s desk. As of this week I’ve completed the second edit of my forthcoming novel, Time of Death and it has been sent back to the publisher. As of the present, the expected release date remains September 2011. I’ll provide updates as they become available.

So, the work goes back underground. Steadily growing and evolving into the piece that will emerge into the sunlight when September rolls around. For those of you who write or are thinking about writing, the process so far has been pretty simple. The first editor focuses on larger edits, finding confusing passages or missing information, honing the language, and punching up the verse. The first editor is your General Practitioner, listening to the heart, taking the blood pressure, and temperature maybe writing a prescription or two as needed. The second edit is more surgical and the focus shifts. Your second editor is likely to look for errors in consistency and dates.

Beyond this round of editing lays a final edit by the publisher and then galleys before September. I’m reminded of a writer’s conference I attended a long time ago where I had the good fortune of hearing Margret Atwood speak about the process of writing. During the conference, I sat in on a session with a science fiction writer (whose name I can’t recall at the moment) and the subject of editing novels came up. His comment to the aspiring writers in the room was to remember that by the time you’ve completed editing your novel you’ll be so tired of it you just want to let it go. Personally, I’m not sure that’s an accurate depiction. I’ve edited Time of Death six times: twice myself, once with Kelly playing editor, once with Kelly’s sister as an editor, and two edits with the publisher. I’m not sick of the book yet and I don’t see myself getting sick of it. Sure, I’ve still got another edit and galleys to go but I can’t see getting sick of the manuscript before it’s published.

Working the Soil

2010-10-15T08:11:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

For those of us who enjoy gardening, or at least seriously dabble in the subject, fall isn't just harvest time - it's also the beginning of the next year's planting. As trees shed their leaves we dig the soil for the tubers and bulbs that will herald the arrival of spring and the height of summer. Though we've a very small amount of planting space, we spent yesterday evening out in the gusty wind, digging through the leaves and preparing beds. Into our landscape went a hundred Asiatic 'naturalizing' lilies, twenty-five Tigrinum lilies, eighteen alliums, and three peony plants all in the space of an hour and a half of hard digging and clearing. When we lived in Shelbyville, that amount of planting and hard work would have disappeared into the landscape without making a visible impact. The differences between a five acre plot and a few hundred feet of planting space are appreciable.

The parallels between writing and planting have probably been mulled over a hundred-thousand times: seeds of ideas, fertile imagination, and all that kind of stuff. I can see the parallels, they're obvious. The most striking to me, though, is the act of burying something and hoping it will spring into glorious bloom when time and weather are right. The author sends off a manuscript, tucking it into the mail (electronic or otherwise) and it's gone from sight - all that remains is the hope and only time will tell if hope will come to fruition or ruin.

That's the feeling I'm confronted with as I put the final chapters of The Cinder Girl together. With each paragraph I wonder if what I've put together is right and good enough. I fret over putting my hard work in its furrow. There's still the hard work of editing to go, the covering over of the seeds, and after that there will be waiting through the long, harsh cold of submission and rejection. This is where the gardener and the writer must be most alike - both must have faith and patience.

Sammy Terry

2010-10-14T15:40:00.001-04:00

Dear Reader,

Recently, while searching the web for Halloween paraphernalia, I stumbled on a small piece of my childhood. As a kid I remember wanting to stay up for the late-late show. I believe every town large enough to have a local television station had (or has) a late night purveyor of B-grade horror flicks and in Indianapolis, it was Sammy Terry. He occupied the television schedule from midnight until two or three, filling the time with double features like "The Creature from 50000 Fathoms" and "The Bride of Dracula". It was a mark of manhood when I could outlast my brother in the face of the Creature from the Black Lagoon (I'll always have a soft spot for the scaly fellow for that very reason).

Reminiscing about brotherly torment aside, though, the particular piece of my childhood I encountered was Sammy Terry's MySpace page. I will repeat that - Sammy Terry MySpace. Unfortunately, repetition doesn’t make it seem any more real.

Sammy Terry being on the Internet seems - wrong. Don't get me wrong, I'm far from opposed to the idea. In fact I'm thrilled to see he's still active and has the kitsch sense of humor he always brought to his show. Maybe it's the pixelization of all my old memories that lends a surreal quality to seeing Terry on the web. Cherished things are best viewed in subdued light.

I close my eyes and I'm back in the tiny first-ring suburbia ranch house where I grew up, laying on the shag carpet and listening to Terry's ghoulish laugh. The TV is turned down so that it won't wake the parents as Sammy's coffin creaks open and the devilish MC rises to bid his fans and victims a goooood eeeevening. Then there'd be the send up of the evening's features with a good send up of the first monster to darken the screen. During the intermission between features, George (the chattering and suspiciously rubbery spider that took the role of Terry's co-host) would put in an appearance, reminding Sammy of some pertinent humorous line. Though I'd be asleep half way through the second feature, I wouldn't dare turn the television off. The staying up was the thing.

Years later Elvira, Mistress of the Dark would bring a new look to the late night horror genre but there'll always be something special about Sammy's late night antics. Through his show I saw some of the early masters of the genre and some of the great (and infamous) films of the forty's, fifties, and sixties. The world is a better place for your being in it, Mr. Terry.

October's Bright Blue Weather

2010-10-10T09:56:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

Tonight we're going to a weenie roast, or at least our version of one. We'll sit by the fireside with a couple of friends torching a few franks and marshmallows, eating smores and poking the embers, and enjoying the clement weather while it lasts. In the fall I love campfire cookery. It lets me play at being a cattle-drive cookie, tending the cook-fire while the roughnecks are out working the heard and riding along on the chuck wagon to the sound of clinking pans and rattling leaf springs as I cross the untamed prairie. The weenie roast gives all the glory of a fall night by the fireside without need of hardship or horsemanship, what a deal.

A poem for the day.

October's Bright Blue Weather

O SUNS and skies and clouds of June,

And flowers of June together,

Ye cannot rival for one hour

October's bright blue weather;

When loud the bumble-bee makes haste,

Belated, thriftless vagrant,

And Golden-Rod is dying fast,

And lanes with grapes are fragrant;

When Gentians roll their fringes tight

To save them for the morning,

And chestnuts fall from satin burrs

Without a sound of warning;

When on the ground red apples lie

In piles like jewels shining,

And redder still on old stone walls

Are leaves of woodbine twining;

When all the lovely wayside things

Their white-winged seeds are sowing,

And in the fields, still green and fair,

Late aftermaths are growing;

When springs run low, and on the brooks,

In idle golden freighting,

Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush

Of woods, for winter waiting;

When comrades seek sweet country haunts,

By twos and twos together,

And count like misers, hour by hour,

October's bright blue weather.

O suns and skies and flowers of June,

Count all your boasts together,

Love loveth best of all the year

October's bright blue weather.

Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885)

My Mayberry

2010-09-25T12:36:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

Wednesday, September 22nd we drove into Mt. Airy, NC just ahead of an autumn thunderstorm that had been dogging us since we crossed the West Virginia state line. For a couple of hours we'd been driving in and out of downpours. In one mountain valley the weather would be clear and sunny and in the next pouring rain would make the going treacherous. The final run of road was kind to us, though, and we managed to beat the rain to our hotel on the outskirts of town. We checked into our mediocre hotel room, unpacked the few belongings we brought along for the trip, made a list of the things we managed to, and road-weary we set out to reconnoiter and find dinner in the land of Mayberry.

The drive into town was uneventful if you don't count my fatigue inspired driving. We passed the town water tower, the hospital, the fire station, and the police station before finding a parking spot in the gravel lot beside the post office. I'd just turned the car off when the rain we'd outrun in the mountains caught up with a vengeance. It fell in a straight torrent and we sat listening to it pound the rooftop while we debated what we should do.

The road makes you tired; especially nine hours - a large portion of which was spent driving across the uninspiring landscape of northern Kentucky. Still just outside, mingling with the raindrops, was a town that I'd only witnessed through the sepia-toned episodes of a television show I personally consider an emotional cure-all. Almost every work-related trauma I've suffered has been healed in no small part through visits to Mayberry, NC. I bore the rain to retrieve umbrellas from the trunk and then we set out to get our first real look at America’s most iconic small town from under the brim of an umbrella.

What did we find? A tourist trap complete with Andy and Barney paraphernalia being hawked from countrified storefronts? Maybe we found busloads of wide-through-the-middle Americans clogging the sidewalks while they took snapshots of their snot-nosed kids in front of the Andy Griffith Show opening-themed statue? Actually, none of the above.

Don’t get me wrong, Mt. Airy has made plenty of hype about their native son (according to a local news station fifty thousand visitors will be in the little town today). I kind of feel like it's fitting that they do. In some ways we're all products of where we grow up and if the place makes the man is emblematic of the place. Things get a little more complicated when that man in question is famous like Andy Griffith and the persona that is being honored is fictitious like that of Andy Taylor, the sheriff of Mayberry. Still, without the influence of his hometown, Griffith wouldn't have begat Taylor and through the TV lens and the twisted genealogy I've just outlined, the town benefits from its native sons (both real and imaginary).

Walking down the streets of Mt. Airy you'll encounter various establishments that are mentioned in the television show. There’s a Snappy Lunch Café, there’s a Bluebird Diner, and there’s even a soda shop that claims to be the inspiration for Walker’s Drugstore. Even during these troubled times all of them seem to be doing fine. Maybe there is safety in the shade of the long shadow Sheriff Taylor has cast over the collective imagination.

However, I'm departing from my story about what I found in Mt. Airy. When we stepped onto the soggy sidewalks was a little different than the television rendition of the small town but at the same time, very similar. Mt. Airy is a rugged little North Carolina town. From the post office steps you can see the weathered peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains. On the day we arrived, the ghosts of rain clouds swept down the valleys and thunder rolled off the mountain sides. We walked along Main Street (its actual name) at eight o'clock and every store was closed. We strolled under along the awnings, window shopping like people do in Mayberry. There were kitsch storefronts as I mentioned before: The Snappy Lunch, the Bluebird Café, Opie's Candy Shop, and a few other themed stores but something struck me. Somehow, in spite of the theme, the town managed not to become a theme park. It remained a living, breathing town independent of what American culture would make it into.

We turned down a side street and found the Trio Bistro and Bar, the only place in town to get dinner. Sure, Trio is a chain but it's one of the better ones and literally it turned out to be our port in the storm. Good food and drink go a long way toward soothing the road-weary soul. Tired from nine hours on the road I sat down over salmon and bread and some time before dinner ended I realized I'd really made it. This was Mayberry at its core - outside was wet and cold but inside was safe, inside was warm, inside I had the person I loved most in the world and together we were okay no matter how hard the wind blew. We saw the museums and ate at the soda fountain, hearing stories about Andy Griffith and the things he did when he was a kid…but I found my Mayberry before any of the festivities began. That's the thing I'll never forget about this little trip to the center of America's heart.

The New Normal

2010-09-19T15:40:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

This was my first week working from home (other than as a writer). It was a strange experience, something akin to playing hooky even though I spent probably more than eight hours a day hooked to my PC. I think the reason it felt like misbehaving was that those eight hours were spent trying to hammer out the basic stuff we all take for granted when we go in to an office for the daily grind. There were server issues to handle, email transitions to be made, and telephone machinations to be considered - all from the quiet sanctuary of my home office. When I used to drive into an office in the morning I would have just dropped by the IT guy's desk to make mention of any issues. Later in the day he'd shamble in, mutter at the monitor, climb around under the desk, excuse himself to go shake chicken bones at the server, and viola I'd be fixed up. Now I've got to call across a time zone and crawl through the red tape before I can get in line to get service. I'll call it progress because that makes me feel better.

I did visit the old building on Thursday. I needed to box up a few things and pay a visit to one of the people who are still working out of the place. It felt a little like returning to a murder scene. The steady decay of shutting down is progressing in earnest now, even the company name has been removed from the building's façade. I walked around the hallways, visited my old office, and after rattling around a little headed home. This is normal, now all I have to do is get used to it.

Lighten Up

2010-09-11T14:53:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

Obviously the last few months have been something of a downer. It's ironic that enjoying the company of your coworkers and the job you're doing exposes you to the possibility of great disappointment and heartbreak. Pablem advice says do what you love however, doing what you love contains within it the possibility of tragedy. No bored button-presser ever laments losing the button they press.

Regardless, the point of this missive isn't to continue lamenting the state of the economy or job market. I thought it would be good to lighten things up.

"You see, Colonel Murphy, we're absolutely safe as long as this safety is engaged - why, if this little switch was in the off position we'd all have been vaporized..."

And then they were.

Later Hank would discover it actually was the cute little nicknames he gave his girlfriends that prevented his ever having a successful relationship.

Now Billy understood why his parents kept Uncle Buck locked in a trunk in the attic. It all made sense, but it was far too late…

They all laughed at Tom's little red yacht. He heard them snickering and pointing at the club. He saw the women roll their eyes and he caught the snide remarks the men made at the marina. They all thought it was so funny. They stopped laughing shortly after he gave Jarvis the order to open up with a full broadside. Yes, when the smoke cleared, Tom was the only one laughing - a high-pitched maniacal laugh that he'd keep up all the way to the padded cell at Belleview.

Slow Decay

2010-09-07T08:51:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

Twenty three days until closure. That includes weekends. The death of an organization is a little like seeing a patient withering in a hospital bed. Slowly faculties decline, one week memories are there and the next they’re gone – vanished as if they’d never existed. Eventually the patient begins to hallucinate, to see ghosts. Last week I got a call from someone who used to be one of the key R&D scientists here – a genuine absent-minded professor sort. Just like in the old days, he couldn’t find something. In the old days I would have had the capacity to locate the missing item and bring it to him. Not in the dying shell of this facility, though. All I can do is walk the empty offices, check the shipping records, and ask my few remaining coworkers…all the while I know we won’t find what we’re looking for. The capacity to find it doesn’t exist any longer, all that remains is a memory of when the finding would have been possible and a faint recollection of what that felt like.

Adding to the personal sense of malaise is the fact that two weeks ago I had to move out of my office because my desk had a new job in another city. The bastard didn’t even wish me well, just packed itself up one night and headed for wherever to be with its new fling. I hope they’re happy together – I really do. Then again, some part of me can’t help but be resentful. Regardless of my emotional state, I’m sitting at the desk of a former coworker, using a laptop, and sitting on a scavenged third-rate chair that’s destined to be a fatality of this move.

About the time I got ousted from my office, the workmen showed up. They’re agents of decay, tasked with disassembling anything of and to restoring the rented space the office occupied to the state it was in when we moved in. What can be salvaged will be shipped off to other facilities across the country, what isn’t deemed sufficiently valuable will be scrapped. When we’re gone I’m sure there’ll be a shadow of what used to be here – but only a shadow, a soulless shade.

The Sea of Life

2010-08-19T12:56:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

Over the weekend I went to a birthday party. It was a celebration of my niece turning 18 and watching her I could almost see her looking expectantly toward a brand new life in the big, wide world. I remember that time of life. I remember standing in the tiny bedroom of my suburban Indianapolis home, looking out the south-facing window late at night. Over the asphalt shingles of suburban sprawl I could make out a single beacon – the flashing red light atop a water tower that stands in Gustafson Park. I'd stand, elbows resting on the windowsill, and watch the light flash out a message only I could interpret.

"The magic is out here." It would flash. "It's waiting on the edge of the night, just beyond the farthest you've ever travelled."

On a cool autumn night, the first breath of approaching winter would waft through that window and I could feel myself changing; turning away from the stale world of childhood and toward the hopeful dreams of adolescence. In that instance I knew the magic was out there. All I had to do was put the safety of home behind me and embrace uncertainty. I became a boat straining at its moorings, drawn by an unseen current that would carry me away from the harbors of my life and onto the open sea. That's what eighteen is – it's being filled with yearning, it's sailing beyond the reach of parental lighthouses and relying on your personal compass. My personal voyages on the Life Sea have been fraught at times. Disappointments, betrayals, and failures are the reefs and rocks that lurk beneath the waves but the glorious feeling of being the helmsman of your own life makes the risk worthwhile.

So, as I write this I sit in my half-disassembled office in a building that will be closed down in forty two days. For over a year I've been heading toward this day – the day when out of the hundred-plus people I worked with only twenty five are left. The facility seems huge and any time I venture into the hallways I'm left feeling like a widower rattling around a big house that used to be filled with life. Each empty office houses a ghost. There's the polite and old-fashioned woman who used to work in Inventory, the guy who could have been the original absent minded professor, the guy who acted as my guide for the first two months I spent at the company, and a hundred others moving silently through the empty hallways. I wonder how long they'll linger once the doors are locked. I wonder if the next tenant will sense their presence and get the shivers.

I'm staying behind to the end. At the end of the week my desk will be moving on, heading for its new job in California. I, on the other hand, will be bunking with the ghost of a former coworker. We'll share stories of the way it used to be for awhile and then I'll get back to work and she'll take her chains out to the foyer for a good rattling. Sometimes the open sea plays tricks on you and you have to sail on, always heading forward, always charting the course toward the magic.

Colorado

2010-07-15T20:12:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

Lafayette Colorado, a suburb of Denver and part of the run-up to the Rockies. If you haven’t guessed, I’m on another business trip. I’ve been on the road since July 12th and it’s been a tough one. Starting with an airline without a flight crew and ending with a cancelled flight and boarding passes that won’t print from the hotel business center. Road fatigue has set in and there’s no place I’d rather be than home right now.

The whole thing has been hours of meetings followed up with the traditional dining in restaurants and trading horror stories. None of the participants in this ritual really know one another and it’s not really about human relationship. This is akin to territorial displays, if we were peacocks we’d be flaring and shaking our tail feathers. The oldest or boldest win the day and the rest are relegated to listening and providing the obligatory laughter. The tab goes to the company and we stumble back to our hotel rooms to prepare to do it all again when the sun comes up.

I’ve decided I’m not a good group traveler. Outside of my wife and cat, I prefer the company of a good GPS system. Coordinating travel through the modern American airport is something akin to arranging peace talks in the Middle East. As I said, my first flight was delayed two hours because someone forgot it wouldn’t fly itself and my flight home already has been cancelled forcing a radical reroute. Imagine trying to target hitting the receiving airport in tune with three other travelers so that you can share a rental car. I believe I would rather have do it yourself dentistry.

There also are the quirks to deal with. I’m all for individuality – writing would be a very dull affair if every human being on the planet had a nice, level personality without irritating habits and grating tendencies. I will say that these oddities are a lot easier to tolerate when you have some emotional connection with the oddity’s owner. When you’re travelling for business the quirks become an irritating nucleus that’ll never morph into a pearl. However, at the end of the trip when you’re shut into your hotel room on that last night before the flight out, the absence of those irritations become a sort of vacuum. You’re left with your fatigue, longing for home, and the throbbing of the elevator down the hall and somehow that feels – empty.

On my last trip I wrote chapters. This time I’ve only got a few paragraphs and a little editing to show for myself. At three in the morning I head back into the whirlwind of the airport with the happy knowledge the turmoil will deliver me home again. In the meantime I can only pray for clear skies and no middle row seats.

Doldrums

2010-06-23T18:12:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

Summer is long, hot, and listless. It's only just begun and already the days seem to stretch out, hazy morning becoming humid day before transitioning into steamy night. Only the thunderstorms that roll across the Midwest break the stagnant routine. They keep a regular schedule, showing up around five and working a shift that any vampire could be proud of. Late at night I wake to the staccato taps of the first raindrops on my windowpane. The bedroom vibrates with the light of distant lightning and I count—one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi before the sound arrives. The seconds between flash and boom are breathless, alive in the way only the mysterious life of nature can be alive. I lay in bed torn between two halves of myself.

The kid inside me wants to run outside, feel the breath of the approaching storm on his face and the yearning warm grass under his feet. He wants to stare up into the roiling clouds and wonder at the arc light that flickers in their bellies. He wants to feel those raindrops, cool and refreshing, striking his face and driving back the heat of summer for an hour or two.

The adult worries about things like whether the surge protector in the UPS connected to his computer would stop a power spike. He obsesses over the gutter that the maintenance crew hasn't fixed, the one that will spill rainwater on the deck and send waterfalls streaming down the siding. He thinks about the National Geographic special on lighting strikes, how more people are killed each year by lightning than tornadoes, and how dangerous it would be to go outside to gawk at the storm even though he'd secretly like to.

We all lay, having this convoluted discussion among ourselves while thunderheads sail across the land. Their billowing sails reach for the stars and they eclipse the moon as they set an easterly course. It's as if the pilgrims arrived, took a tour of the country, and decided they were better off in the old world. They head for the dark and boundless Atlantic firing goodbye salvos as they go.

When the storms pass the night is still and ripe. Droplets catch the light of the moon's freshly washed face and lightning bugs scale grassy masts, blinking their intent to the darkness. The retreating lightning is nothing more than an electric postcard, sent from the east filled with memories of times gone by and finished off with a rumbling signature. I sink into my pillow and close my eyes, thinking about tomorrow and the tomorrows that will follow and all of their deadlines, disappointments, and challenges. But I dream about riding the wind on a hot summer night.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

2010-06-16T15:52:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

I apologize in advance for the fact that lately everything I'm adding to the blog seems to be about the impending implosion of my second job (that is the one that's not being a writer). Unfortunately, while waiting for the second edit of Time of Death to come back from the publisher and slugging away at the last half of my Cinder Girl manuscript the only events of note seem to be the steady goings of my colleagues.

Today was our HR representative's last day. Nobody mourns the going of someone from human resources. In the modern workplace it de rigueur to express contempt for all things related to the department. Maybe far too many HR reps don't represent anything human at all, instead being a corporate organ devoted to the enforcement of self-beneficial policy and obfuscation. All I can say is that, in the case of my small corner of the world, that wasn't the fact. Having our HR rep was a little like having an easily angered terrier in your corner – and I mean that in the most positive way possible even though it might not sound that way!

Regardless, nobody mourns. Perhaps after losing so many fellow employees, those of us who are left can't muster the spirit for heartfelt fare-thee-wells. I'm not certain of the reasons but there wasn't any card circulating around for signatures, there wasn't any goodbye lunch held at some noisy local restaurant, and there wasn't a group meeting to express thanks - only the quiet progression of emptying offices and disappearing faces. The rolling wheel of this last year runs over another victim and continues down the road.

107 days remain, and each promises to be a little more depressing than the last.

The Hard Work

2010-06-12T14:40:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

The real work started this week. I'm over half-way through the first edit of The Cinder Girl and it's time to go back to chapter one to start a hard edit.

Creating is fun; you're rambling along with the story and finding where it takes you. Every chapter is a new discovery. As an author, I believe it's the closest you can come to experiencing your novel in the same way your reader will. You're navigating a new country without a map (at least if you write like I do) and the only way to find out what's on the opposite side of that next mountain is to climb it.

Editing, on the other hand, is a bit like farming the ground you've discovered. Lewis and Clark might have mapped the Northwest Passage but they didn't build the roads and bridges, carve out the settlements, pull stumps from the fields, and plant the crops to sustain the townsfolk. To edit a novel is to work its soil, to improve its fertility and harvest every bit of creative fruit possible. It's hard work. In one week I've managed (along with writing two chapters) to edit just seven five pages of printed manuscript. In the process it grew to seven pages of (I hope) better constructed story. I'm telling you, it's tilling the soil!

The best things aren't the always the easiest, I guess. When the work is done I feel good about it, I'm proud of what I've achieved. Sitting in my office on a Saturday afternoon, hammering out paragraphs, it seems like it'd sure be nice to nail it the first time through, though!

The Demise

2010-06-11T07:31:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

I should have done this sooner. It's something that's been a major part of my life for the last year and I haven't really made more than a passing reference to the fact that it's happening. Since April of 2009 some portion of my waking consciousness has been focused on this thing. It's lurked behind the good and bad news of the year passed, hanging around like smoke in the atmosphere. The dire thing I'm writing about, of course, is the closure of the office where I work and the displacement of the 300-some workers who've made their livings working there.

Until now I've never experienced a plant shutting down. I've worked places where I knew the company was taking on water but, in those cases, the company in question had so many other flaws I felt good to climb into a lifeboat. Hearing those companies went under never felt good but it did give me a certain feeling of validation – a feeling that I foresaw the coming disaster and had the wisdom to get myself out. This time, at least for me, the experience is different. It's different in two ways really.

Firstly, I've never stayed until all the furniture was gone and the doors locked. This time, as a part of my own succession plan, I'll be doing just that. It's like making your home in a hospice, every day someone else is gone. You hear about people who are moving on or will be moving on, you walk passed darkened offices where people you knew used to work, you see the possessions and files being boxed up and labeled for shipment, and the only constant seems to be your playing witness.

Secondly, I've never been working at a really good company when this happened. Sure, some of them were okay and some even had a few good people working for them – but the signs of their demise showed in petty managers, poor or adversarial policies, lack of direction, dry product pipelines, and a hundred other little ways. Not so this time. I can honestly say this is the first place I've worked that really had it all – it encompassed the close-knit feeling of a small company with the resources of a large one, the staff was damned smart, and the policies were geared toward doing the right things for the right reasons. In spite of all those things on October 1, 2010 this facility will close down and all of the jobs were transfer elsewhere. On that day I'll walk out the door for the last time and then the building will go quiet.

Maybe it's the last quarter of existence that's got me in a certain dark mood today. Maybe it's the realization that time is really short that's driven me to write about this subject in what is truthfully a writer's blog, not a diary. I hope you'll forgive my spending time musing over something that's not about writing but then, isn't it? Isn't a writer formed from the experiences they have throughout life? Isn't every moment, every encounter, and every chance happening, traumatic or benign, fuel for creating new characters and new stories? Possibly.

I'll keep you updated on the major happenings in these last months. Maybe something will spring from these missives and maybe it'll just be a record of how I felt in this time and space. Either way, I hope you'll pardon my occasional fixation on matters other than writing.

Website Updates and Progress on Novel

2010-06-06T18:34:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

For a week of vacation, this has been a productive week! I have 40k words on my latest novel and I’ve completed a total revamp of my website. The site that used to be Ghosts of the Mind is now The Gentleman from Indiana website. I’ve reformatted the site and added new content, so take a few minutes to stop by.

As for the novel, I’m about half way through. The goal is to finish the first draft and edits by the end of the summer and to have it edited and ready for submission to publishers by the end of 2010. With luck it will be taken up by a publisher and you’ll be able to find it at your local bookstore after that. I’ll keep you updated on my progress.

A Working Vacation

2010-06-02T22:18:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

Over the past week I’ve been hard at writing and doing it full time. You see I’ve been on a vacation of sorts. Not the type where you pack up your bags and board a liner bound for the great mysterious somewhere else or even the jump in the car, point the steering wheel in some random direction, and figure out what to do once you get there kind. I’ve been on a working vacation.

The gist of the working vacation is simple. You take time off work so that you can – work. In my case that means taking time off the bread and butter job to hammer out a few chapters in the new novel. Yes, I’ve traded days stuck in the office, staring at a computer screen for days in the home office, staring at a computer screen. For variety I huddle over a journal, penning passages that later are translated into the computer. It’s a thrilling life that only those with a strong constitution should endeavor to undertake.

I guess the general point, though, is the whole work angle of writing has really come home to me this week. It’s one thing to steal an hour during lunch or between doing this or that to pen a few paragraphs but a whole new animal to sit down at a desk with the whole day spread out before you and nothing but the story to kill the hours. Wonderful things happen when you’re that free but then, not so wonderful things do too. What’s more, you make interesting discoveries about yourself and your writing style.

I’ve discovered just how much I need change to write effectively. Many authors need a stable, quiet environment in which to do their best writing. They thrive on consistency, on feeling at peace. Personally, I need to shake it up a little to get the words flowing. I write well in a car or on a plane, I get a lot of good out of alternating between composing at the computer and in longhand, essentially I need to harvest the energy that comes with change. This doesn’t mean I can’t create while sitting in my office in the quiet. On the contrary, that is the time I get my editing, rethinking, reimagining, and refining done. While I can pen a new chapter while wedged behind the wheel of my car parked in a lot behind the local supermarket during lunch hour, I can’t edit for squat under those same conditions.

I like to think this makes me an interesting author. I’m not sure, maybe it really just makes me quirky. Regardless it reinforces something a writing instructor once said to me. There is no one right way to write – do what you need to do and you’ll get the most out of your talent

The Fountain Pen

2010-06-02T07:50:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

You might have noticed my recent missive on the death of one of my favorite pens. It wasn't the cheapest of writing devices but, to be honest, it was a disposable pen. Still there was something about it, some kind of attachment that made me actually feel sorry when it reached the end of its life and spilled its last bit of ink on paper. It started me thinking about writing and writing instruments and, generally, the handwritten word.

The first functional fountain pen was patented by Louis Waterman in 1884. Earlier, ink-carrying writing devices preceded Waterman's pen – a Frenchman named M. Bion designed one in 1702 and Peregrin Williamson, a Boston shoemaker, patented a pen in 1809. Schaefer and Parker also had pen (or pen-like devices) before Waterman; however all were plagued by ink spills and weren't widely used. Waterman's design attempted to rectify some of the most irritating failures of previous pens by adding an air hole to the nib and three grooves inside the ink reservoir. The end result of Waterman's experimentation was a more reliable pen with fewer ruined documents.

It's interesting to think that, since the nib of a pen wore down according to the way the writer used it; a fountain pen essentially became broken in, conforming to the writing style of the owner. Up until the invention of the ballpoint pen (1945), pens were as personal as clothing.

The mention of the disposable ink pen brings me back to my old faithful Precise V5. Like the fountain pen, the V5 is far from the perfect writing instrument – the ink can smear, some V5's put down ink like a paint roller, they can leak, and taking one up in an airplane should only be undertaken if you have a change of clothing because the pressure will drive the ink right out of the reservoir. It is, however, one of my weapons of choice when it comes to putting word on page. I've been looking for a good fountain pen and I've even gotten a set of Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pens just for the novelty but the V5 will always be a favorite.

Recently, however, I've been using a new pen for my longhand composition. The Varsity is a disposable fountain pen made by Pilot. It is available in a range of colors (good if you're making corrections and notes on a manuscript) and unlike some disposable fountain pens I've used, has a metal nib. So far the writing is smooth and I haven't encountered any problems with smearing or leaking. Not a replacement for the V5 but a change of pace, for certain.

Looking Back...

2010-05-17T12:10:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

This is not a travel blog, it is a blog dedicated to writing. I keep repeating this phrase to myself as I put pixel to paper. In the wake of a - less than pleasurable - travel experience, however, I felt like posting something on the subject. Rather than tossing around accusations and uncouth inferences I thought that I would roll about in the nostalgia patch until I got the stink of modernity off myself.

The Stratocruiser was a pre-jet age plane that provided trans-Atlantic and coast to coast service to air travellers between 1947 and 1963. It was big and graceless, with four droning piston-driven engines keeping it in the sky, but inside its polished aluminum skin existed a world that travellers might dream wistfully of today. I offer diagrams.

Oh for the days when an airplane offered private staterooms and a forward berth with an attached bedroom. Surely a luxury item beyond the pocketbook of a poor, struggling novelist but knowing the possibility existed means something. If you look at the "custom-designed cabin" you'll note - no more than two seats per row and they have space between them. One might not feel like a canned sardine in a cabin like that! One might feel human and be inclined to dress for travel instead of wearing pajamas and sweat pants. Then again, I imagine in days gone by a trip through security didn't have so many similarities to being abducted by aliens.

I'm intrigued by the lower deck "Hawaiian Lounge". A part of me wants to believe there were shows with guys in grass skirts twirling flaming batons. It wouldn't be wise but it would be thrilling. Then again it'd be thrilling to order a tiki drink at thirty thousand feet while sitting at a bar instead of having service consist of trying to juggle a laptop, napkin, and plastic cup on a tray-table with your knees shoved under your chin.

The British Speedbird included men's and women's dressing rooms, a hat and coat room, and a snack bar. Personally I'm intrigued by the spiral staircase. Somewhat less descriptive (or imaginative) cutaway here but still - look at the midships cabin. Notice two seats per row and space between? In the late forties and fifties people had elbows. When the seventies came they were surgically removed at birth to assist with neat stacking of passengers on increasingly crowded mass transit. By 2050 I'm told we won't have legs below the knees, that way there can be two floors of five seat rows on DC9's.

Farewell, Dear Friend

2010-05-14T08:43:00.001-04:00

Dear Reader,

Last night I killed another pen. Well, “kill” is probably too strong a word – it ran out of ink. Still, as I sat staring at the drained writing instrument, I felt a slight pang of sadness for seeing it go. You see, I’m a writer who doesn’t compose everything on the virtual typewriter of a word processor. Occasionally I go through a period where words and ideas flow best from the tip of a pen.

This is especially true when I’m travelling. For some reason the vacuum of an airport draws ideas from my pen and at ten-thousand feet, while crammed in the window seat, I get pages of text. The same is true of hotel rooms. Something about the feelings of emptiness that come in a place that is meant to look like home but isn’t sparks my creativity. The pen is the vector through which this infection of ideas is transmitted to paper.

So it was with sadness I said goodbye to my Precise V5 fine point. Its blue ink saw the heroes of my latest novel from the doorstep of their homes to the gateway of the untamed wilderness. It was a trusty friend, a reliable antenna to the muse, and I will miss it.

Now on Twitter

2010-05-11T12:34:00.001-04:00

Dear Reader,

I wanted to drop a quick note from the road. Presently, I’m in California tending to business but I had a bit of time to set up a Twitter account. Eventually I’ll manage to figure out how to connect Twitter to The Gentleman from Indiana Blog without blowing up the look of the blog – for the moment you can find me under the ID “yarn_spinner”.

Vanishing Words

2010-05-06T14:03:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

I hope you will forgive my doing a rare blogging double-dip today. Generally I tend to space my posts out (it placates my inner laggard) but today the ideas wouldn't be satisfied with sitting in quietly the queue. Compartmentalization seemed the best course of action. Why not get as much mileage out of this productive spree as possible? So there are my excuses and justifications, take them as you will.

What I'm writing about is an episode of the radio program Radio Lab. Some of you may be familiar with the highly produced show out of New York's WNYC. The hosts excel at inducing mental lapses in me. If I tune in I soon find myself staring into the middle distance, totally engrossed in the tale that's pouring out of my headphones. Such is was the case with the recent piece entitled Vanishing Words.

I recommend you listen to this piece since my synopsis can't do it justice. The crux is this: Agatha Christie wrote a great deal of fiction during her long career and recently a scientist has started to analyze the substance of her writing. He has gotten what he believes may be a glimpse into things that the author herself may not have realized about herself. The words Christie used to compose her mysteries may indicate the author was developing Alzheimer's disease. As I said, I recommend you listen to the program, it's very thought provoking.

It's fascinating to think that in everything you write there is a hidden piece of yourself. Behind the biases, prejudices, and habits we all possess, behind our individual style and education, behind our regional tendencies, there are the fingerprints of our mind. There may be a day when biographers add another data source to their toolkit: forensic analysis of documents. A hundred years from now someone might be combing through published works, attempting to divine whether a particular author had a particular mental condition or the exact moment when their mental capacity to write began to decline.

A strange sadness accompanies that thought. In the past few days I've been ruminating on empty spaces and shadows and this idea of missing words creates a lonely trinity. It seems every time you walk through an empty room you leave some phantom of yourself behind. A pale shade of who you were lingers in every hallway you walked, every empty elevator you rode, and ever deserted parking lot you crossed. Our youth sits in disused classrooms and boarded up hotspots, listening to silent music and waiting.

National Teachers Day

2010-05-06T13:09:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

In high school I had the good fortune of being able to take a creative writing class. The instructor was John Combs, and he was fantastic. I remember him as a man who passionately believed in writing and that every child in his classroom might, someday, become a writer. During the one hour a day I spent in Mr. Comb's class I felt special. I no longer was a mediocre student–just another kid from a blue-collar family who only could aspire to climbing one rung further up the corporate ladder than his parents. For an hour I became someone in the most mystical sense of that word. No other teacher had such a positive impact on my life. I owe Mr. Combs a debt of gratitude.

So, here's a belated National Teachers Day hats off to you, Mr. Combs–wherever you are. Hopefully you've written a wonderful story for yourself and you're busy living it right now.

'Tis Spring

2010-04-28T12:40:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

Pardon my recent absence. A bad bout of life in its most fundamental broke out, taking me by surprise and forcing me to spend a few weeks in the ward of consumerism. In short everything in the house decided to break at once and I've been fixing, reassembling, and replacing since. I promise to share my views on the sinister nature of appliances on some future date. I'm under doctor's orders to maintain a pleasant disposition until everything heals so I'll purposefully digress.

Finally the first redress of Time of Death is complete. Rogue sentences have been tamed, errant ideas rechanneled, and the clean copy has been sent back to the publishers for its second culling. With spring pressing on the windowpanes I'm reminded of how much writing resembles gardening. There are weeds to pull, rows to hoe, and ideas to furrow into what hopefully is fertile ground. Now, with everything neatly tucked into its bed I'm left to wait for the sprouting. Five Star's tentative release date is September 2011 (mark your calendars). My garden intuition says that is a long time to wait for something to sprout. Maybe that's the flaw in my whole garden metaphor.

The off time won't be wasted, though. I'm in the midst of two science fiction novels, one with the preliminary title The Cinder Girl and another which is still lurking around my desktop without a name. Before old nameless is completed I'll be spending time on the follow-up to Time of Death. If that's not enough, there's a fantasy and a literary novel kicking about in the darker regions of my brain. Evidence suggests spring is a season where ideas and hares frolic madly and multiply.

Renewal

2010-04-16T09:32:00.001-04:00

Dear Reader,

Spring has arrived and with it the sense of renewal everyone's so fond of talking about. I'm a winter person myself. I can't say exactly why. Maybe I enjoy the long, dreaming slumber and the imagining of possibilities before the hard work of manifesting them. It probably would take a psychologist (or maybe a philosopher) to sort out the truth. Still, with all of that said, I'm not totally adverse to the whole renewal, re-growth, and reinvention thing. It would be difficult to be a writer while sticking strictly to imagining your stories without ever revising them and revision is impossible so I embrace the season's growth even if I don't look forward to the mosquitoes.

A few days ago, in the spirit I mentioned, I ventured into the deepest recesses of my closet and brought out a relic. Probably twenty years ago I bought a Canon TL QL 35mm camera from a coworker. It was, at that time, ten years old and had seen many of life's rough patches. I like to imagine it'd ventured across the ocean to Viet Nam where some soldier or civilian used it to document the conflagration that had set fire to east and west. I like thinking that because it helps the winter side of me justify holding on to a thirty-plus year old camera that I haven't used in at least ten years. The writer in me likes believing the story because it's got a romance about it and might make the backbone of a short story if properly parsed. The realistic side of me has to admit that, knowing the guy I bought the camera from, it's unlikely the Canon ever saw anything more daring than taking pictures of buddies water skiing and drinking beer.

None the less, I drug out the battered leather case and pulled out the heavy camera for a dusting off and refurbishing. The batteries were long-since dead and a couple of them had puked their acidic guts up, corroding the battery terminals and requiring a baking soda scrubbing. I had to order a battery for the camera's onboard light meter - shipped from some distant port that the camera itself may or may not have visited. And in the end I found that the light meter which I'd went to the trouble of ordering that battery to power, no longer functions. I debated purchasing an external light meter to replace the onboard one - but then I thought. This is a thirty year old camera. I put all the camera components back in their boxes and stowed them away again. There is a time when renewal fails.

One great thing about writing is that renewal need never meet mechanical failure. Words don't corrode and if they don't work, a bit of mental gymnastics usually will accomplish the necessary repairs. This is something I'm discovering as I go through the first round of edits for Time of Death. Some of the words I stored inside the story have gotten tarnished or failed but they can be renewed and refurbished.

Pushing the Kid out the Door

2010-03-17T14:00:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

Last week I sat at my desk with two envelopes sealed and waiting. The first, an eight-by-eleven manila, contained signed and witnessed copies of contracts for my forthcoming novel Time of Death. The second, a standard mailing envelope, contained a completed author's sheet for my publisher with the form dealing with the legal permissions. I sat there, staring at the envelopes and feeling a strange sense of unease. This was, after all, the accomplishment of a long-held dream – becoming a published novelist – and even though mailing off the paperwork equated to taking the final step into the dream, I felt…well…nervous.

The cliché goes that any creative venture is, in a way, a child of your imagination. You labor long hours, shaping, refining, and generally muscling it into something presentable and then there comes that moment when you must let go. The work will stand or fall on its own virtue as a reflection of the effort you put into its formation. All the creator can do is stand aside, trust, and wait.

Surely, for me, there's plenty of work to be done before the final letting go. I've signed the contracts and mailed them off and now I wait the assignment of an editor and the heavy-lifting that's to come. I'm sure my creative child needs a lot of schooling and a fair amount of discipline before being ready to enter the public. I guess if I had one bit of advice for the aspiring writer (I'm still in this category so I'm half saying this to myself) it would be not to fall into the trap of believing the work is completed when the manuscript is finished.

In Memory of a Dear Friend...

2010-02-19T18:54:00.000-05:00

Dear Reader,

I bring you sad news - truly a tale of terror fit for a noir thriller. It is the story of a dear friend of mine, Frosty. You may be familiar with Frosty, many people are. He's a happy soul - some might say jolly with his dark eyes and button nose and ever-present pipe caught in the corner of a happy smile. Frosty was a fellow who could almost magically lift the spirits of a room when he walked in. He'd doff his silk and in that way of his, ask the ladies to dance - soon all the worries of the world vanished.

Even children loved Frosty. Those who know me will be aware that I'm not particularly fond of the little cusses. They make me nervous and generally run amok given even the shortest span of leash to run with. Not Frosty, though. He saw them as windows into his own childlike spirit, muses sent to bring out the playful essence that lurked within. Yes, put Frosty in a room with a flock of kids and soon they'd all be running and romping together. In a way I envy his comfort with the younger set.

Well, late last year Frosty met a lady and fell hard. Immediately I was concerned - she didn't seem his sort. I'd always pictured Frosty as the sort of guy who'd go for a jolly, well-rounded lady who shared his cheerful disposition and mischievous streak. Knowing that, you'll understand why I was taken aback when he showed up with a wasp-waisted brunette in a tight red sweater. I told myself the unease I felt was more due to my preconceptions being shattered than any real gripe or concern with his choice of companionship. Every man is entitled to be happy and the Frost-man certainly seemed to be just that. Happy.

So, I played along when he traded in his old top hat for a porkpie and his fine clothes for trendy garb. I ignored the fact he spent more time at the track than with his old friends. I didn't even say anything when he started drinking - bourbon on the rocks, I should have realized he was on the downhill slide. We all ignored the changes in his personality, his clashes with the police, and his public acts of indiscretion. If a man wants to trot about the square, that's his own business - right?

Then, one night with spring on the cusp of breaking, he disappeared. He left the club, muttering something about having to hurry. The last I saw him he waved jauntily from the doorway and then disappeared. None of us could have imagined he would be gone from our lives so soon.

The police were summoned to the Frosty residence on a call from the mysterious brunette. His body was discovered in the freezer and, though I find the explanation ridiculous, the coroner's report would say he fell in and the door shut behind him. The police say his blood alcohol level was so high that it's likely he never felt a thing. The brunette, sole beneficiary in Frosty's will, soon disappeared - moved to Florida I hear tell.

I will try not to think of Frosty's springtime demise but I have to say, whenever the calendar turns and the temperatures climb it will be hard not to think of my dear friend. I'll look out over the snowy hills, wipe a tear away, and I'll remember we'll be together again some day…

More Snow, More Validation

2010-02-09T20:18:00.000-05:00

Dear Reader,

Another night and Mother Nature has provided another storm. This one is more of a show than anything serious - three or four inches of snow through the day and as the sun set the wind began to moan through the bare cottonwoods outside my office window. Before night fell I watched snow blowing up from the reservoir and across the road, forming drifts when it met any obstacle that couldn't easily be circumvented. Sitting here, warm and safe, I'm reminded again of how much I love winter. Of all seasons, winter seems to be the most mysterious - the most untamed and unmanageable.

I heard that the east coast is getting more than two feet of new snow to top up the two-plus feet they received over the weekend. It's possibly because I don't have to deal with that kind of snow that I sit and wistfully dream of feet of fresh powder slowing the city to a halt. I find many times my fancy for certain things is governed by having no experience with them.
Another thing that has my heart feeling fine this evening is the fact the publisher's preliminary contract came through today. With my reply I should receive a copy to sign in short order. Thus another hurdle in selling my first novel seem real has been cleared. Validation (like all happiness) comes in small servings and should be savored!

Snow

2010-02-06T07:44:00.000-05:00

Dear Reader,

The storm arrived for brunch. It started with tiny flakes that disappeared as soon as they touched the relative warmth of the ground and by noon the air was filled with big, sloppy clusters that splattered juicily like overripe winter fruit when they encountered any obstacle. Through the day the storm lingered and the city’s inhabitants gathered at windows to assess and fret over road conditions and traffic tie ups. By two o’clock the office had virtually shut down and when I found my way to the parking lot my car had been thoroughly encased in a frosting of snow and ice.

I’ve always had an affinity for snow. Maybe it comes from growing up at the tail end of an era when every winter meant at least one hefty snow would grace our city and that there’d be the off chance school would be canceled. As a grade school boy I benefited from the last true blizzard to hit Indiana. In 1978 I woke to find that all the world had been turned to winter. I remember watching from the picture window of our little suburban ranch house as a drift slowly built until it nearly reached the eaves. I’ve never outgrown the feeling that school might be cancelled due to inclement weather and it’s for that reason I’ll never want to move to some tropical paradise where temperatures never dare drop below fifty.

Snow turns the world silent – if only for a moment. It eliminates the world of deadlines, schedules, and expectations and slows everything down. From my window I see pines frosted with fresh snow and a landscape that rolls like a down blanket. It won’t last but while it does I feel a lovely sense of peace.

Success!

2010-01-20T21:36:00.000-05:00

Dear Reader,

Wonderful news today, my first novel Time of Death has found a home! On January 19th I received word from Five Star Publishing that they would be purchasing my manuscript.

Writing is a funny business. You spend your time laboring away over the keyboard – pounding away at the keys and burning up synapses to create what you believe is a great story, you edit heartily to prune everything up into a presentable shape, and then you send your work off firmly believing you will be rejected. In no other business is the performer so convinced that all their efforts will come to naught. Yet we keep going.

Perhaps being a writer is a form of insanity – it’s worth considering. Unfortunately, as soon as you’ve come to the decision that you’re crazy you sell a piece and the whole cycle of insanity is revived.

Now I wait for contact from the publisher. Probably an editor who will help me with further pruning and shaping – it’s the hard part of the job, the part that isn’t fun. In the end, though, what comes out will be tighter, better written, and more pleasurable to read. I once attended a writer’s conference where Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale. She said something at that conference that has stuck with me, “If you sell a novel you’ll start editing – by the time you finish editing you will hate your novel.”

I hope I don’t wind up hating it – I put a lot of work into it to hate what I created!

More Airports, More Transition

2010-01-17T06:34:00.000-05:00

Dear Reader,

Traveling seems to be my obsession lately. Maybe it’s a part of the general unrest that’s become my work life lately. With insecurity surely must come unrest and there’s nothing more restless than the modern airport. It’s a place of transience, a hallway between two states.

The first state is physical – you are traveling and that, reasonably, entails moving from one place to another. As I sit at the terminal, waiting for my flight, I watch dusty travelers bound for destinations across the country and around the world. There are the vanquished fans of the visiting football team, the road-weary business travelers heading for the next corporate call, and then there is the endless stream of bleary-eyed refugees. Even the flight crews are just passing through – either on their way to their next plane or home for a little sleep before taking off again.

The transition is more than physical, though. When I step through the doors and walk into the ticketing level of IND, my mental attitude changes. I’ve long lauded the ‘old fashion’ concept of air travel – the days when boarding a plane and was part of the enjoyment of traveling. There’s something lovely and nostalgic about pictures of stewardesses with little airline hats pushing carts of complementary comfort items down the broad aisle between rows of seats and travelers who dressed (jacket and tie and a nice dress for the ladies) to travel. Merely going from ticketing area to terminal destroys that image – the process is something like passing through a Star Trek transporter where you are disassembled molecule by molecule and reassembled on the other side of the x-ray machines. No amount of nostalgia can survive such a trip – its hard enough to maintain your dignity.

Security isn’t the problem. I don’t think you could find a single person who’d like to reduce airport security to the level that would allow crazies with exploding underwear to board of their own volition. Personally, I believe the blame for the death of pleasurable air travel on a variety of factors. Airports have become ticket kiosks attached to low quality, over priced strip malls. Airlines no longer have to provide service. Unless flying first class and on a luxury carrier the traveler is considered an irritating inconvenience instead of a customer. The airlines have strangled the service they provide down to the utter minimum and shoehorned as many travelers as possible into the smallest amount of space. And, unfortunately, I’m sure that it only will get worse until the air travel industry is forced to reinvent itself.

So, I sit here at terminal B7 waiting for my flight to Dallas. It isn’t dawn outside and when I look out the cantilevered windows I only see the lights of the waking city, the blinking indicators of the runways, and my own reflection. Everything else is uncertainty, a dark canvas to be filled in by the light that time will bring. After tomorrow I may have a secure future, a great new job, and an assurance that my life can move forward in some trajectory that resembles what I’d hoped for before the Great Economic Decline. Then again, maybe there’s only more uncertainty out there – another airport and more waiting and wondering.

Proper Air Travel

2009-10-24T16:20:00.001-04:00

Correction

2009-10-24T15:32:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

All of us make mistakes and I believe the best thing we can do when we recognize a mistake is to own that error. To that end, I have an error to admit. It isn't a tragic one. It isn't a substantial one. Instead its one of those bungles of the brain - the type where you deftly explain your reasoning and conclusions only to realize much later that you didn't have the question quite right.

Yesterday, when I wrote about traveling by train, I made a bit of a mistake on the fare information. In actuality, the price for travelling by train with a bedroom works out to be over $600 round trip. I neglected to include a return trip in my original estimated price. I also realized that the comparison wasn't exactly of the old apples vs. apples variety - my plane ticket was coach and my train estimates were definitely first class. To rectify this I performed a quick fare estimate with Delta Airlines for a flight leaving on November 8, 2009 and returning November 11, 2009 and I came up with a cost of $1100.00 round trip. Also I didn't realize that meals are included with your fare when you book a bedroom with your train trip.

What it comes down to is you're buying time when you fly. If time is what you need (or something you don't have to spare) air travel is your bag. If you have time for a more gentile trip (and its within your budget) I recommend the train.

Yours Most Sincerely

- G

An Addendum on Traveling

2009-10-23T16:04:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

This morning, after a short nap of nine hours, I had an opportunity to read my last missive about traveling. I think it could best be described as downtrodden. Maybe spending too much time alone in a hotel room is apt to put anyone in a bleak kind of mood - that is unless it's a hotel on some sun-blessed shore with good music and warm starry nights. Then again, I guess if you're in your room long enough instead of out somewhere dancing and enjoying good company, well you'd probably be depressed in Bali Hai. I guess the point is, I don't want to come down on the wrong side of travelling because I really like to travel. Well, at least somewhat.

It seems at the moment travelling has kind of run down hill and, at the moment, is lying in a ditch waiting for an ambulance to arrive. I'm old enough to remember a time before the major airlines started knocking on congress' door with a cup and cart of apples, so I remember a time before the airlines cut costs by eliminating service. Ah, yes, the times before every plane was packed to the overhead bins, before passengers and ungulates had a shared understanding of the trip to the slaughterhouse. At present there are two trips a day from Indianapolis International Airport to Dulles - one departs at 6AM and the other arrives at 11PM. Any enjoyment in between would seem to be of the delirious, bleary-eyed sort. Add to this the fact that the major airlines have steadily decreased space for passengers and gotten progressively worse at making schedule and you've a good idea of why travel (business travel) can be distinctly unpleasant by its very nature.

So, what's a fellow to do? We're all prisoners of the Airlines, aren't we? The simple answer is no, we are not - so long as we have time, that is. We're prisoners of our schedules, when we adapt and make our schedules adaptable a great number of opportunities present themselves.

I give you my schedule for my latest business trip to Virginia: Depart Monday morning, arrive Monday afternoon, shuttle to the rental counter, pace the hotel lobby and sleep on an uncomfortable bed, go to work over the course of three days, return Thursday evening, delayed by the airlines, and finally arrive back home in time to welcome Friday morning which was already an hour old by the time I parked in my driveway. Total cost, $414.00 plus rental car and meals with all the health benefits of drinking a slurry of catsup and salt.

Now, I present an option:

You can catch an Amtrak from Indianapolis to Chicago Union Station and then on to Washington DC, a seventeen hour jaunt on train with a 2 adult bedroom car, for $366.50. On-train meals won't cost any more than they do in an airport and if you bring a deck of cards and maybe a good friend you can make a rolling party of the jaunt. Grabbing a rental at Union Station isn't a problem since the rental car agency (at least the one I use) has a desk in the train station. GPS will get you from the station to the hotel in barely more time than it took to drive from Dulles.

The difference is obvious - 17 hours. Think of my trip, though. If I would have left Sunday Evening I could have ridden through the night and arrived Monday morning and probably wound up at my hotel earlier than I did by flying. Not to mention the sights between Indianapolis and DC, the off chance of meeting a few colorful people, with a wireless account I could have worked from my bedroom, or if I wanted I could have gotten a few chapters of my next novel written. And all for the cost of 17 hours trundling along on the rails - it's worth considering.

Yours in Sharing the Rails,

- G

Traveling Man

2009-10-22T13:36:00.000-04:00

A week of business travel has got to be the loneliest, most alienating thing possible – except for, maybe, being an expatriate. Schlepping from airport to rental counter and across alien countryside to a nondescript, corporately approved hotel leaves a guy feeling like he’s got no country. I find myself staring out the hotel window, past the heavy-duty tapestry drapes and across a sea of asphalt to the strip mall across the street at odd hours. As if I might see someone I know out there – somebody dropping by to say hello. It doesn’t happen.

I get up at whatever wrong hour work demands and hit the free breakfast buffet in the lobby. I never have eggs on a Tuesday and definitely never eggs and sausage – but they’re there on the steam table. Tossing aside the pretence of hominess, I get cold serial and skim milk with a toasted English muffin. I never have those things on a Tuesday either – but they’re closer to my normal breakfast bar while I drive fare than anything else the hotel has to offer.

I roll into work at what, back home, would be the god-awful late hour of 7:30. Showing up at an out-of-state plant site requires showing up late – your schedule has to conform to the hours of the front desk when there will be a receptionist or security guard whose well enough informed to get you the prerequisite visitor’s badge and let you sign off on the magical book that documents your arrival and departure. I wonder if there are hundreds of register books stowed away at elder companies – all of them bearing witness to the comings and goings of people long since dead and gone.

Tense hellos and introductions lead to the temporary office – a space as denuded of character as parts of the Amazon after slash and burn farming. My spot is on the second floor among rows of file cabinets and disused copiers. The vent huffs noisily when the heat comes on and directly below me is some machine that pounds most of the morning, apparently smashing big somethings into littler somethings.

Nobody visits you when you’re the guy from the Indy office come to stay for a week. Well, unless some low-ranking schmo has pulled take the visiting guy to lunch duty. I always feel sorry for the guy whose got to take me to lunch. Not that I’m unpleasant to be around but what the heck do you talk about with someone you don’t know, probably won’t see again, and don’t know anything about? Sports, weather, work, and then whatever you’re eating – then you’re out of bullets and its just chewing until time to get back to work.

In a half hour I’m off for the airport again. Waiting in some noisy bar or lounge while US Air screws up the schedule. Then it’ll be crammed into the flying sardine tin for the trip home. That old crutch “home is where the heart is” should be amended to “home is where your life is”. Everywhere else is just a shadow of life – life on pause, flickering like a VHS tape paused in mid-scene.

Dresden Files, Kindel, and Lighting my Fire

2009-10-12T09:34:00.000-04:00

I'm not a reviewer and I don't intend on turning this blog into just another opinion column on books, writing, or anything else for that fact. I don't mind recommending what I thought was a good read, though. Over the weekend I finished Jim Butcher's first Dresden File novel, Storm Front. As a writer of hard-boiled mystery I appreciated his treatment of the genre and his portrayal of the magical world of his protagonist, Harry Dresden, had the right mix of comedy and tragedy for my tastes. I'd recommend it to anyone who's in the mood for mixing mystery with magic.

I also have to say my first experience with the Amazon Kindle turned out to be positive. The device is easy to use, readable, and not too focused on its own tech to be user friendly. I'm using a Kindle I, so I don't have any idea what version II has improved – I hope it adds a backlight for those of us who read in bed.

Reading Butcher's work has put me in the mood to brush the dust off my own keyboard and get back to work. I've given my writing enough of a rest, I guess, and as I said last week: writers write, always. Ideas have been plunking around inside my head and its time to let them flow out through my fingers – that's the only way to shut the characters up, in the end. Let them voice their opinions, prejudices, and foibles on the page so that they'll quiet down inside my head. So it begins.

Black Thursday

2009-10-08T08:52:00.000-04:00

I spent a dreary, October morning listening to Radio Dismuke – the tunes of the 20's filled my headphones, doing their best to lift the morning's mood. Their effort turned out to be totally wasted. I'm sitting with a certain sense of melancholy this morning.

Think about driving down a divided highway. You're heading southbound and, across the grassy median, you can see northbound traffic. As you drive you see the aftermath of an accident blocking all of the northbound lanes. For ten miles after that, northbound traffic is utterly and totally snarled – at an absolute standstill. Once you pass the last cars in that traffic jam, and you've crested a hill or two, you start seeing northbound drivers who've got no idea what they're heading into. They're driving along, thinking their day's in perfect order, oblivious to what waits for them. But you know.

To me, listening to songs of the mid twenties is somewhat like being in that southbound car. I've got a kind of omniscience, I know in 1929 the market will crash, that millions will be destitute, and that the nation will labor under the yoke of economic despair and only shrug it off through the auspices of a world war. I know all the light songs of cheer and good times exist inside a champagne bubble that's about to burst. Outside that bubble is a cold, hard world with little room for silly songs of love and youth.

I'm also aware that I'm living in my own bubble – champagne or not, a bubble none the less. Inside it's only possible to see the now and the nearly now. I'm in suddenly transported into one of those northbound cars and unaware of what I might be hurtling toward. Sure, maybe I've noticed a few cars slowing down around me. The economic woes of our times are only missed by those rich enough to be unaffected and I don't belong to that set. I'm just another motorist in my steel and glass bubble, speeding along with the radio turned up and the windows up. Comfortable and ignorant.

Writers Write

2009-10-07T20:38:00.000-04:00

It's taken me quite a while to work up to this blog. Two years ago I had the inspiration but it was unfocused – should I write about my beloved home state of Indiana and expound its virtues or should I write something else? I wanted to start a writer's blog but I didn't want to just write about writing because that seemed both self-serving and too restrictive. In July I penned my first entry, choosing the latter subject as the focus of my blogging based both on what I wanted to write and what didn't seem to be present on the web…but soon after I found myself mired in the doldrums of being unsure what I should say and how. Between those two pointed rocks I sat, pinioned and immobile while the world ambled past. There's something to be said for momentum. It can keep you in motion but it's equally good at keeping you stuck right where you are.

Today I penned a few words for another blog I write and I found myself in a groove. The blog itself (Blue Suede Souls) is about dancing and as I wrote I realized that I'd strayed afield of the subject of dance. I was writing about culture and pop art and generally having fun. Before I knew it I had over a page of text (as MS Word flies) and it'd seemed like nothing. The sentences just flowed from fingertip to keyboard to screen and on to publication. That's when it struck me. The problem was worrying over what I should write instead of just writing.

Back when I was in high school I had a creative writing teacher who handed down an old cliché about writers. He said "writers write – always." I think the point was to get us interested in journaling and keeping the sort of notes that many writers go back to for subjects for their novels and short stories. As I'm reentering my blog concept today I can't help but think on those words and realize the nugget of truth that makes any good cliché. I should write and I must write if I want to be a writer. There are no right subjects, there are no right approaches, there only is writing and not writing.

In my head I can feel the tickle of a good rationalization forming. It goes something like this: Over the last seven months I've found out that the company I work for is pulling up roots here in Indy, spitting its operations up, and sending them to the east and west coasts. This, of course, means practically everyone in the building will be losing their jobs. Starting in December the first people will be without work - merry freaking Christmas. Due to my role in the company (babysitter of the documents) I'm "lucky" and my job will be one of the last to go. I've got until October, 2010 before my job wends its way coastward. So I've been investing my time in fretting over making a paycheck and watching the place slowly dissolve.

That's the rationalization. It's probably a really valid one. It's an emotional time and it's hard to focus. The thing is that rationalization really is just an excuse. I firmly believe where there's an excuse there's something that'll never get done - and I don't want my writing career to be something that doesn't get done.

So, here's to writers writing. Here's to living the cliché. Here's to putting in the hard work that is being a writer - rain, shine, and when you really don't feel like putting pen to paper. Here's to having at it.

Taking the Plunge

2009-07-05T15:48:00.001-04:00

I've been mulling this blog over for a long time. I pinned down the title over a year ago but after the initial rush of enthusiasm died off I found myself wondering just what I had to add to the blogosphere that's worth expounding upon. I reasoned that I could go the route of vanity blogging but pining away on the whatever-ness of being me didn't seem worthwhile. Don't get me wrong, I'm not waxing depressive; I'm just pretty sure that there are enough bloggers out there pounding the virtual paper with that kind of theme.

So what to write about? Maybe it's all been done? Maybe the whole blog wave has passed and the tide's gone out leaving everybody standing in the mud among the tide pools. I took to Google, typed in "Indiana Blog", and hit return to - if I came up with pages after pages about life in the state I promised myself I'd put the idea to rest and walk away. The results were interesting.

There are a lot of lawyer blogs out there. I never thought that there'd be law blogs - I mean, don't get me wrong, but it's kind of a dry subject. Now add to that the concept of law blogs directly associated with Indiana? Talk about niche markets! The Indiana Department of Tourism and Chamber of Commerce have blogs. Some Indiana-based news organizations have blogs. In fact there were over 58 million hits for my combination of search terms but in the first three pages I didn't find a single link to a blog belonging to a resident (as opposed to a business or organization) of the state who'd decided to write about the state and living inside its borders. On page four I did find a web ring that provided a few links to blogs by actual Hoosiers about actually being a Hoosier, but too many of those blogs seemed to be dead and forgotten.

My interest was piqued and my thoughts of dumping my blogging idea vanished.

So, what is this project about? What is my mission statement? What is the y purpose for putting out all of this creative effort? Well, we all know that blogging won't make you rich so obviously I can scratch that off the short list. Instead I'm hoping to show some of the things in the state that people don't usually see, expound on the psychology of being a Hoosier, and generally write about the state I love.

So, on July 5, 2009 I step off the end of the pier and take the plunge. Whether I end up splashing into pleasantly cool water or find that the tide's gone out remains to be seen. This project might ill-conceived, doomed, and in a few months this blog might end up discarded with the wadded-up fast food wrappers alongside the information superhighway with the rest of the Internet's jetsam. It's a possibility but you'll never know if you don't try.