Four-leaf Clover

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It was recently my late mother’s birthday.  I didn’t post about it on that that day since it might become a security question some day.  In any case, it was a somber day for me.  It’d been raining on and off for several days straight and I was wanting a picture of her for my bulletin board.  I remembered that I had inherited one of her photo albums.  This was the old kind with black paper onto which you had to lick and stick corners to hold the pictures.  Many of the photos had fallen out even back when she asked me to hold onto it, but there were some still there of her as a young woman.  As I was looking through them, something inside the front cover caught my attention—the crumbly brown remains of three four-leaf clovers that she’d glued there.

Since this isn’t likely to be a security question, I can say that her home life wasn’t ideal.  The page with the young photos of her were obviously from a day that she and my father were taking pictures of each other as young lovers.  They were outside a house on a summery-looking day.  Smiling and looking for a better future.  Four-leaf clovers.  My father was an alcoholic, and my mother knew that, but hoped that she might change him.  I don’t know the dates of the photos so I’m not sure if they yet knew they’d be parents.  One of the oddities of life is that about the time the questions occur to you, your parents might already be gone.  I wanted to ask about that happy day.  Those clover leaves.  The sunshine.

Rain and gray clouds persisted.  That particular day I had little human interaction, and I felt her presence with me.  I’m not a minister, as she always hoped I would be.  I could never find a job closer to home, as she wished time and again.  I didn’t even get to see her before she died.  Instead I had a photo album on my lap and rain falling.  And work for the day looming.  Her birthday is an engrained date in my mind.  Those last years we tried to find appropriate gifts for a woman who always said, “I don’t need anything.”  A few of those gifts are scattered around our house now.  One that gives me hope is a vase with flowers made from colorful paper that we purchased at a craft show for her.  I look at it and think of crumbled four-leaf clovers.

Craving Enchantment

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I really want to know, but just can’t figure out, how to write like Katherine May.  My wife and I read her book Wintering and now have added Enchantment.  In many ways I seem to be like May; we may be different shades of neurodivergent, but I understand what she says.  Indeed, at one point in Enchantment she talked me down from a writer’s dilemma that had me worked up for days.  But I can’t write like her.  I have times when my rhetoric for a blog post or two might come close, but I have tried to sustain it for an entire book, so far without success.  My background was perhaps too sullied by academic writing, although May is also an academic, so I may simply be making excuses for lack of talent.

That’s too bad because Enchantment is meant to improve your outlook.  Subtitled Awaking Wonder in an Anxious Age, it consists of life lessons the author learned during the pandemic.  I often, if I allow myself in this constant struggle for my time, experience the sense of wonder May describes.  I enjoy walking in the woods, watching heavenly bodies, staring into a river or pond, and trying to draw lessons from such things.  Lately, however, I find myself rushing through them because I have something else I have to do.  Daily, it’s the 9-2-5, of course.  That schedule overloads my weekends with things that have to be done even if I want to spend time appreciating the enchantment I can find, if I have the time.  Sorry, I’m letting the anxious part take center stage.

This is a wonderful book.  I admire the way that May is able to face down her own struggles with grace and remain open to possibilities.  I found such things much more readily when I was at Nashotah House.  There were moments between classes and there were semester breaks.  We lived in the woods.  By a lake.  There was wonder there, for the taking.  Having a young child to introduce to the wonders of nature definitely helped as well.  Children force you to see through new eyes (it’s not a surprise that May has a young son when writing).  Too quickly we grow up and let capitalism tell us what to do.  It takes so much from us and gives so little.  I’m looking out my window at nature, as I write this.  I know it has enchantment to offer.  I also know that work begins in fifteen minutes.

Think

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Those of us who write books have been victims of theft.  One of the culprits is Meta, owner of Facebook.  The Atlantic recently released a tool that allows authors to check if LibGen, a pirated book site used by Meta and others, has their work in its system.  Considering that I have yet to earn enough on my writing to pay even one month’s rent/mortgage, you get a little touchy about being stolen from by corporate giants.  Three of my books (A Reassessment of Asherah, Weathering the Psalms, and Nightmares with the Bible) are in LibGen’s collection.  To put it plainly, they have been stolen.  Now the first thing I noticed was that my McFarland books weren’t listed (Holy Horror and Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, of course, the latter is not yet published).  I also know that McFarland, unlike many other publishers, proactively lets authors know when they are discussing AI use of their content, and informing us that if deals are made we will be compensated.

I dislike nearly everything about AI, but especially its hubris.  Machines can’t think like biological organisms can and biological organisms that they can teach machines to “think” have another think coming.  Is it mere coincidence that this kind of thing happens at the same time reading the classics, with their pointed lessons about hubris, has declined?  I think not.  The humanities education teaches you something you can’t get at your local tech training school—how to think.  And I mean actually think.  Not parrot what you see on the news or social media, but to use your brain to do the hard work of thinking.  Programmers program, they don’t teach thinking.

Meanwhile, programmers have made theft easy but difficult to prosecute.  Companies like Meta feel entitled to use stolen goods so their programmers can make you think your machine can think.  Think about it!  Have we really become this stupid as a society that we can’t see how all of this is simply the rich using their influence to steal from the poor?  LibGen, and similar sites, flaunt copyright laws because they can.  In general, I think knowledge should be freely shared—there’s never been a paywall for this blog, for instance.  But I also know that when I sit down to write a book, and spend years doing so, I hope to be paid something for doing so.  And I don’t appreciate social media companies that have enough money to buy the moon stealing from me.  There’s a reason my social media use is minimal.  I’d rather think.

A Different Lord

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I just wanted to learn the basic outline of Lord Byron’s life without having to commit to the hundreds of pages most of his biographies boast.  Something brief, but authoritative.  Something for which I could be sure the author was vetted.  I hadn’t read any of the Writers and their Works series before.  It gets good reviews and here was the story of Byron in less than 100 pages!  I was excited to get started.  Then I discovered this is mostly about his poems rather than his life.  It contains 21 pages of biography and 60 of poetic analysis.  I really should’ve checked more reviews.  I’m not really into poetic analysis.  I know that those of us who create tend to think of our creations as extensions of ourselves.  I’ve made 3-D art (kind of like sculpture), I’ve drawn, I’ve painted, I’ve written.  These are parts of me that exist in the world.  But really, I just wanted to know what Byron’s life was like.

Actually, I did learn the answers to some of my questions.  Although a “lord,” he didn’t inherit much wealth.  Indeed, the opposite.  His eventual wealth came from his poetry.  This is nearly an impossible dream these days, of course.  His fame brought the spotlight onto his personal life and politics.  A man who easily “fell in love”—he was a Romantic, after all—he had affairs and his politics weren’t those of the majority.  He left England at the advice of a friend, never to return.  He was friends with Percy Shelley, which is common knowledge.  As he made a home, actually several homes, in Europe, he continued to earn good money for his poems.  He was famous and feared, it seems.  Although the book doesn’t describe it, he gave the world its Byronic hero.

I haven’t read much of Byron’s poetry.  That style of writing has never appealed to me.  The poetic life, however, is of endless interest.  Shelley drowned on a boat trip home after visiting him in Italy, and Byron was present at the cremation.  (And I got yelled at in the New York Public Library for trying to snap a picture of the fragments of Shelley’s skull that were on a special display.  Byron had been there in person, of course.)  A few short years later Byron also died while helping to plan and finance the Greek war for independence.  Still, there is more I’d like to know.  But probably not enough to read a biography of several hundred pages, though.

Release Date

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July 16.  That’s the release date for Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.  If you’re so inclined, preordering helps to earn a book attention.  (I know it’s pricey, but thanks for considering it for a second.)  This book has been, like most books, a long time in the making.  As my wife will attest, reading the proofs nearly sent me into a spiral this time around.  It wasn’t because they were bad (I only found 7 mistakes) but it was because of my own doubt about how well I’d done this one.  I found myself between elation at some parts, and dread at others.  I really like this book but I spent my proofreading journey anticipating what critics would say.  I do take a few chances in this one and it has what I believe to be an important message.

Writing books is like walking into a library naked.  There may not be many people there, but those who are can see more than you want them to.  I love the Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  I learned a lot about Washington Irving doing this research.  I learned a lot about Halloween—that’s one of my favorite chapters.  I also like the conceit I applied to the book itself as a labyrinth.  And I’m already looking forward to reading more renditions of the myth once the dust settles a little.  Reading the proofs took a good portion of the weekend, as well as after-work time the previous week.  I could focus on little else.  Books, you see, are parts of their authors.  I feel a little bit crazy for even writing them in the first place.

That having been said, I’m chuffed with a July publication date.  The best time for Halloween books to be available is the summer.  My last two Halloween titles (Holy Horror and Nightmares with the Bible) both came out in November or December.  Not that there were angry mobs at Barnes & Noble demanding them at the end of October.  The other deadline I’d set myself was to have this published before Lindsey Beer’s reboot of Sleepy Hollow hit theaters.  I seem to have managed that one by quite a margin; there’s still been no release date announced.  For her, that is.  I just received mine yesterday.  I guess it’s time to start touching base with those good folks in the Hudson Valley who expressed an interest in the project when I first told them about it.  I’m anticipating Halloween already.

The Talk

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Sex.  It’s the great forbidden topic.  This extends to the truly staggering number of words that have been coopted, either as slang or circumlocutions, to discuss anything related to sex.  The other day I wanted to use the phrase, “finger in the dike.”  I was thinking of that illustration of a little Dutch boy preventing a flood from some of my childhood reading, but I quickly realized that it could be construed as insensitive.  When I was a child I wasn’t like other kids.  Some referred to my interests as “queer,” although I am not a homosexual and am not afraid to admit that I have many friends who are.  That word, though, can’t be used without being thought to refer to sex.  While this is true of many words that were once slurs, such as “gay” and the whole arsenal of derogatory words associated with denigrating our sisters and brothers, other—more neutral—words also fall into this category.

The sheer number of words we use to refer to our genital organs would stun alien (off-world) linguists, perhaps confirming, in their own minds, the advantages of telepathy.  Who isn’t slightly embarrassed when someone introduces himself as “Dick”?  I remember a good friend, who happened to be a bishop (now, sadly, departed), who introduced himself to me as “Dick.”  (I was a seminary professor at the time.)  I had trouble calling him that, although we met on many informal occasions and he even wrote me letters of reference.  Sometimes I ponder how sex has become the most talked about stigma there is.  I’ve been on a private campaign against stigmas lately.  I know this is a fight I cannot win, but still, isn’t it worth talking about?

Probably the most frequently used adjective, among many subcultures, is the f-bomb.  No matter how many times we hear it used (and books have been written on it), it always manages to shock.  Even the word itself has spun a whole effing set of circumlocutions to refer to the word itself.  This is truly a remarkable state of affairs.  I’ve studied linguistics enough to know that some topics are like this, but I’m hard pressed to think of any others that reach the level of sex.  Many are the times when I want to use a phrase I was taught as a kid that I now have to resist.  I had a colleague once respond with open-mouthed shock as I used a word in public that remains perfectly innocent (which is how I was using it) but which could be construed the wrong way. Such is our world.  Ironically, you can see sex in the media quite easily.  Movies, television, the internet.  Just don’t talk about it.

Photo by Gama. Films on Unsplash

Therapy with Books

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I’ve been doing this for years and just found out there’s a name for it.  Bibliotherapy is a treatment method that uses reading to deal with anxiety.  It is closely related to writing therapy, which I also use.  Both have been self-moderated, in my case, and both have been part of my way of coping for decades.  I was actually surprised to learn that these are valid methods of treatment that some therapists use.  I knew about journaling (I suppose blogging counts), but the larger picture was never in focus.  We live in stressful times.  We went through a very stressful four years about, let’s see, eight years ago.  This time I’m intentionally using bibliotherapy.  Reading a book (eyes off the screen, please!) is a way of entering another reality for a while.  Already this year I’ve stepped up my reading, as much as work will allow.  (And now, proofs.)

Writing is therapeutic as well.  Both reading and writing engage your mind.  And can remind you that there are other things to life besides headlines.  I’ve been writing a lot of fiction lately.  That doesn’t mean I’ve been publishing a lot of it—that part’s still very difficult for me—but writers do it because that’s what writers do.  And it makes me feel better.  More balanced.  One of the truly difficult things in my life is when I’m on a roll, particularly with fiction, then I have to stop for work.  The whiplash is almost too much some days.  I realize that you can’t make a living out of pouring your soul into words, unless you’re very lucky.  And even then I suppose it might soon start to feel like work.  Maybe some day I’ll find out, but until then reading and writing will see me through.

I know I’m not alone in this.  There are other people out there who spend as much time as possible between the pages and/or with pen in hand.  There’s nothing like it.  These therapies can change your mood.  Give you hope.  Make you feel complete.  And this can happen whether something you’ve written gets published or not.  I admit to having seen therapists from time to time; I probably should do it more.  None of them, however, have suggested bibliotherapy.  It’s something I stumbled onto myself.  That’s probably no surprise.  I bumble my way through life most of the time.  We all know, I suspect, when our brains are firing properly, what makes us feel better.  The shelves that surround me most of every day certainly know.  And there is a name for it.

Proofing Yourself

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Some publishers give you advance warning.  Many do not.  As a struggling writer, after I submit one manuscript I move on to the next project, knowing proofs will eventually come.  The thing is, I’m obsessive.  When I’m in the middle of a project I can think of little else, thoughts of it leaking into other activities throughout the day.  I’m in the middle of one such project, as I have been for at least three months now.  Then the proofs came.  If you write books you know that proofs always come with deadlines.  You need to drop everything and prioritize them.  I read many academic books with tons of errors, and I think I know why.  If proofs come at an inopportune time, you read them as other required activities (I’m looking at you, 9-2-5) permit.  For me, it’s difficult to let go of my present project.  My current fascination.

The proofs for Sleepy Hollow as American Myth arrived yesterday.  I’m excited for this book.  I have hopes of reaching out to local magazines and pitching stories about the Legend this autumn.  But I’m red hot into a new project.  My mind is of an age where there’s no guarantee that I’ll remember precisely what I was thinking if I lay aside my present project for a week to read the proofs.  Indeed, the last two weekends have been so busy with other things that I haven’t had time to watch any horror movies at all.  Just yesterday I awoke at 4 a.m. feeling hopelessly behind already, a feeling that lasted all day.  Then at 4 p.m. the proofs arrived. ( For context, 4 a.m. is late for me.  I’ve been waking up later due to that pointless ritual of annual time changes which, like everything else, the government can’t seem to get right.  In any case, proofs trump all.)

My time is extremely regimented.  I had to drop all committee work at our local faith community because the meetings were all in the evening, scheduled for after when I’d normally be asleep.  I wake early to write and read before the snowplow of the 9-2-5 throws me off the road for another day.  Everyone who talks to me feels that they don’t have time for what’s important any more.  The proofs are here and I’ll get them back by the deadline.  I’ve never been late once told when they have to be in.  My accountant tells me that anything that leads to royalties, no matter how small, counts as a second job.  I hope this one sells well enough to make it feel like that.  In the meantime, please don’t come knocking because I’ll pretend I’m not at home.

Dangerous Driving

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It reminded me of the time my manager fell down into the basement.  It also makes me think I must be neurodivergent.  Yesterday we were helping my brother in New Jersey get some things in order in his house.  He lives about an hour and a half from us and when the GPS showed us our options to get home we decided to go shunpiking.  I find something atmospheric, and maybe a little haunted, about driving along roads next to a river.  We crossed into Pennsylvania just north of Trenton and followed “River Road” home.  This stretch of road, mostly highway 32, is almost impossibly quaint.  I’d driven sections of it before, but not the whole stretch.  It was a pleasant day but we’d just come off of a period of rain and high winds.  The winds were still up, and have been gusting for about a week now.

After somewhere over an hour on this pleasant drive, we saw a motorcycle stopped in the road.  I slowed way down, unsure of what I was seeing (this starts the neurodivergent part), and I saw a man staggering across the road to lay down on the berm.  I could see branches on the road.  Unsure what to do, I pulled up next to him and offered to call 911 (my wife actually suggested that, since I didn’t know what to do. She’s better in a crisis than me.).  By then the people in the cars behind us had gotten out and one of them indicated they had medical training and that help was on the way.  The man indicated he’d been driving his motorcycle and the branch came down on him, or right in front of him—he was pretty dazed and confused.  Not wanting to throw my own ignorance and ineptitude into the mix, I pulled over, and my wife and I got out of the car and started clearing branches from the road.  Kay and I, and by now others, had pretty much cleared the road and, unsure what to do, and since there were many people attending the man, I drove off.

Image credit: Doug Kerr, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license, some rights reserved, via Flickr

That incident made me very reflective.  When I worked at Ritz Camera in Brookline, Massachusetts, one day my manager didn’t see that the cellar door (inside the store) was open.  We heard a scream and a thud and I ran to the door and pulled it back open.  The door had to be held by a hook and eyelet being joined and while I was trying to do that, one of my coworkers brushed past and down the stairs to help our manager.  Later, my co-worker ribbed me for being more concerned about the door than the person.  I was actually trying to help our manager, but in my mind, going down the stairs only to have the door fall on my head made no sense.  It turned out the manager was fine; a trip to the ER showed nothing seriously wrong with her.  I don’t know about that man by the side of the road.  I was only glad that, as my wife noted, so many people had stopped to help.  I just hope he, like my manager, was okay.

Deep Backlist

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It’s kind of a personal archaeology.  Exploring the terrain of one’s own mind, that is.  Back in January, I mentioned my “deep backlist,” which is actually my “to read” list stored on an online book vendor site.  When it comes time to buy (or provide a gift request for) a new book, this list is my first stop.  I started the list in 2010.  Since I’m cautious about book buying (believe it or not), there are many items on that list that never got purchased.  And if I go back far enough, I have to confess to myself, there are books I really don’t want to read anymore.  At least not at this time.  That list, however, is a snapshot of my interests at the time an item was entered.  I don’t delete things from it unless I actually get them.  Life has taught me that when interests fade it’s usually not permanent.

Sometimes I think I should be more intentional about my reading.  When I was writing Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, I was adding lots of books related to the subject.  Many of them came off the list as I purchased and read them, but not all.  Although I’m currently involved in my next writing project or two, I don’t remove the remaining Sleepy Hollow-inspired books because I may well, depending on length of life, come back to them.  The same is true of all my books from Holy Horror on.  Depending on where I am on that list, I can tell what book I was working on, and not a few that never got finished.  An accountant once told me that if you are writing books to earn money (as paltry as those earnings may be), the books you buy may be tax write-offs as business expenses.  Such is the mind of capitalism.

My wishlist is a personal archaeology of some poignancy.  It took me many years after being shunted out of academia (no matter how dark) before I found employment stable enough to allow for me to start writing books again.  Weathering the Psalms was started around 1997 or 1998.  It was published in 2014.  Even after that it took a couple years to realize that I could write Holy Horror.  And there are other books that, if I’m honest with myself, I know I won’t have time to write or finish.  I find scrolling through my “deep backlist” an inspiring but melancholy exercise.  We all have layers, and strangely enough, even the books that we wanted to read, or just remember, can speak volumes about who we are.

Imagine Monsters

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Adulthood is where you begin to recognize the folly of growing up.  Like most people, when I “matured” I was ashamed of things I made as a child and, regretfully, threw them away.  This came back to me recently as I was thinking of a sketchbook—actually a scrapbook that I repurposed in my tween years.  I love to draw.  I don’t do it as much now as I’d like (thanks, work!), but I was encouraged in it by art teachers throughout school who thought I had a little talent.  The sketchbook, however, was only ever shown to my brothers, but mostly only looked at by me.  This particular project was where I was making up monsters.  As with my writing, I’d never taken any drawing classes, but I had an active (some say overactive) imagination.  (That’s still true.)  

In any case, a discussion with my daughter brought back memories of this book I’d discarded by the time I went to college.  I still remember some members of the menagerie I’d concocted.  Even now that I’ve seen hundreds of monster movies, most of those I’d fabricated as a child have no peers that I’ve seen.  These weren’t monsters to be incorporated into stories—they were purely visual.  Although, I can say that my first attempted novel (probably around the age of 15) was about a monster.  I got away with being interested in monsters in high school, but college was a wholesale attempt to eradicate them.  Even so my best friend from my freshman year (who left after only a semester) and I made up a monster that lived in the library.

As an academic, until very recent years, monsters were off limits.  If you wanted to be sidelined (and in my case it turns out that it wouldn’t have mattered) you could explore such outré subjects.  Now it turns out that you can get mainstream media attention if you do (as a professor, but not, it seems, as an editor).  I’m sitting here looking back over half-a-century of inventing monsters, with a sizable gap in the middle.  The interest was always there, even as I strove to be a good undergrad, seminarian, and graduate student.  Now I can say openly that monsters make me happy.  I can also say, wistfully, that I’d been mature enough to keep that sketchbook that preserved a part of my young imagination.  It was tossed away along with the superhero cartoons I used to draw.  And the illustrations of favorite songs, before music videos were a thing.  Growing up is overrated. 

A surviving drawing, unfinished

Dead Darlings

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The thing about being a writer is that there’s no one size fits all.  I watched Kill Your Darlings because it is an example of dark academia, or so it’s sometimes presented.  I have read some Beat Generation writers, but the movie made me feel very ignorant of that aspect of American counter-culture.  The movie is based on true events and such things as coincidences of writers always makes me feel terribly alone.  In case you don’t know the story (I didn’t) Allen Ginsberg came under the influence of Lucien Carr at Columbia.  Carr had been surviving at the university by the writing of his one-time lover David Kammerer.  Carr introduces Ginsberg to William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and the four (excluding Kammerer) kick off what would become much of the Beats.  Carr, however, kills Kammerer and Ginsberg, who has become Carr’s lover, must decide what to do.

Ginsberg grew up in a broken home, as did Carr.  I could relate to their feelings of loss.  Of course, the Beats relied on drugs and alcohol and sex to write, breaking the rules of institutions like Columbia.  Now that I’ve written my “million words” (and more), posted for free on this blog, I think back to my literary friends.  Both in high school and college I knew guys (I was awkward with girls) who dreamed, or at least talked, of becoming writers.  Over the years this pool has dried up.  Seminary and doctoral study were too focused to find those who really wanted to write.  Academic books, maybe, but not forms of self-expression.  Now, I’ve never used drugs, nor have I wanted to.  I write nonfiction books that are creative forms of self-expression.  Naturally, they don’t sell.

Many of us who write were raised in broken homes.  With tattered dreams we set out to try to make something of our lives in a hostile world.  My behavior in college wasn’t exactly conventional, as any of my roommates could attest.  It often appeared that way on the outside, even as poems rejected from the literary magazine were called “too depressing.”  So I pursued an academic career, but there was, whether anybody saw in or not, always a wink in my eye.  The same is true of my writing since.  This blog scratches the surface.  There’s a huge pile of fiction, and yes, poems, underneath.  They may someday be found, but I do have my doubts.  Movies about writers will do this to me.  Even if they don’t really fit my tastes in dark academia.

Asteroid

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So, that asteroid.  Good thing Trump won’t be in office in 2032.  Well, it’s only a three percent chance it’ll hit us, but chances are things can’t get much worse anyway.  It might be a good idea to make some plans now—but wait, we currently deny science is real and spend our time renaming bodies of water.  Hmm, quite a pickle.  If science were real it would tell us that an asteroid is not the same as a meteor, although it can become one.  Back in high school astronomy class—yes, our Sputnik-era high school had its own planetarium—I learned that the difference between a meteoroid, a meteor, and a meteorite.  Want to go to school?  Here’s the quick version: a meteor is something in Earth’s atmosphere (thus, meteorology).  A meteoroid is a space rock, or even dust, in the solar system somewhere.  Once it enters our atmosphere it becomes a meteor.

Most meteors burn up as shooting stars and never hit the ground.  Yes, that atmosphere is a pretty good idea.  If a piece does make it to the ground, that piece is a meteorite.  Although your chances of being hit by a meteorite are minuscule, they can be impish.  Not far from here, a few years back, a meteor smashed through the backseat window of a car after a couple had just put their groceries inside.  The meteorite stopped inside a carton of ice cream.  The window had to be replaced, and I can just imagine the conversation with the insurance company.  Or take that meteorite heard on a recording for the first time.  In Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, a doorbell camera caught a meteorite strike just outside someone’s house.  Both of these were tiny critters, though.

Our 2032 friend is quite a bit bigger.  Sometimes when large meteors heat up, they’ll explode in what is called a bolide.   In western Pennsylvania back in January of 1987 (if I recall correctly) my brother and I were working on a jigsaw puzzle during the holiday break when our house shook.  A loud bang had us worried—we lived in a refinery town, and explosions weren’t a welcome report.  We ran outside to find neighbors also outside looking around.  We later learned that a flaming fireball had gone overhead before exploding, a bolide.  The actual explosion took place quite a distance from us, but sound travels in our atmosphere.  So a possible near miss is scheduled eight years from now.  Let’s hope people show some sense at the polls before that happens. Or we could just rename it MAGA and hope that it hits somewhere else.

An asteroid. Image credit: NASA, public domain

In Praise of Paper

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I write quite a lot.  I’ve done so for decades.  As I’ve tried to carve out a writer’s life for myself I noticed a few things.  I’ll start a story or novel and put it aside.  Sometimes for a decade or more, then come back to it.  I recently found what looks to be a promising novel that I began writing, by hand, back in the last century.  As electronics forced themselves more and more into my life, I began writing it on my computer.  I must’ve picked this story up a few years back because I clearly began revising it, but I ran into a problem.  The program in which I’d written it—Microsoft Word—was no longer supported by Apple products.  I eventually found a workaround and was able to extract a Rich Text Format from files that my computer told me were illegible.  If you want illegible, I felt like telling it, go back to the original hand-written chapters!

I dusted this off (virtually) belatedly, and started working again.  Then I reached chapter four.  That’s where I’d stopped my most recent revision.  Then I discovered why.  Near the end of the chapter were two paragraphs full of question marks with an occasional word scattered in.  A part of the Word file that the RTF couldn’t read.  Frustrated and heartbroken—there’s no way I can remember what this said some thirty years after it was initially written—I simply stopped.  This time I went to the attic and found the hand-written manuscript.  I went to the offending chapter only to find that the corrupted passage was missing.  It was what we used to call a “keyboard composition” and it was eaten by the equivalent of electronic moths.

Photo by Everyday basics on Unsplash

Now, I’m no techie, but I just don’t understand why a word processing file can no longer be read by the program in which it was written.  Publishers urge us to ebooks but how many times in my life have I seen a new system for preserving electronic files fold, with the loss of all the data?  It’s not just a few.  And they’re asking us to make literature disposable.  If I have a book on my shelf and I need to look up a passage, I can do so.  Even if I bought the book half a century ago and even if the book had been printed a century before that.  I’m aware of the irony that this blog is electronic—I used to print out all of the posts—and I have the feeling that my work is being sacrificed to that void we call electronic publication.  That’s why I keep the handwritten manuscripts in my attic.

A Plea

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One literary Saturday recently I found myself in the attic.  When we first moved to this house I sometimes wrote up there but I quickly learned that with no heating it was intolerably chilly on autumnal mornings, and that didn’t speak well for the coming winter.  Nevertheless, I set up a shelf with my fiction writing on it.  I was looking for something on that shelf when I discovered many things I’d forgotten.  Novels mostly.  I don’t know how many I’ve started, but I have completed six (now close to seven).  Going through the papers and folders on that shelf I found about 250 handwritten pages of another novel—one that I’d completely forgotten.  There were stacks of short stories, also handwritten, awaiting some recognition.  I haven’t had a ton of success in getting fiction published—the current count is 33 short stories—but I was inspired by what I found.

When my wife and I visited a lawyer some years back to make out our wills, I kept trying (unsuccessfully) to interject a literary executor.  At that point I had published only three books and two of them were academic.  Besides, there’d probably be an extra charge for adding that codicil.  I guess what I fear is that all of this work will just get dumped when I die.  Retirement doesn’t look like a realistic possibility for me, and what I need is time to sort it out.  Some of the novels aren’t good.  I know that.  Some are.  One was actually under a book contract for a couple of years before the publisher decided to kill it when the acquisitions editor left.  I haven’t found a replacement publisher yet.  Then, a few years back, my laptop started complaining about the amount of writing I was asking it to remember.  I had to buy external hard drives to store some of my writing.  Even I forget it’s there sometimes.

Graphomania should have its definition expanded to include those whose thoughts overflow to the point that they’re constantly writing.  There’s a reason I get up so early in the morning every day.  Up there in the attic I found what I was looking for and pulled it off the shelf.  A half-written novel that I had, unwittingly, started to write again presuming that the original had been lost.  All of the writing has been done while trying to hold down a demanding 9-2-5 with no sabbatical and few vacation days.  Not all of it is finished.  Not all of it is good.  But someone, I hope, will stand in front of the dumpster on some future day and say, “This doesn’t get thrown away.”