Migration

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Since the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting (AAR/SBL) is coming up soon, I got to thinking about my experience of the event.  I went to some memorable meetings and missed a few for various reasons.  I’m at the point where I don’t really crave attending anymore, but when I should go, I do.  My first experience was in 1991, in Kansas City.  I flew back from Edinburgh for that one.  It was the last time it met in Kansas City.  It was obvious, however, that this would become an annual pilgrimage for me if I ever landed in academia.  My first couple of years teaching were part-time with a full-time load of courses but Nashotah House had some faculty development funds to help pay my way.  My wife would go and we’d stay with friends whenever possible.  It became an academic addiction.

I skipped the year my daughter was born, but when AAR/SBL met in New Orleans we drove down from Wisconsin.  In 1998 I attended the infamous meeting at Disney in Orlando.  Then in 2000 we met in Opryland in Nashville.  This was an experimental phase, I’m guessing, but themed locations weren’t popular with serious scholars and soon we were back to major cities without theme-park vibes.  Having lost my toehold in academia, I missed the 2005 meeting in Philadelphia, but was back for the Washington meeting, representing Gorgias Press.  The three-year separation that started in 2008 I missed, except for the first lonely year in Boston.  I was back for San Francisco in 2011, working for Routledge.  Two years later I was in Baltimore, staying off site, with my current employer. I drove down for that one.

In 2018 I missed the Denver meeting because of a snowstorm panic in Newark, after sleeping the night on the airport floor.  Then the pandemic kept me away for a couple of years, but one of those was virtual anyway.  The last one I attended was 2022 in Denver.  This year I’m scheduled to be in Boston.  Even when my career has slipped off the academic rails, this meeting has been a rather constant touch-stone for November.  Now that I no longer give papers—the last one was on Sleepy Hollow in Atlanta, I believe, ten years ago—the spark has gone out of it for me.  I am glad to be heading back to Boston, however, on somebody else’s dime.  I’ve got some Poe sights to see in my off hours there.  And some 33 years of history to recollect.

Mighty Mouse

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The only way I write my books is by living a regimented life.  It’s front loaded too.  Most of the work is done sometime between two and seven a.m., before starting work.  Disruptions to that time aren’t welcome, but then, many things in life aren’t.  Perhaps the most disruptive weekday event is when a mouse makes its way into the house.  We live in an old house and mice find their way into even more recent structures.  I can’t see killing them for doing what they’re evolved to do—we began using a humane trap when I found a mouse trapped by its paw back at Nashotah House.  I couldn’t stand seeing its distress, so we bought a cage trap that works pretty well.  Fortunately, we don’t get many rodentine visitors, but when we do, my crowded morning becomes even more busy.

I jog at first light and this time of year it’s straight to work after that.  I like to take our mice into the woods, far enough away that they’re not likely to find their way back.  Ideally that means driving, but since my wallet’s in the bedroom where my wife’s still asleep, during weekdays it generally means somewhere along the jogging path.  The trap is probably on the scale of a room at the Ritz for a mouse, and I don’t want to be scolded if I choose to release them in the wrong place.  I put the trap into a bag, for privacy.  Now, I normally jog to the trail but the trap rattles and I can’t imagine how horror movie this must be for a mouse.  Besides, running down the street with a bag in your hand in the dark isn’t at all suspicious.  Why not just paint a dollar sign on the outside of it and be done with it?

 I try to make sure the release spot is across a big road or a river.  There are places like that on the jogging trail.  But then, with the mouse safely released, I have to find an inconspicuous place to leave the trap in the bag so that early-morning garbage collectors don’t take it.  Jogging with a rattling trap is just a bit too strange for even me.  Although I’m an early jogger, I’m seldom the only one on the trail just as it’s light enough to see.  All of this adds up to considerable time carved out of my usual writing period.  And all because of a mouse.  The small can be significant.  Maybe I should write a book about it. 

Naming the Dead

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It probably just goes with the territory, but I’ve noticed something.  A big part of my job is searching for people on the internet.  (Academics, of course.)  Mostly these are folks I don’t know, some of them with very common names.  This presents special challenges, of course.  Every once in a while, though, you search for a name and pretty much every entry you find is an obituary.  I’m not talking about someone prominent who has died, but rather several people with the same name who’ve passed away.  The other day, after four or five pages of Google I found nobody alive.  That particular name wasn’t an “old fashioned” name either.  It could be (perhaps is) still a very common name.  It does get me pondering whether some names are “safer” than others.  Is anyone by this name still alive?

We place a lot of stock in our names.  Being the way that others get our attention, and identify us, they do have importance.  And many names are common—parents aren’t always the creative sort.  And the internet is a source of frustration when trying to narrow down a common name and attach it to someone you don’t already know.  Growing up, kids want to be like everyone else—no standing out in the herd.  “Wiggins,” where I grew up, was an unusual name.  We got teased for it quite a lot.  When my mother remarried, my brothers and I went by our stepfather’s common last name for a few years.  In seminary I decided to revert to my birth name—Wiggins.  I was wanting to do two things: reclaim my heritage, and stand out a little.  Even so, a web-search for Steve Wiggins will bring up at least four or five individuals not me, including an obituary or two.

Before the web, when trying to find a scholar you had to use letters.  (Or maybe the phone, but cold calls weren’t really professional). You’d send them a letter.  In a way, the web is a great equalizer.  But it favors those with names that are somewhat less common.  Some people change their names—performers and some authors do this to make their persona more to their liking—but this is a fraught activity.  I know from switching back to my birth name that the process is complex and if you try it after you’ve started to publish things it adds whole new layers of complications.  So I spend quite a bit of time searching for people who aren’t easily found.  Not infrequently I seem to be naming the dead.

Routine Weirdness

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I’m weird.  Nobody has to tell me that.  Like most people, I suspect, with my mental condition, I value routine.  Although the time I post on this blog varies, that’s usually due to one of two factors—the wobbling of the earth, and whether I get wrapped up in something that makes me forget.  The wobbling earth changes the time of sunrise rather dramatically, of course.  I jog at first light and my routine before that jog is pretty solid.  Then something comes along to interrupt it.  I have to begin planning the day before how to make it all fit.  So, routine bloodwork.  The lab where I have it done is within walking distance.  Of course, you have to go in fasting so everybody wants to get there first.  The lab opens at 6:30 a.m. and this time of year vampires are still safe out and about at that time.  

Edvard Munch, Vampire. Image credit: Google Art Project, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

But by 6:30 I’m usually dressed for my jog.  I’ve been writing and reading, typically for three hours.  I forgot to wash my jogging clothes this week and this was a Friday.  Hmm, better think about that.  Then there’s the whole question of my eating routine.  If I’m going to have something it has to be a couple hours before I jog—can’t do that with anything on my stomach.  Will I be too weak with nothing until afterwards?  After all I’ll be missing a vial or two of blood.  And there’s the matter of my shoes.  I only wear my jogging shoes on the local rail trail.  It’s pea gravel and it’s been raining lately which means they get a bit muddy.  All the rest of my shoes are in the bedroom where my wife’s (sensibly) still asleep.  Besides, I need to be on the trail right after giving blood, and changing shoes takes too long.

I’ll need to change my shirt when I get home.  The jogging tops are a bit too much to expect even a phlebotomist to put up with.  Besides, the under layers are tight-fitting since it’s only in the thirties today.  Why all this fuss about going to the lab before work?  That’s the magical word.  Work.  Also, lines have always been a problem for me.  Although I take a book I dislike waiting in line.  I need to get there before the doors open.  Be first in line.  There’s already a car in the parking lot, but standing beside the door in the cold has to earn you something, doesn’t it?  I’m back home just as the sun is rising.  Throw on my under layers and out before anyone else gets on the path.  I know I’m weird.

Author Pages

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It takes me awhile, sometimes.  Maybe it’s a generational thing.  I’ve been blogging for sixteen years now (my blog is a teenager!) and it only just occurred to me that I should be putting links to authors’ pages when I post about their books.  I know links are what makes the web go round but I assumed that anyone whose book I’ve read is already better known than yours truly.  Why would they need my humble help?  Well, I’ve been trying to carve out the time to go back and edit my old posts about books, linking to authors’ pages—there are so many!  In any case, this has led to some observations about writers.  And at least this reader.  Most commercial authors have a website.  Not all, of course.  People my age who had earlier success with writing tend not to have a site since they already have a fan base (I’m guessing).  Most fiction writers in the cohort younger than me have pages, and I’m linking to those.

I’ve noticed, during this exercise, that my reading falls into two main categories: novels and academic books.  I suppose that’s no surprise, although I do read intelligent nonfiction from non-professors as well.  In the nonfiction category, it’s fairly rare to find academics with their own websites.  They probably get the validation they require from work, and being featured on the school webpages.  Or some will use Academia.edu to make a website.  As an editor I know that promoting yourself is important, even for academic authors.  Few do it.  Then I took a look around here and realized, as always, that I fall between categories.  No longer an academic, neither have I had any commercial success with my books.  I’ve fallen between two stools with this here website.  I do pay for it, of course.  Nothing’s free. 

Almost nobody links to my website.  This isn’t self-pity; WordPress informs you when someone links to your site and that hasn’t happened in years.  Links help with discoverability on the web, so my little website sits in a very tiny nook in a low-rent apartment in the part of town where you don’t want to be after dark.  And I thought to myself, maybe other authors feel the same.  Maybe they too need links.  So I’m adding them.  As I do so I hope that I’ll also learn a thing or two.  I’m trying to learn how to be a writer.  It just takes me some time before things dawn.  Maybe it’s just my generation.

Hallowed Halls

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Every time I read a short story collection I tell myself I should do so more often.  Knowing that you’re only committing yourself for maybe thirty or forty minutes at a time is one way to incorporate more reading into a life that’s incredibly busy.  I read In These Hallowed Halls, edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane, because, as its subtitle declares, it’s A Dark Academia Anthology.  As with nonfiction anthologies, it is a mixed bag.  The stories are all well written and all were enjoyable to read.  They also display some of the breadth of dark academia.  Most of the stories are literary (as a genre), others dip into science fiction and horror.  Dark academia doesn’t specify whether a book (or story) will be speculative or not.  As someone who writes short fiction, it seems that some of my tales might wag that way.

In any case, discussing a collection is tricky because there is such variety.  Some of the stories stayed with me beyond reading the next, which could be quite different.  Others I have to go back to remind myself what happened.  These days it can take several weeks to finish a book and a lot can happen in real life in that time span.  The stories that stay with me the most have obsessive narrators, or characters who are obsessed.  This kind of story, I know from experience, is difficult to get published.  Many of us who write, I suspect, do get obsessed.  An idea latches on and won’t let go.  Of course, most of us also have jobs that force the jaws open and drop us down in the world of the ordinary again.

Another thread that runs through many of these stories is how students struggle for money.  That’s true to life.  Thinking back to both college and seminary, there were times in both settings that I was working two part-time jobs as well as being a full-time student.  And living like, well, a student.  That experience, except for the truly privileged, is fairly common and our writers here recognize, and perhaps remember, that.  The other unavoidable theme when writing about young people in college is, shall we say, hooking up.  For many of us, college is that period in life when, thinking of our futures, and following our hormones, we start looking for love.  (I know, high schoolers do that too, but college has a way of focusing your energies.)  All of that swirling around the darkness that sometimes falls over our tender years makes this dark academia collection worth reading cover to cover.

House Spiders

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I give them names, the spiders who choose to live in our house.  That’s how I named Henry, shown in the photo.  I grew up with an almost debilitating arachnophobia, and as with most of my fears, worked hard to overcome it.  So when a spider moves in, I let them stay.  Unless they’re too big.  Here’s where it becomes interesting.  Like quantum mechanics, there seems to be an arbitrary point when something is “too big” for the rules to apply.  What is that tipping point?  The other day I bumbled into the kitchen early to get some water, having given up coffee years ago.  There was a spider that I could see from across the room.  It was very large.  It’s a sign of how much I’ve overcome my phobia that I was able to walk around the counter and to the sink to fill up.  I kept a wary eye across the room, however, in case Octavian made any funny moves.

The spider held very still, as arachnids often do when they know they’ve been spotted.  I sometimes wonder if they know how scary they are to other creatures.  I searched around for a jar large enough to catch and release, without pinching any legs, and crept over.  Turns out Octavian was faster than I am first thing in the morning.  And, honestly, I was still recovering from a vaccine that had knocked me out the day before.  At least I can blame that.  I wonder if that’s one of the reasons fear of spiders is so widespread—they’re fast.  Or is it something inherently menacing about those eight legs?  I’ve never experienced any kind of octopus phobia, so I can’t think that it’s merely the number.  The jointed legs?  That seem disproportionate to the body size?  Whatever it is, days later I’m still cautious in the kitchen.

I have a great appreciation for spiders.  I don’t like to be startled by them, but otherwise, if they keep their distance, I’m fine with them.  I do wonder what they think, living in a world of giants.  Some insects, in the same size range as arachnids, seem ignorant of the human threat.  It’s not unusual for an ant to find its way inside and walk right up your foot and leg, oblivious to the danger.  They seem to have no fear.  Spiders, however, do.  They’re very good at running and hiding.  I like to think they know our house is generally a safe space, until the vacuum cleaner comes out.  When I’m behind it, I always try to give Henry and his friends a chance to get out of the way.

Unwritten

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It has been clear to me for some time now that I won’t live long enough to finish all the books I’m writing in my head.  A good number of them have a head start on my hard disc, but as Morpheus says, “Time is always against us.”  The largest culprit in the 9-2-5 job.  Eight hours is a huge amount of time to devote each day, no matter how you slice it.  Since eight hours are required for sleep, or trying to sleep, that means work is half of each day’s waking hours.  The other half includes things like making meals, washing clothes, family time, paying bills, running the vacuum, exercising because you sit in front of a screen all day, and, of course, yard work.  Plants don’t have the same constraints that humans do and can get to the business of growing larger 24/7, as long as the weather cooperates.

Some days I grow reflective about this.  My daughter often asks why I don’t draw or paint more.  I love doing both.  The answer is time.  Even weekends are eaten up with shopping for the food you need to get through the week, and yes, the yard was bigger than I realized, and the house needed more repair work than anticipated.  You see, writing well requires a lot of practice.  And even more reading.  Any successful writer (which I am not yet) will tell you that reading is essential.  I do read a lot.  A friend recently sent me an article about a writer whose heirs calculated he’d read at least 4,000 books.  I know that I’ve read about 1,200 since 2013.  I also know that I can’t count them all before that time.  I went through our living room shelves and counted 500 I’d read there, and that’s only one room.  

Ironically, as a professor reading time is limited.  Unless you have a research only post.  I read a lot as a kid and a ton as a student.  When I started teaching I had less time, except on semester breaks and I tried to read as many books as possible during those interludes.  Then the 9-2-5 began.  My current pace of reading began when trying to live as an adjunct between Rutgers and Montclair State.  Montclair was a 70-mile drive, so between classes I started reading voraciously.  Ironically, the commute to my 9-2-5 spurred me to start writing books again.  By then I was practically fifty.  Since my nonfiction books take about five years to write, well, the math’s not in my favor.  Time to stop my musing, because the 9-2-5 begins shortly.

Professionalism

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We’re all tightly packed together here on the internet.  Social media is a fuzzy category and now includes such platforms as LinkedIn, which I think of mainly as a place to hang your shingle while looking for a job.  I chose, many years ago, to make myself available online.  This sometimes leads to a strange familiarity.  It isn’t unusual for me to have an author hopeful to contact me through my personal email or through LinkedIn, especially, to try to push their project.  (Such people have not read this blog deeply.)  One thing acquisitions editors crave most highly is professionalism.  Being accosted on LinkedIn, or in your personal email, is not the way to win an editor’s favor.  Some of us have lives outside of work.  Some of us write books of our own and don’t blast them out to all of our contacts on LinkedIn.  Professionalism.

It’s tough, I know.  You want to promote your book.  (I certainly do.)  It seems strange to say that blogging is old-fashioned, but it is.  (Things change so fast around here.)  But you could start a blog.  Or better yet, a podcast.  Or a YouTube channel.  You can blast all you want through X, Bluesky, Facebook, Tumblr, or Instagram.  I admit to being old fashioned, but LinkedIn is for professional networking, not doing quotidian business.  It may surprise some denizens of this web world that some publishers don’t permit official business through social media.  Email (I know, the dark ages!) is still the medium preferred.  Work email, not personal accounts.  Some authors (believe it or not) still try to snail mail things in.  Publishing is odd in that many people, and I count my younger self among them, suppose you can just do it without learning how it works.  Most editors, I suspect, would be glad to say a word or two about professionalism.

Photo by Ben Rosett on Unsplash

Professionalism is what makes a commute to the office on a crowded NYC subway train possible.  We all know what’s permissible in this crowded situation.  We know to wait until someone checks in at work before asking them about a project we have in mind.  (If you’re friends with an editor that’s different, but you need to get to know us first.)  When I started this blog I was “making a living” as an adjunct professor.  I was hanging out my shingle.  I also started a LinkedIn account.  Then I started writing nonfiction books again.  Since those days I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to promote them.  Professionally done, if at all possible.

Banning Books

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For many years I’ve celebrated Banned Books Week by reading a banned book.  What with Republicans wanting only white, hetero, history-denying titles approved, I’m pretty sure that most books I read are banned somewhere.  Banned books, of course, see sales bumps and benefit the publisher and author.  So instead of reading a noted banned book, this year I’ll hang out my shingle here with but shallow hopes that it will be read.  I’m pretty sure, any agents out there, that at least one of my novels would be a banned book.  Maybe all of them.  You see, in my fiction I’m not the mild-mannered, inoffensive person who blogs here everyday for free.  There’s a reason that I keep my pen name secret.  I’m pretty sure that most people who know me would be surprised, if not shocked, by what appears in my fiction.

Writing, you see, is where we express the ideas in our heads.  I may seem to yak about everything on this blog, but in reality, I’m quite guarded.  Many of the horror movies I discuss, for instance, have ideas or scenes that I simply leave unaddressed.  I’m trying not to offend anyone here.  (A friend of mine who does publish fiction mentioned recently that a significant other in her family suggested that her writing wasn’t controversial enough to be picked up by publishers.  I think there could be something to that.)  While my mother was alive, I took special care that she wouldn’t discover any of my fiction.  Now that she’s gone these two years, I still protect her name with my own nom de guerre.  I really don’t want to hurt anybody.  I do, however, need to express myself.

Some of my fiction is horror.  Some is just plain weird.  The novels are well written, I think, and I’m open to editing.  (Agents, I am an editor—I know how this game works!)  As long as we’re stuck in a morass of banning books, why not look at a writer who’s more controversial than you might believe?  I’ve been writing daily for going on half-a-century now.  Think about that.  Think about the sheer number of controversial thoughts one might have in that amount of time!  Add graphomania to the recipe, with just a squeeze of talent and you’ve got banned books to last a lifetime!  I’m not sure any of the books I’m currently reading (five actively, at this point) formally appear on a  banned list.  But if you want to find one that almost certainly will be, well, my shingle’s out there if you care to take a look.

A banned book, in some districts

The Season

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I learned about the Horror Writers Association years ago, shortly after I started publishing horror stories in 2009.  I couldn’t join because you had to have earned at least $30 from a publication.  I took this to mean a fictional one and I never made it beyond that benchmark until this year.  (It’s possible I misunderstood and could’ve joined for Holy Horror and beyond.  I think the point is they want to know you’re serious.)  In any case, these folks may be my tribe.  During the month of October the website has a set of free blog posts available to the public.  Mine—located here—dropped yesterday.  It deals with nonfiction, of course, since I’m still not finding much traction in getting novels published.  One of the weird things about book publishing is that you don’t know, unless you’re already successful, how well your sales are going until after about six months or so.  Sleepy Hollow as American Myth may be flopping for all I know. 

I’ve tried to promote this one as much as I can.  I contacted bookstores and libraries in Sleepy Hollow itself.  I had bookmarks printed and put them in local libraries and bookstores.  I arranged a discussion at the upcoming Easton Book Festival.  I told my local writers’ group about it.  Posted on a Halloween Facebook group.  All of this is tricky rather than treaty when a book is priced near $40.  That’s quite a trick, I know.  As Halloween approaches I keep seeing memes and posts about the Headless Horseman.  But I’m not sure if anyone’s finding my book or not.  It’s an anxious period when you write.

Working in publishing for nearly two decades now, I’m starting to realize that there are two ways to relevancy.  One is to be hired by an institution with name recognition—that automatically makes you an expert and everyone want to know what you think.  They’ll even pay you for it.  The second way is to write a book that sells well.  That one’s a bit of a catch-22, however.  To get published these days you need to already have a following.  I suppose that’s what the internet is for.  The best forums at the moment seem to be YouTube and TikTok, but there’s more much traffic there than on a Los Angeles freeway during rush hour.  I’m not sure if many people read the Horror Writers Association Halloween Haunts blog posts.  These folks, however, seem to look at this from a similar perspective.  Maybe a few of them will buy Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.  ’Tis the season.

Dark Pliny

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My current dark academia kick has me looking at the Classics again.  I taught Greek Mythology for three semesters as an adjunct at Montclair State University.  In the course of my New Testament studies I’m sure I encountered some of the classical Greco-Roman writers, but being focused on the Bible at the time, I never really followed through.  Then my doctorate got me interested in even earlier classics.  In any case, I’ve been trying to self-educate myself about Pliny the Younger.  To be honest, this is because he wrote one of the most famous Roman ghost stories.  Pliny wasn’t some guy into woo-woo subjects.  He was a magistrate and a lawyer and a noted orator.  His most famous work is the collection of his letters.  One of those letters tells his ghost stories.  Others describe Mount Vesuvius’ eruptions.  So, Pliny.

Image credit: Daderot, Angelica Kauffmann’s Pliny the Younger and his Mother at Misenum, 79 A.D. (detail), public domain via Wikimedia Commons

My fully-loaded bookshelves don’t have any Pliny.  I’m sure he’s mentioned in many of the books on these shelves, but I don’t have a copy of his letters.  I used BookFinder.com to search for used copies only to discover that the Loeb Classical Library divides his letters into three volumes, which feels like too much for casual reading.  Then I realized that most editions are edited, leaving out some of the, I suspect, less interesting missives.  Even as an editor, I don’t trust editors.  What if they left out the ghost stories because, well, serious scholars pay no attention to such things?  I discovered that Penguin Classics has an edition and from what I can tell, it seems to be complete.  I mark books that I want to remember on Amazon because they have pages even for the obscure stuff.  I try to buy the actual books from Bookshop.org.

What makes all of this noteworthy is that as I was on the Amazon page I noticed that you can “follow the author”—Pliny the Younger himself!  He must be a ghost by now.  So what the heck?  I clicked “Follow.”  I’m not in the habit of following authors on Amazon; I find my books in many different ways and most authors I know don’t like to talk about their writing, so why add another social media commitment?  I’m hoping that Pliny will be more willing to chat about writing.  He may be dead, but I’m not a prejudicial sort of individual.  I won’t hold it against him.  Who knows, maybe in addition to ghosts, I’ll learn something about Vesuvius?  And if he ghosts me, well, at least he’s a professional.

Nostalgic Shadows

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Nostalgia is a funny thing.  Although it can strike at any age, somehow after the half-century mark it’s particularly easy to get swept into it.  As I written about many, many times, I was drawn into the Marilyn Ross Dark Shadows novels as a tween.  In my mid-to-late forties, when the internet made it possible, I started to collect all the volumes from 1 through 32.  It took several years.  I had to find them via BookFinder.com and our level of income didn’t support buying more than one every few months.  Then in 2022, having difficulty locating the last of the original series, I found a seller on eBay offering up the whole set.  The price for that set was less than the least expensive final volume I could find.  I did what any nostalgic guy would do.

We don’t really buy antiques, but I’d been looking for an office desk (this was before the scam).  I’d been using a craft table for a desk for years and it seemed that I really needed something with a better organizational range.  This led me to stop into a local antique shop.  They ended up not having much furniture, but they did have aisles of nostalgia.  A few weeks later when it was too hot and humid to be outdoors, I revisited the shop.  This time, relieved of the burden of seeking a desk, I was able to browse at leisure.  It’s like going to a museum but not having to pay admission.  I turned a corner and I saw something I’d never seen before.  A collection of Marilyn Ross Dark Shadows books.

It wasn’t a full set, but I had, prior to finishing my own collection, never seen more than one or two together in any single place.  As a child I’d buy them at Goodwill.  As an adult, on BookFinder.  All those years in-between, I always looked for them when visiting used bookstores.  I visit said shops whenever possible.  In decades of looking I’d only found one in the wild once or twice, and always by its lonesome.  This was a completely new experience for me.  It was also quite odd to be seeing them and not having any need to buy them.  I have a full set.  The nostalgia was almost overpowering.  I couldn’t help but think of how even a few years ago I’d been pawing through to see if there were any I hadn’t yet found.  All for reliving a bit of my childhood.

Secrets

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It’s a mystery.  All parents do it and even when you’re a parent yourself you’re surprised to find your parents doing it to you.  Keeping secrets, that is.  Parents have their secret lives that they don’t tell their children, and when we’re given a glimpse into that life sometimes we’re shocked.  My mother kept a diary.  Not religiously, and not for much of her life.  I inherited one volume, and I’m afraid to read it.  I tend to be an honest guy.  I try to answer my daughter’s questions with complete openness.  There are, however, some things I won’t talk about.  My secrets.  And despite the fact that I reveal something of myself daily on this blog, I do have many parts of my life that remain unrevealed.  Those of us who write sometimes don’t want everything we put down to be read.  Or maybe we do.

I used to keep a diary.  It was partially to remind me but also, in part, to explain myself.  It’s quite personal and I lost maybe two or three volumes of it years ago.  I stopped keeping it after I got married.  I guess I figured a Ph.D. and publication record would do the job for me.  Probably those missing volumes were with stuff left at home that Mom unwittingly threw away, like our old baseball cards from the early seventies.  Some of my stuff got damaged by water, foreshadowing what’d happen when we moved.  Perhaps they were thrown away then.  They had secrets, I’m sure.  Our private lives are a mystery to others.  That’s one reason that I try to be kind whenever possible.  We don’t know the burdens that others carry.  Why add to them by a sharp reply?  Even typing this, I’m not sure it will end up on the blog or not.  Other pieces haven’t.  Secrets.

Photo by Yogesh Pedamkar on Unsplash

Some intelligent animals try to hide things.  Corvids, for example, look around to see who else is there before hiding food.  I once saw a doe giving birth.  She was in a secluded glen in the early morning and I just happened to be jogging quietly by.  I’ve started multiple autobiographies.  I’m not sure anyone has an interest in reading them, but I have hope.  Despite my secrets, most of which I keep out of the autobiographical musings, I know I have a story to tell.  That’s why I keep at this blog, day after day, year after year.  It brings no money and has only a few followers, but it’s a chance to tell my story.  Even if I keep the secrets closely guarded.

Fragments Etc.

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I’ve never counted, but there’s well over a hundred of them.  And a notebook with at least a thousand more.  What have I got in such abundance?  Ideas for stories that remain unfinished.  I’m not exaggerating or inflating numbers, I assure you.  I’ve been writing short stories for a half-century now, many, no, most unfinished.  Thirty-three have been published.  I was reminded of this recently while reading a nonfiction book that suddenly gave me the ending for a story I’d started many months before.  Perhaps even a couple of years.  I started searching through my electronic files for it and couldn’t find it.  Why?  There were too many stories started with frustratingly short titles (my bad).  To find the culprit, I would need to open each one and remind myself what was inside.

A few months ago, I printed out copies of all eight of my unpublished novels.  I also printed out copies of all my published stories as well.  I never got around to the unfinished majority.  I have a feeling that if I printed them I’d find what I was looking for more easily.  This, even with the ease of electronic life, will be quite an undertaking.  I think it may be a necessary one.  Although I’m hardly well known—I’m an obscure, private intellectual, after all—I do have many fiction ideas.  The stories generally come to me with an impression.  The start of an intriguing tale, for instance, or the end of one.  I then begin writing and either write myself into a corner or I scribble until I realize that I don’t know what happens next.  The story sits, unfinished.  Now and again, however, the missing piece is found.  I try to find the story so I can complete it to send out for several rejections.  Such is the writing life.

Now, if I could do this for more than the paltry time allotted to personal pursuits, courtesy of capitalism, I’m confident that I’d have far more than thirty-something stories published.  At current count I have seventeen stories ready to send out to literary magazines, several of them already rejected a time or two.  Another twenty finished and nearly ready to send out.  And forty just finished, but requiring a bit of spit and polish.  And these aren’t the fragments.  Don’t get me started on the nearing 6,000 posts on this blog.  Is it any wonder I can’t find anything?  I grabbed my notebook of a thousand fragments and jotted a physical note of how that particular story ends, in case I ever find it again.