Another Monday in the wilderness.

Well, I'm still here.  Is everyone as gobsmacked about it as I am?

Guess what, the Blue Notes are playing frozen-rubber-disk sports thing again.  I wonder if watching the hockey game somehow makes me write an entry?  It seems like it has been a recurring theme lately.  Whatever the reason, I'm still writing.  Well, such as it is.

I'm seriously considering revisiting my fantasy novel again.  I wasn't happy with the way it sounded, or read as the case may be.  I wasn't satisfied with my writing, or how the story was developing.  I lost interest and put in on the back burner.  Now, it is on life-support, tucked away in the unfinished fiction folder.  I still believe there is a good story there, maybe I can revive it.  I literally have hundreds of unfinished or barely started story ideas tucked away in that critical care ward of an archive folder.  Some just a couple of paragraphs or simply an idea, but they are there.  Maybe I should go into the folder and spend a day perusing them. The next great American novel might be lurking there, waiting to reach out and grab me.

I don't know what will become of these entries, or how long they'll last but I'm writing.  My muse is out there, close enough that I can feel her hovering in the darkness out on the fringes.  My creativity is trying to flow again as witnessed by the ideas I have for both my Wardens of the Realm campaign currently on hiatus, and the new Serenity/Firefly mini campaign.  Unfortunately, two games that I really enjoy game-mastering, my last incarnation of my Traveller game and a 1920's pulp-fiction themed pulps game seem to have succumbed and perished.    Oh well, they are both there, ready to be revived and sent in if they are requested.

Thanks for sticking around.

Oh, by the by, the St. Louis Blues won again...

See you tomorrow... 

 

More Insanity.

More insanity on the horizon.  In July, it's the Tour de France and the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona.  In November, all thirty days of November, people all across the country, and perhaps around the world as well will sit down with parchment and quill, pen and paper or a computer.  Armed with energy fueling snacks in order to stave off starvation and coffee strong enough to walk we will try, or we won't  write a novel of 50,000 words.  We'll have thirty days. One thousand, six hundred and sixty-seven words per day.  It's only seventy words an hour, if you stretch it out over  twenty-four hours.

I'll be playing again.  I've never succeeded.  I can offer up excuses, real life getting in the way, lack of preparation, a plot that I couldn't sustain.  Truth of the matter, it's all me.  Lack of motivation, big surprise there, lack of discipline, an even bigger surprise.  ADD issues.  Yada, yada, yada.

This time around, I'm trying a different tack.  This year instead of one novel of fifty thousand words I'm going to

 do a ten micro-novel Lester Dent style  "Pulp" style serial.  

Thirty Days and Nights of Literary Abandon!

Fictional reboot.

In my case, I've never wanted to be a writer, I had no choice. It has always been something I've been driven to do. I have always sought an outlet for creativity, music, writing, drawing. The only one that I'm even remotely close to being satisfied with my meager abilities would be writing.

Most certainly I've had thoughts and dreams of writing the Great American novel,  Pulitzer Prize and all that.  I never acted on them though.  For most of my life my creations have been for me alone. Once in a blue moon I'll let someone read something. Most of the time my stories either get filed away or discarded. It's the creation of the story, not the reading of my words that is important. 

I was first published, if you can call it that, in a local newspaper at about age 6 or 7, and then in the same local newspaper every year for the next four or five. It seemed a great achievement then. I seem to remember my parents made a big deal about it at the time. Then the other shoe dropped. I never received any encouragement from them to pursue writing. It was never talked about. That's probably one of the reasons why I've never sought publication. Another, would be my lack of faith in my skills in this craft.

I'm writing with a different outlook now, and trying to devote and focus energy on storytelling.  I’ve received encouragement from people, writers, authors and readers alike.  Someone has to write the stories.  Why not me?

Writers and authors

There is a difference between being a writer and being an author. Today, through various web sites, blogs, ebooks and self-publishing companies, anyone can publish anything, thus laying claim to being an author.  Writers have to write, we have no choice.  Yes, I may be a bit presumptuous in calling myself a writer.  I’ll get to that later.

Most of the "writers" that I know personally, are also voracious readers.  From a young age we read everything we could get our greedy little hands on.  Through those midnight flights into other worlds, something caught us, laid its seed in our minds and somewhere along the line sparked our desire to create fiction, poetry, prose or songs.  I suppose that some are driven and inspired to create the next great treatise on Advanced Mathematics.  Not me, there is a reason why I'm a liberal arts type. 

Either through reading everything we could, or struggling with a droning professor in a 7:40 English Lit. lecture we learned that words and phrases have voice and a rhythm.  If you can’t sense it and express your stories by weaving your words and phrases together you can never be called a writer.

Earlier I said that as writers, we had no choice, that we had to write.  Here is the presumptuous part.  One cannot proclaim writer status for oneself.  Only after others have read and reflected upon your words can they determine that you have indeed found a voice and a rhythm worthy of being called a writer. 

It took me a couple of trips around the block to get into the neighborhood of a point, but I've arrived now.  Regardless of one’s level of education, from a PhD in English Literature to a fourth grade education, if you can’t make your words dance and entertain readers, you are a struggling, wannabe writer.  However, when it happens, when someone reacts, when they look up from your words in stunned silence, or grinning from ear to ear, when they ask for more you’ll know that you’ve arrived.

 I'm fortunate enough to have been labeled a writer by my peers.