tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31634696487605029872024-02-21T09:52:32.941-08:00Writing in Bed (sleeping in the chair)Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-87905570307648427742013-05-01T06:47:00.005-07:002013-05-01T19:48:50.459-07:00May Day, 2013Many years ago on this date, we had all practiced our roles and I can still remember how the day felt as all the girls in their pretty dresses danced around the May Pole, weaving their ribbons in and out in a grammar school rendition of frolicking Pagans. The May Day king and queen sat on their thrones, nestled into the green lawn that separated rows of classrooms. The first and second year band students played a simple melody, the teachers stood outside the circle with parents who could make it to the school for the celebration and the day was as innocent as any good Spring day.<br />
Now, in the 21st Century, the idea of allowing children to dance a Pagan fertility rite would be cause for church boycotts and probably an appearance of the SWAT team. We've come a long way, baby.Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-4358123617238018892013-04-18T07:44:00.000-07:002013-04-18T07:44:32.540-07:00Question: Elmer Fudd or Bugs Bunny?I grew up deep in the woods. It was quiet in the country back then because those who lived there were comfortable living where the world got dark at night.<br /> Now, the countryside is noisy, because it's filled with city people who are afraid of the dark. They buy a home in the country, fence their yards and fill them with yapping dogs. They buy guns and shoot them night and day with the sound of firecrackers on a string. They shout at everything, watch FOX news and wait for the black helicopters. They sandbag their home and imagine the ‘Gumment' is wanting to take it from them.<br /> The ‘Gumment' doesn't even know, or care, that they're there. That might even be worse than their fantasies. Nobody even cares that you live ‘out here.'<br /> And their fierce shouts sound like screams to me: "Get away! Leave me alone!" Bang. Bark. Bang.<br /> (When a frog sees a snake it sucks in all the air it can handle, hoping to swell itself up to the point of looking too big to swallow. Machismo is like that. Show me shaved heads and tattoos and I can almost hear that air being sucked in)<br /> Oh, how I wish they would move back to the city, join the neighborhood watch and buy a streetlight. But they won't, because in this modern American fantasy they are the brave. They are patriots and they are the NRA.<br /> Am I the only one who sees the irony in the NRA (a Right Wing bunch who asks for Freedom Fries or Freedom Toast because they hate everything ‘French') being led by a prissy Frenchman with a bad comb-over? That Conservatives who talk tough always look like Rush Limbaugh or Carl Rove or Glen Beck? That loudmouth musicians and dopers like Ted Nugent are seen as the ‘tough guys'?<br /> The guys who can hurt you, and they're out there, are the quiet, wiry little guys with the dead eyes. A Hummer or a Dodge Ram won't make you bad anymore than will a boybeard. I was killing time in Target not long ago and saw an electric razor that shaved your face but left the ‘boybeard.'<br /> Without it, how would they know? <br /> In the Deep South of my childhood we all had guns. Every car in the school parking lot had a least one gun in it; maybe a rifle in the rack or a pistol in the seat. Students and teachers alike. But we never shot anyone. We couldn't imagine shooting someone. Beat the hell out of them, maybe - but shoot them? Look back through the newspapers of those times. A shooting was rare and unexpected as a tornado. We weren't afraid.<br /> If this sounds more like a rant than a blog then I guess it is. Symbols are both powerful and easy to manipulate. When you read a murder mystery or crime novel, do you really want the hero to be flawless and unbeatable? Do you want to know, from the first page, that he'll overcome everything? That he's sure to win?<br /> Have we lost the confidence that once made Americans more like Bugs Bunny than Elmer Fudd? It was always Elmer, remember, who carried the gun. Bugs didn't need it. I'm a Southerner....I have a house full of guns. I try to keep them clean and make sure the ammo stays dry. The last time I fired one at something it was to kill a rabid raccoon that stumbled up to my porch a year or so ago. <br /> I have friends who love to ‘shoot.' They go to the pistol range and empty a box of shells at targets. I'm not sure what they see while they're emptying their pistols, but I don't see it. <br /> I want to see confident Americans, relaxed neighbors and, maybe, drivers who don't look like Goofy in that old Disney short, Motor Mania. It might as well be called Crazy at the Wheel. <br /> It might help to know this is being written the day after the gun safety compromise was defeated in congress, and my neighbor is shooting away into the air as his little dogs create a dust cloud by running up and down the fence line, yapping. In the middle of four hundred thousand acres of pristine wilderness and I have Elmer Fudd for a neighbor. What's up, doc?<br /> Bang. Bark. Bang.Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-12097163869274621502013-04-08T07:15:00.001-07:002013-04-08T07:15:30.968-07:00The Mercy of Mary Gautier<div class="postbody">
<div class="xg_user_generated">
Mary Gauthier paces across the left side of the porch
at the back of the house, separated from the stage by room dividers.
She paces, drinks from a water bottle, glances toward the stage. Above
her, above us all is a tremendous old oak tree, its Spanish moss in
black silhouette between her and the sunset.<br />
Onstage, a very good Canadian duo is playing sweetly to an audience
fanned out in the back yard, all varieties of camp chairs from Spartan
to opulent fill the space. Bottles of wine, coolers of beer and, far to
the left, beyond Mary Gauthier, are tables filled with food. A big cake,
finger foods and such. The wooden fence surrounding Bart and Susan's
‘Music Under the Moss' concerts is draped with pretty lights. Dogs bark
from other yards like distant jungle drums. Barking at the music, at the
rows of parked cars along the narrow road in ‘The Cove.'<br />
Mary paces, drinks water from the bottle, watches from the back. I
know the pacing, the impatience to begin. We've played two concerts in
the last three days and this is a rare opportunity to be part of the
audience. Pacing before a show may not be universal, but it isn't
uncommon. The show, the chance to tell the stories and sing the songs,
is everything. After the show, eating too much, talking too fast, trying
to come down, yes; but before the show it's the waiting, wanting to
look the audience in the eye, to pass along the one thing that matters
more than anything else. Music, lyrics that are always more than just
that, more like memories and confessions linked by a progression of
chords.<br />
Finally, it's time. Mary Gauthier appears as so many touring
musicians do, loose without being clumsy, looking tired and
uncomfortable with the pause in the introductions. A beginning that
seems almost bashful, mumbling, tuning a guitar that has suffered
sitting in the Florida damp, the duo now her backup band, shift and wait
until she begins her first song.<br />
I love people who keep me off-balance with their lyrics, who go to
places I hadn't imagined they'd go. Mary does that, starting with the
Fred Eaglesmith song, ‘Your Sister Cried.'<br />
<br />
Well, I stared out of the windshield into the rain so light<br />
And I turned on my dims, and somebody flashed me their brights<br />
And I reached over and turned the radio way down low<br />
Lightning crashed, and the road shone like a mirror<br />
Your sister cried all the way home<br />
<br />
A dog came out of the ditch, then he disappeared<br />
And I remembered a conversation we once had on the phone<br />
Your sister cried all the way home <br />
<br />
I was hooked. Around me, people shuffled deeper into their seats,
clinked wine bottles against glasses, settled in to listen. The magic
that a good artist can create is truly that. The late dusk poured over
us like a dark syrup, and that Spanish moss, grey now, swayed above the
soft stage lighting. Behind Mary Gauthier, behind the duo, a frosted
bathroom window became a light show as people drifted in and out of the
room, their shadows floating inside for a minute or two, the pale,
buttery light going off, then on. A huge palmetto frond below the window
reflected the light and danced with each breeze. She never noticed,
almost dancing herself at the microphone as she told her stories and
sang her songs.<br />
The King of the Hoboes, and why a Hobo was not a Tramp. She told us
gracious stories of her little Italian stepmother, of the burning of
acres of cane in the part of Louisiana that created her. It was in her
voice, in the rich accent that told as much as the words. Oyster shell
roads and nights so dark you could get lost in your own yard. She sang
an exquisite song she'd written after reading a newspaper article about
the people so lost in that darkness after Hurricane Katrina:<br />
<br />
With nothing but our dreams<br />
And memories of who we've been<br />
Scattered forth like seeds<br />
At the mercy of the wind<br />
Another day another night<br />
Another night another day<br />
We wanna go home<br />
We can't find the way<br />
<br />
The inevitable knot of over-aged stoners stood in the darkness at the
back of the crowd, murmuring and laughing in stage whispers that
carried, I'm sure, to the stage. But that's another thing you get used
to as you share your songs, your stories. She sang on, and the audience
leaned forward in their seats to hear her soft words.<br />
"I stole my mother's car on a Sunday," she said quietly. Her sweet
music was lifted, carried along by the couple - Scott Nolan and Joanna
Miller, from Winnipeg. I don't believe I've heard anyone so well matched
to the singer as these two. Mary Gauthier played, sang and apologized
for having to leave early, explaining they had a show the next night
deep in Louisiana. That's a long road, and we've been on it more than
once. Five hundred miles of pine trees and wet air that plays through
your sleeve as you drive. Windows up and the air on, the Southern sun
will bake you and melt you to your seat. With the windows down the
humidity bathes you in your own sweat. It's a long road, and she
apologizes again. Sings a last song, Mercy Now,<br />
<br />
Every living thing could use a little mercy now<br />
Only the hand of grace can end the race<br />
Towards another mushroom cloud<br />
People in power, well<br />
They'll do anything to keep their crown<br />
I love life, and life itself could use some mercy now<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
reposted from my No Depression Blog page </div>
</div>
Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-24855019029457837492012-12-18T08:52:00.000-08:002012-12-18T08:52:18.026-08:00AmericanaReading Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem ‘<i>Johnny Nolan has a Patch on his Ass</i>', the barracks hot because of the furnace; outside, snow is falling so hard you can't see. B-52 bombers are rumbling on their pads nearby, shaking the earth, straining at the bit to be sent back to the Philippines and on to Vietnam. A lonely Hispanic boy sits between foot lockers with a little plastic record player listening to Stevie Wonder -<i> "There's a place in the sun, and before my life is done....."</i><br /> He plays the song over and over.<br /> (A friend, stationed in the Philippines as an Air Police grunt during Vietnam told me of a night there, as he was on solitary watch guarding the back side of a B-52, keeping in mind now that they'd been converted to computer guidance during that war, listening to a click-click-click as he walked his rounds at the rear of the plane. He walked and heard the clicking. He stopped walking and the clicking stopped. Irritated by the sounds, he finally looked up to realize that somebody had left the computer tracking system on. That meant the big machine guns in the tail were still active, and they were trained on him. No human being in that plane, just a computer. Big bullets, the size of your thumb (maybe just a little larger), loaded and waiting. Steel jacketed shells that could rip a man's body apart. The guns following him along his path back and forth in that lonely jungle night, as though he were the enemy. Tracking his steps for hours through the steamy darkness.<br /> "Click-click-click," my friend said. "All night long.")<br /> One tour of duty and I was out and gone. The military isn't for everyone.<br /><br />Sitting here tonight watching the 2012 Americana Award show that I recorded last night. Glass of Jameson's whiskey in my hand, my guitar propped up against the arm of the couch. Music has taken me, literally, almost around the world; and it has opened that world up to me. <br /> A couple of months ago, on the home leg of our 4500 mile tour, Maggie and I stopped in to spend time with friends in North Carolina. A great duo, and she's one of the finest songwriters I've ever known. Lyrics that will move you, and she has a beautiful voice from another planet. She told me she's begun to worry that success will always elude her, that she's thinking maybe she needs to write that one ‘fantastic' song to get her back into the running.<br /> How do you explain that Trace Adkins' song Honky Tonk ba Donkey Donk will make more money in a day than she'll make in her career? How to say "Your music kills me, it's so good. You don't have to search for that one ‘GREAT' song. You've already written it more than once."?<br /> There is no way to say it. Her songwriting is exquisite. Nashville has the ‘formula' for success. It's that simple.<br /> <br />Guys are being shipped out to Vietnam on this cold Illinois morning in 1966 as I pace the floor in the barracks, listening to the Stevie Wonder song, the roar of the furnace. A guy downstairs is playing something on his record player that sounds like jazz. I wander down the stairs to talk to him, and he tells me it's a song by Cal Tjader, from an album called ‘Several Shades of Jade.'<br /> I was just back from a weekend in Chicago, staying in the Roosevelt Hotel and walking all night, leaning into the wind, the freezing rain coming off the lake like bullets. Into Old Town, watching a night life I'd never dreamed of while growing up in my little dirt-road Southern town. The Paul Butterfield Blues band blasting away, and, somewhere, a young guy named John Prine was learning his craft.<br /> .<br /> Thinking about the young Navy recruits drinking with us in those Chicago clubs on an icy night, showing off their new tattoos as we walked the wide sidewalks. They were in full uniform, but Airmen could shed their uniforms for civilian clothes before leaving the base.<br /> Later, back at Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul, Illinois, sitting in the NCO club, hearing a local band play The Animals' song, "We Gotta Get Out of This Place," as hundreds of desperate young men sing along, drinking cheap beer by the pitcher with the feeling that we're all going to die; I remember Winter in Chicago. I remember Country Joe and the Fish later, singing,<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9MVk_LF1n6t92fihDIwrtRiQsXc9_wuNT2a90fsiguFbchbX_z6IPADG88V4_CiTZb4naNfLv4RTRzKRZTeur6QMHTa4QFqwsZ_067apAqPcjG8nX4rgb7tALJts12DBg_vRfOIXf2Sw/s1600/NewJersey3Liberty.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="184" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9MVk_LF1n6t92fihDIwrtRiQsXc9_wuNT2a90fsiguFbchbX_z6IPADG88V4_CiTZb4naNfLv4RTRzKRZTeur6QMHTa4QFqwsZ_067apAqPcjG8nX4rgb7tALJts12DBg_vRfOIXf2Sw/s320/NewJersey3Liberty.JPG" width="320" /></a><i>"Ain't no time to wonder why<br />Whoopie! We're all Goin' to Die."</i><br /> There at Chanute, listening to news of Vietnam, to the ‘Ropes' telling us we were all headed there, telling us we'll all die in that foreign land.<br /><br /> Maggie and I played in Jersey City on that 4500 mile tour this last summer, August of 2012 - a house concert on the fourth floor with the Statue of Liberty just outside the window, then we were up at 5 a.m. and on the road like maniacs. Played the week before in Nova Scotia, stood on Halifax Pier and thought of Stan Rogers, the great singer/songwriter who was killed when his plane caught fire while attempting to land in Kerrville, Texas, where he was scheduled to play at the folk festival. <br /> <i>"God damn them all<br /> I was told/ we'd sail the seas for American gold<br /> We'd fire no gun/ Shed no tear<br /> Now I'm a broken man on the Halifax Pier<br /> The last of Barrett's Privateers"</i><br />
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<br /><br />The week before Nova Scotia, we'd played a house concert in an old brownstone on Massachusetts Avenue, downtown Boston - stayed at the Royal Sonesta overlooking the Charles River.<br />
Worn out now, Boston a memory, a long drive down from North Carolina, stopping for the night just outside Savannah, thinking of home and the dozen lobsters we'd shipped back from the coast of Maine, waiting for us and a group of friends back in Panama City, Florida, the next night.<br /> <br /> A puzzle piece in the life of Lucky Mud. That's us - Maggie and me. And I want to belong. We want to belong. Forty plus years of carving a path, trying to conquer the world one bar at a time. It takes a toll as years begin to pile up. But, if you don't start out with an overload of piss and vinegar, you'll never make it.<br /> Last March I had two heart attacks. We played our first road gig nearby four days after I got out of the hospital. If I'd sat home I would've died. Playing music is what we do, what we love.<br /> Listening to Bonnie Raitt last night, strutting her wonderful self across the stage with John Hiatt, singing with Emmy Lou Harris (who sang harmony on The Band's song, The Weight). That wonderful woman from Alabama Shakes and all the rest. I wish them well.<br /><br /> Two years ago Maggie and I hosted a twenty five concert series at a local art-deco theater, and we brought in singer/songwriters from across the country with high hopes and a pitiful budget. I still can't believe they came, and we would sweat it every Sunday: will the artist get here, will an audience show up, will we remember the words to our own songs every week as we introduced the artists? <br /> We brought in Florida singer/songwriters and folks like Beaucoup Blue from Philadelphia. There was Sally Spring and Rebekah Pulley - Kamm and MacDonald came all the way from Northern California to our little Florida panhandle town to play the most amazing concert I've ever been part of, stayed with us and became our friends. We were very proud of the series and will never do it again. Ever.<br /> The only cancellation was Eric Taylor, who got iced in after his gig in Atlanta the night before. He called to apologize.<br /><br /> A group of Nashville staff writers, on the payroll of some of the music publishing companies there, was bused in to play a singer/songwriter series out on the beach not long after our concert series was finished, and we heard the producers might be interested in talking to us, so we called. They offered us the chance to drive these songwriters around, make sure they had water and snacks. We said no thanks. Nashville always has a ‘formula.'<br />
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<br /> We know, because we spent six and a half years in Nashville on the fringes of the Music Business. Our son was born there. We knew lots of staff writers, lots of session pickers. Maggie worked for a star, during the time he won the CMA's Entertainer of the Year award. We hung out, watched and listened, and then we left. Nashville isn't for everyone. <br /> A few years ago at the Kerrville Folk Festival we overheard a young independent producer telling someone, "You shouldn't go to Nashville unless you've been invited." The formula.<br /><br /> So, we're back on the road, with our one-bar-at-a-time plan intact - starting the first week of the new year at the Woodview Coffee House in Inglis, Florida, back to what we love.....making music. It's our formula. I wouldn't trade places with that CMA star, not for his money and his fame. The path we've made is very long and very narrow, but after forty years we still love playing, still love traveling and still love each other. Not a bad plan.<br /> Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-91891315057170383492012-11-21T10:30:00.000-08:002012-11-21T10:30:06.716-08:00Writing the Past<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLkW0OGstf5qP1fO6tjdLThCBHn5eCi8zFLddYnOc2RWAzBZtJ7IwjK-kNxQuhplnEqfk1TXJQ6z4dMHtJMHOXno_vpym_i7r2tsglKj2dQEvlvgSZRRSX0u49cvIybwXYtVSP6UHkoMU/s1600/1973+MichaelWewa1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLkW0OGstf5qP1fO6tjdLThCBHn5eCi8zFLddYnOc2RWAzBZtJ7IwjK-kNxQuhplnEqfk1TXJQ6z4dMHtJMHOXno_vpym_i7r2tsglKj2dQEvlvgSZRRSX0u49cvIybwXYtVSP6UHkoMU/s320/1973+MichaelWewa1.JPG" width="308" /></a> <i>"A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel." — Robert Frost</i><br /><br />I'm
sitting here watching a documentary about the early days of the Rolling
Stones, which came about in the mostly fictional time and place called
The Late Sixties. A long and nasty war swept up kids and ate them like
the monsters in bad fairy tales and villagers put signs in their windows
saying, "I gave my son for freedom."<br /> And such shit as that. <br />
Cities were burning at home, too, in places like Watts, Philadelphia
and Detroit. Free Will became a dangerous narcotic and The Movement, a
loosely organized and mostly White rhetorical revolution, went from its
Bi-Polar best at Woodstock to its worst in Altamont in barely four
months. <br /> Nihilism trumped reason. Hard Hats beat up Hippies. The
Weathermen blew up buildings, usually killing no one but the janitor.
Demonstrations became riots, tear gas swirled in a thick mist while
Jackie Gleason and Anita Bryant pushed themselves as Role Models and Jim
Morrison got busted at a show in Miami. All this in a decade. <br />
Bryant went from spokesperson for the orange juice industry to the
anti-gay superstar of the Right when, in 1977, she said things like, <i>"As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children."</i><br />
Think back. Frank Zappa competed for airplay with Bobby Sherman and the
1910 Fruit Gum Company. We were a schizophrenic nation with nothing but
self-prescribed medication, fear building with each new assassination,
each bungled war. Whiskey drinking adults feared pot smoking kids.
Suddenly there were <i>Flower Children</i> and there was <i>The Summer of Love</i>.
Squalor and gangs and Charles Manson were intermingled with feather
boas and Nehru jackets, mimes held court on the sidewalks and Black
Panthers cruised the streets alongside Klansmen, though in street
clothes there was no way to know who was whom. <br /> This was the
world I knew, from joining the military in 1966 to getting out in 1969 I
watched my world change completely. Coming from a dirt road town in the
Deep South to a club in Old Town, Chicago; watching blacks and whites
making out and dancing together, breathless with all this new
information I wondered, <i>"Is that legal?"</i><br /> The first time I heard someone (Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog) say ‘<i>fuck</i>'
on purpose from the stage of a crowded auditorium without anyone
seeming to mind was a marker of that time for me. As hard as it might be
to believe now, the censorship of books, films and speech was the norm.
Lenny Bruce was hounded to death because of his insistence that he, a
returning Navy veteran from World War Two, should be allowed to speak
freely in public. Grove Press, through its Evergreen line, published The
Complete Works of the Marquis de Sade, and risked a lengthy court
battle with the United States government. <br /> Those of us on the
road tried hard to call home at least once a month to let loved ones
know we were okay. There were no cell phones. Telephones were leased from the phone company. It was illegal to ‘own'
one. <br /> All this from watching a few minutes of ancient film footage of the Rolling Stones.<br />
It was my time. I was there. I tried once to write a novel about it,
about a guy named Gideon who, freshly out of the military and green as a
salad, becomes the accidental leader of The Revolution. I finished
writing it 40 years ago and still pull it from a drawer on occasion to
glance through it. No one besides Maggie has ever read it. I doubt
anyone ever will. It was my first finished novel, and the only way I
could write about those times was as a fairy tale. Nothing seemed real
about it when I was immersed in it, and none of it seems real now.<br /> Writing ‘<i>what you know</i>'
is very important, but it isn't the only thing you need to know when
writing. If I tried writing the same book today, all these years later,
it would still be that same jumbled fairy tale today because that's how I
still remember it.<br /> So write what you know, but unless it's a
memoir you need to disconnect from the story. If you can't then maybe
the story needs to stay in the bottom drawer.<br /> Just my opinion.<br />
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<br />Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-88874945056248188942012-10-19T07:12:00.000-07:002012-10-19T07:17:21.234-07:00Keeping Up with the Times<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjqWOKj3nTkPGWzj6wwXuwFsCGot_RidZPLQAg6pHlwrrLWy06h0Ble82qeSXciKeYnJwTdeSur5YL51n5xx5akJ0UugQePk4d_Bc-pbVKKYOeBwsGKMC3KCjH6EjJ2z3cezoxIg7xzz0/s1600/MikeWIldHog1sized.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjqWOKj3nTkPGWzj6wwXuwFsCGot_RidZPLQAg6pHlwrrLWy06h0Ble82qeSXciKeYnJwTdeSur5YL51n5xx5akJ0UugQePk4d_Bc-pbVKKYOeBwsGKMC3KCjH6EjJ2z3cezoxIg7xzz0/s320/MikeWIldHog1sized.JPG" width="320" /></a>I just read a new short story that featured a woman on the run and in danger. Old story, right? The problem is, this one was. It was set in the present but her problem was made worse by the fact she couldn't find a pay phone to call for help.<br />
There are no pay phones.<br />
I see these time anomalies all the time in print, and in film as well. We grow up in one time and write in another. I remember reading a science fiction novel when I was in my early twenties about cities in space. These cities had been ripped from the Earth, whole, covered with a bubble and sent off into the universe. It took entire cities because the vacuum tubes had to be so huge it took an entire city underground to hold them and the machines they powered.<br />
Then, along came the silicon chip. Micro-electronic engineering. The story was still good, but it didn't survive the change. <br />
I wrote a screenplay once that ended in a confrontation between the Soviet Union's space station and the United States' space station. Goodbye Soviet Union, goodbye a year of work. Oops.<br />
So, we have to pay attention - something I'm spotty at doing. We have to be aware of the <i>Present</i> as we write. I still see private investigators in black-and-white in my mind. Big fat black telephones you could bludgeon someone with, not one that's the size of my thumb and weighs a half-ounce. <br />
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When I was younger black fingernails meant you'd hit yourself with a hammer. Now, they're the height of fashion. Men in cities grew facial hair once a year for Pioneer Days, then shaved it off after the event was over. No women had tattoos, unless they were in the circus. Some men had tattoos, but they were ex-sailors and worked pumping gas at the filling station. They usually had a cigarette behind their ear, a pack rolled up in their shirt sleeve and a crooked smile. They had a girlfriend named Blondie. <br />
Gas was pumped for you by ex-sailors and banks gave away toasters. <br />
Now, a good story needs a tattoo somewhere. Maybe not a dragon but at least some little peek that's part of the story. I try to be aware of these changes, but digital natives will notice things I've overlooked because these things are a normal part of their lives. Hubcaps that keep spinning after the car has stopped; people who seem to be talking out loud to themselves while alone. <br />
We had those people around when I was younger, but they usually had one pant-leg rolled up, a rope for a belt and a grocery cart holding all their belongings. Now, a crowd scene with no one on their phone, their <i>Blue Tooth</i>, no one texting a message on some portable device, is not real. Airports were filled not too long ago with people either looking off into space, reading the newspaper or talking to strangers in the next chair. Now they're lost in their ear-buds, their <i>Kindles</i> and <i>Nooks</i>, their computers. Not just a few but almost all of them are in their own little worlds. <br />
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These are not little things when working on a novel. Even in non-fiction, as the book I'm working on now, we have to get the times right. I've been sweating bullets trying to research a 20 year time-span in New Orleans, from the late 70s until around 2000. So many changes big and small, and one mistake will take the reader out of the story like the opening of a parachute ruins a good free fall. <br />
I was born into a post <i>WW Two</i> world of dirt road Southerners, fields still being plowed with mules and <i>Separate While Unequal</i> Rights for the races. Towns that closed on noon Wednesdays, and from noon Saturday until Monday morning. No ATMs, no weekend banking. <i>All</i> stores closed on Sundays. Separate entrances to movie theaters, to doctors' offices - on one door WHITE, on the other, COLORED.<br />
You cannot, absolutely cannot tell a story of those days without including that, and the racial slurs that flowed like water, and have that story be believable. If I wrote a story about a brave black man who arrived in my little Southern town in those days and became a hero of white people no one could, or at least should, believe it.<br />
When I write a story about ‘<i>Now</i>,' it has to reflect ‘<i>Now</i>.'<br />
Here's hoping I get it right. Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-4481258059610293372012-10-15T07:29:00.000-07:002012-10-15T07:29:55.883-07:00Gods and Other Faeries<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br /><br />Two things happened when I was fourteen years old. I finished reading the Bible cover to cover for the fourth time, and I walked away from church with no interest in returning. As a story teller, I've never been able to make the bible stories blend with the religious meanings attached to them. <br /> Anyone who can read the shenanigans of Old Testament characters and ascribe a deeper, higher story to them simply confuses me. Anyone who can take the hundreds of conflicting parables and make a cohesive god out of them is too complicated for me to understand. I have the same problem with religion that I have with superstition - there are too many rules.<br />
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<br /> For this Halloween blog entry, I'm going to do something I've not done before, and probably won't do again. Amid the yammering of politicians and preachers and media celebrities, a conservative candidate and a taliban spokesman saying the exact same thing (I find it impossible to separate my faith from my politics) and not see the correlation, I'm posting a song I wrote called Talkin' Middle East Blues.<br /> Happy Halloween.<br /> Mike<br />
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<br /><br />In the beginning, God made day and night<br />Then Abraham got tired of the Canaanites<br />So he decided to go off and start his very own clan<br /><br />Well, he finagled some sheep and a couple of cows<br />(you can read the bible if you want to know how)<br />But then he saw the flaw in his little plan<br /><br />See, he and Sarah did it night and day<br />They did it in the desert and they did it in the hay<br />They did it and they did it until they almost wore it out<br /><br />But Sarah said, "Sorry"<br />And Abe said "Thanks,<br />I can't be sure who's shooting blanks<br />So I'm gonna have to leave it up to you to work this out"<br /><br />So Sarah gave Abraham a jug of wine<br />Then she gave him Hagar, the concubine<br />and nine months later, there was little Ishmael<br /><br />So it was Sarah who was barren as a dry creek bed<br />But she couldn't get those pictures out of her head<br />and it would be an understatement to say she did not take it well<br /><br />She was in her 70s and she thought she'd had it<br />But she and Abraham kept going at it<br />And along came Isaac, her own little bundle of joy<br /><br />So she said, "Abe, I'm gonna need more room for the baby<br />A place for the bassinet so do you think maybe<br />You could get rid of Hagar and that dirty little ugly bastard boy?"<br /><br />Well, Hagar begged and Abraham whined<br />But Sarah stood firm and she toed the line<br />And before you know it, Hagar was on her own<br /><br />Well, Abraham didn't have to do it,<br />but he thought it over and he figured, "Screw it,<br />It's the easiest way I know to keep a happy home"<br /><br />So with the clothes on her back and a baby at her breast<br />No food to eat, no place to rest<br />Hagar began to starve in abject deprivation<br /><br />But God looked down, and God took pity<br />And Ishmael lived, and he built a city<br />And soon he was the leader of a brand new Arab nation<br /><br />Now we all know that sooner or later<br />The Middle East will be a nuclear crater<br />And we're all gonna die trying to fulfill some biblical matter<br /><br />That was written on papyrus with camel dung<br />By some dim bulb on the bottom rung<br />Of the entire human evolutionary ladder<br /><br />About a naked couple that was left to grapple<br />with Life and Death and Snakes and Apples<br />And a God that would let some guy kill 10,000 people with the jawbone of an ass<br /><br />So, don't you think it's time that we got rid<br />Of hating somebody 'cause your daddy did<br />and finally put our history in the past<br /><br />But, there's only one real question I have for you......<br />Don't we need better reasons for the things we do?<br />
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<br /><br />Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-5140735163100652152012-09-29T07:34:00.000-07:002012-09-29T07:35:30.906-07:00A Good Cook<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg18Q_vjyuwBv-NurrPGIaaGFcJakSIux01eZn0hyphenhypheng3_N6uzaDm6AhU2aI7vH0atO-MunJqMuAZz6YU7lu9Cz_ed4_pO4hzVsCUf2qfxH-2Z5i2fPzX_cwkBA2zeZ2vN5Wql-FsZpvVLWg/s1600/Zulu,+sleeping.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg18Q_vjyuwBv-NurrPGIaaGFcJakSIux01eZn0hyphenhypheng3_N6uzaDm6AhU2aI7vH0atO-MunJqMuAZz6YU7lu9Cz_ed4_pO4hzVsCUf2qfxH-2Z5i2fPzX_cwkBA2zeZ2vN5Wql-FsZpvVLWg/s320/Zulu,+sleeping.JPG" width="320" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_qlIOv01RB5Qz-r9aW0B8_2VMQZi-QaunHJXo_dJsto0xpNJyELIGHlPdTNQ3ipYB5_7-MwGekbH2WTYF7ShtMZyVBssoOlcuYtp4NDBt8NxT4mdpSK4oLjlmD2tZOS8nGyBGzS0XblU/s1600/CatsZulu1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="169" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_qlIOv01RB5Qz-r9aW0B8_2VMQZi-QaunHJXo_dJsto0xpNJyELIGHlPdTNQ3ipYB5_7-MwGekbH2WTYF7ShtMZyVBssoOlcuYtp4NDBt8NxT4mdpSK4oLjlmD2tZOS8nGyBGzS0XblU/s320/CatsZulu1.JPG" width="320" /></a>A friend online asked a question that gave me this post. How does my gardening go with my love of travel? And writing books also takes a little time. <br />
Gardening, like writing or cooking, takes coordination. A good cook gets all the food to the table at the same time. A writer, a gardener, lays out the plot in the same way. If not done correctly, the garden dies, the book withers. <br />
I love to travel. Maggie likes castles and cathedrals, I like great food and fluffy beds in great hotels. While traveling, I'm aware that my 135 year-old farmhouse abides, my cats and dog are in the care of friends (mostly one. Greg.) and my garden is alone with the weeds, insects and animals. That's the contract. I can't change who I am and will never stop gardening, or having animals around. We've had horses, cows, chickens, innumerable cats and dogs across the years. I hope these three last forever. They should, as much as they sleep.<br />
My two deadbeat black kittens sprawl across the laziest black Lab ever born (she plays like a maniac in the rain, in terrific thunderstorms with lightning popping in the yard, yet she's manically afraid of flying beetles). <br />
Stories come from life. Life feeds the imagination. It's why a memoir from a famous 18 year-old does nothing for me. Why listening to an 80 year-old ranch hand in dusty clothes captivates me. Writers are not the center-of-attention kind of people. Where that cowboy's charm is just ‘out there,' the writer manufactures it in his head and is never glib. I've been in the company of great novelists and, with the rare exception, they're all the kind of people you hear about after a crime: <br />
"I dunno....he seemed so quiet. You barely knew he was there."<br />
The writer seems glib, if you only know his/her work. Knowing the writer is all together different.<br />
But a writer is always writing. And, that's the difference. A writer at dinner or a movie, or riding in a car, is writing. It's just what we do. We ignore those we love and we miss appointments because we saw a flash of color somewhere. We can spend all night with a beautiful woman (from this man's point of view) and remember the sweep of her hip, the way her hair falls across her shoulders, the flash of her eyes and the way her lips make crescent shadows when she smiles. But that doesn't mean we'll remember her name, or would remember her again out of context. <br />
We're always filing things away, and it irritates the hell out of people. Especially those close to us; but it's what a writer does. It's the same care a chef takes with food. He, or she, may never stop to taste what they've prepared, but they know it's right. By the smell, sometimes....by the color and blend and the way spices swirl around inside. <br />
Gardening takes time. Preparing the soil, potting the seeds and adding nutrients and water. Treating them right. It's all the same, whether we garden, quilt or paint. The cowboy just ‘is,' the artist, usually, isn't. Charming, that is. <br />
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<br />Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-42708564833802432372012-08-28T13:17:00.001-07:002012-08-28T13:42:58.441-07:00The Zombie Tour<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Leaving Halifax behind</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We spend a day in Hall's Harbour</td></tr>
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"I don't think much about zombies," I said.<br />
"What?" Maggie glanced at me as she drove through North Georgia toward the eastern tip of Tennessee to catch I-81, the road that ambles along the Blue Ridge Mountains. <br />
We'd spent the night near Brasstown Bald at the top of Georgia, given that name by the first white settlers who'd asked the Indians where they were and couldn't understand the answer. "I dunno," a settler probably said. "Sounded like he said Brasstown Bald to me."<br />
Up through Virginia, into New York State to a motel in Binghamton with a show the next night in Historic Downtown Boston, as the sign said. A wonderful house concert in an old brownstone on Massachusetts Avenue and a tour of Boston the next morning by our hosts. <br />
"I know this is going to be a long road trip," I said, "so I needed something to start talking about."<br />
"Zombies?" Maggie said.<br />
See, we talk a lot while driving because it gives us hours to pursue things we never get the chance to talk about at home. Like books, tours, friends and family. Lots of music, too.<br />
I thought zombies would be a good place to start.<br />
"Sometimes," Maggie said, "you're just too weird for me."<br />
"Like now?"<br />
"Yeah, like now."<br />
<br />
I don't understand the fascination with zombies. There must be some social connotation that I just don't ‘get.' <br />
What is it about Nuclear bombs, or alien gasses or escaped scientific monkeys that turns people into zombies? I think I would go the other way and become a gastrophile. Someone who wanted duck pate' partnered with a very good wine, not human flesh, but that's just me.<br />
From Boston we headed north, at first planning to stay on I-95 through
Bangor and to the border at Calais (pronounced Callas), but we were
called by the lure of the Maine coast and left the freeway for Highway
One along the Atlantic. It was a very good choice. We stayed in
Ellesworth in a little motel attached to a lobster restaurant, then
spent the next morning with a Jim and Sue, a couple we'd just met
through music, getting their names from another touring musician before
dropping in to spend time with them.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_umS1RAwPcLet1BxItDz25QhmeWiByTYhCKOHdsUSSAgpYt48aDpo7KpjsrI8KzPMgX8lYhE4KgEEBm54Ca7KR-MhWOg7rpTEdLIcshF_71JGcY7CyZiPesMgRq8kB2WPYvONsn_Ufd4/s1600/AFundyhFerry2maggie.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_umS1RAwPcLet1BxItDz25QhmeWiByTYhCKOHdsUSSAgpYt48aDpo7KpjsrI8KzPMgX8lYhE4KgEEBm54Ca7KR-MhWOg7rpTEdLIcshF_71JGcY7CyZiPesMgRq8kB2WPYvONsn_Ufd4/s320/AFundyhFerry2maggie.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Maggie at the rail, returning across the Bay of Fundy on the Ferry, Princess of Acadia</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
We became friends and stayed with them on the return trip; or, at least
we stayed in a park along a high bluff in their little travel trailer -
but that was much later.<br />
With Maggie at the wheel we found our way to Middleton, Nova
Scotia, about 9 o'clock that evening, dragging ourselves into our
friends' house. Different friends. This couple had been coming to
Florida every year and each time they caught our show they invited us up
to Nova Scotia. After 18 years it happened. <br />
All those years ago Maggie and I were playing in a coffee house in
Panama City, Florida. The two of them wandered in just as we were
singing the Stan Rogers song, Barrett's Privateers. He began singing
along, and when I asked how he knew the words he said he was from Nova
Scotia. He'd actually stood on Halifax Pier. We've been friends ever
since. <br />
His wife has read my novel, and I was surprised to see her review
of it on Amazon. They live in a magic land with vegetable stands on
every corner, sweeping green hillsides and apple trees growing wild
along the roadways. Panoramic sweeps of land and sea, and little
restaurants serving great ‘Maritime' fare, including ‘poutine' and
lobster rolls. We ate lots of lobsters. And haddock chowder and lobster
chowder and wild blueberries as the dessert with everything. They grow
all along the North Atlantic, a surprise to us, and every stand has a
corner dedicated to wild blueberries. In the strange ways of language,
Cherryfield calls itself the ‘Blueberry Capital of Maine.'<br />
We spent a week exploring Nova Scotia, one day climbing the rocks
along the Peggy's Cove lighthouse, the next wandering along the rocky
beaches of the Bay of Fundy. I should mention we played a few concert
dates as well, but it was the land that kept us excited as children.
Hall's Harbour, Hampton Harbour, actually standing on Halifax Pier and
taking photos of Theodore the Tugboat. <br />
We ate extraordinary food and met great people. The more we travel
the less I know. All I thought I knew was wrong, as it always is. Any
preconceptions I carry are washed away with travel and, as a writer, I
drink it in like water. The color of houses, the storms at sea, pretty
eyes in a crowded pub. Writing takes place ‘after' living. It can't be
done while hiding in the dark, because nothing is what we think it is.
Travel cures that. We learn, we watch and realize how little we know. <br />
I love to travel, and am lucky enough to travel with someone who
likes me, someone who enjoys riding for days with me and talking about
everything under the sun. Even zombies.<br />
Zombies became the topic of at least one conversation throughout
the entire tour, which encompassed 14 states and two provinces. Zombies
seem to have international renown, and everyone has an opinion. Some
remember George Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead. Younger people
liked 28 Days Later or I Am Legend. Movies about drooling, mindless
living-dead people staggering like drunks down city streets and, though
they seem slow, they always catch non-zombies and eat them. <br />
<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">On Halifax Pier, Nova Scotia</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
We left Nova Scotia reluctantly aboard the Princess of Acadia, car stowed in the hull as we lingered on deck with hot tea, watching the high shore line through the mist, leaning on the rail while the ferry slipped out into the Bay of Fundy and everything disappeared in the fog. Morning sunlight washed the rippled surface with silver. A small whale stitched the water's surface near the boat and dolphins leapt everywhere. From Digby to St. John's we stood alone in the chill of a Canadian morning, singing songs to the sea. Inside the ferry a large group of white-bearded Amish men sat facing a large group of black-leathered bikers, like two gangs from some odd version of West Side Story. <br />
Through customs and back down along the rugged Maine coast to stay with our new friends, eat more lobster (a little restaurant outside Sullivan served a Twin Lobster Dinner with 2 Sides for $14.95), with wild blueberry pie for dessert.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI0uS8OtMvBlhHlmAgNlBLJI5CvH_-kcBTl0IXA8g58HdkisjRJ3gGDTcMtwnn80VV88ak4dZ0ee17QFHStnzD7PTdScrke13rzLKlvZ-oQ49LqiLbFmzoo6IAOcRe_YvZhwehJ79dOTo/s1600/AANova+Scotia+Hall%27sHarbor31yellowfairyhousecloser.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="247" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI0uS8OtMvBlhHlmAgNlBLJI5CvH_-kcBTl0IXA8g58HdkisjRJ3gGDTcMtwnn80VV88ak4dZ0ee17QFHStnzD7PTdScrke13rzLKlvZ-oQ49LqiLbFmzoo6IAOcRe_YvZhwehJ79dOTo/s320/AANova+Scotia+Hall%27sHarbor31yellowfairyhousecloser.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A wonderful little house overlooking the Atlantic. Someday, we'll rent it.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Lobstermen are getting creamed at the docks now, with lobster going there for about 2 bucks a pound. It seems the harder the physical work you do, the less you get paid for it. In the Florida panhandle, where we live, it's the oystermen, the pulpwooders, the cowboys you see standing in line at McDonald's with dusty clothes, sweat-rimmed hats, worn boots and spurs. You don't see cowboys everywhere, but you don't have to look hard to see the ones who do the hard work it takes to keep the bottom propped up, keeping things solid for the rest of us. <br />
A wearying traffic jam in New York because the George Washington Bridge was down to one lane, construction everywhere. Later that evening, though, we played a house concert in Jersey City at a beautiful home with a fourth floor garden/putting green and the Statue of Liberty standing nearby like a night light. A good crowd, great food at the break and a late-night talk about music and life with some fascinating people.<br />
We stayed in North Carolina and spent time with the incredible Sally Spring, one of my favorite singer/songwriters in Americana today. So many wonderful singers, musicians, small groups out here right now struggling to find the next gig, unnoticed by the factory-made stars who sell out the big auditoriums. A little like the cowboys, like the mill workers there at the bottom. <br />
(Support Local Music)<br />
Anyway....home again after the latest tour and preparing for the next. Our old farmhouse abides, and our black lab waits to climb back in a lap. Another tropical storm rages along the Gulf Coast and we settle back in. I open my computer and, before working on another chapter of my next book, I spend a little time thinking of how wonderful my life is. And I think about zombies. Just a little.<br />
<br />
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<br />Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-42777406441783815412012-05-30T12:11:00.003-07:002012-05-30T12:11:45.021-07:00Happiness<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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As I mentioned in an earlier post here, I've shared the podium at writers conferences with authors who tell the audience to ‘not even try' writing a book. I've heard the quote, "Writing is like cutting your wrists with a rusty razor" more than once. I have absolutely no idea what these authors are saying. It makes no sense to me. Why would you do something that painful, when it really doesn't matter to anyone else?<br /> Writing, painting, making things with your hands; these are things we do to fulfill whatever parts of us are in need of fulfilling. I love to write books. I'm always writing books, even if it looks like I'm doing something else. The way a bird flies past, the sound the wind makes, all the little things that make up a story. I've read about how some people spend a year researching their characters, writing down lists of things they like and don't like, and I don't understand that, either. Do we need to fill a character out before we can ‘know' the character? Maybe, but it would drive me nuts.<br /> We all create differently. I'm not saying you can't learn to write ‘better,' how to know when you've finished, lots of things. But writing comes from a personal place. At least, to me. I write because it's impossible not to write. It's the same with music.<br />
Luckily, I have Maggie and we have our duo Lucky Mud. We play festivals, bars, concerts and clubs, both here and in Europe. Anywhere they'll have us. We've shared the stage and a home for 40 years. We'll play a four hour gig without taking a break because we forget to take a break. And we don't really want to, anyway. <br /> We call it ‘the Groove.'<br /> When we're in the groove, we and the audience share a ride that is absolutely effortless. The energy produced is returned equally. The joy goes both ways. Stopping means losing the Groove, and that means having to find it again. <br /> That's why I write the same way I play. When I begin a story, or a chapter or a page...it doesn't matter...all else disappears. I may write ten minutes, if distracted, if I can't find the Groove - but once I find it I simply disappear. I'll write for days, for weeks without stopping except to eat or sleep or pee. And all the while I'm doing these incidental things I'm still in the Groove. I'll stumble over things. I'll forget where something is, though I put it there a minute before.<br /> To write, you have to visit the place you're creating. You cannot, absolutely cannot write a story from a distance. If you don't know that character, or that one-page walk-on enough to keep writing, to stay in the groove, then stop. Close the computer, put down the pen. Close your eyes and imagine the place. Imagine the person, the incident you're creating. Take a breath. Take several, then begin again. If you make mistakes along the way you'll always come back later to correct them in your edits. If you're lucky, like I'm lucky, you'll have someone close enough to you who will tell you the truth. Even when it hurts. Because we blind ourselves in this compulsion to create, and sometimes we blunder without knowing it. We need someone we can trust. Someone who will never let us down, because they're in the same groove.<br /> That's happiness.<br />
<br />
<br />
(Tim Fik and Bridget Kelley joined Maggie and me on the Under the Oaks stage at the 2012 Florida Folk Festival Memorial Weekend )Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-15040003912082259672012-05-15T17:00:00.000-07:002012-05-15T17:00:07.471-07:00Ghost WritingIt's been slow in the publishing world. That's an understatement. So my agent, who is very good at his job and cares for his writers, gave me a great chance to write a series for a well-placed London firm who had outlines for a line of police mysteries, based on an American police detective. I've never tried this before, but it sounded fun. And lucrative. So I said sure, made contact with the firm and was sent the outline. <br /> Because I'm sure some other writer has taken up the flag and created this series, I'll obfuscate. Trust me, what I tell you won't narrow it down enough to make it stand out. Enough to say it was the story of a detective forced to leave a big city for a little city. A town, really. He had a shrewish wife and an uncontrollable daughter, plus a sickly mother living with them. He'd gotten in trouble in the ‘big' city by mixing it up with a newspaper writer. Now, he's offered a new chance. <br /> The first thing he does is mix it up with a newspaper writer in the ‘little' town.<br /> Then, murders begin in this little town - murders that seem linked. In the outline I was given, the CSI team arrived on each scene and puzzled over it. Small towns have no CSI teams. They're lucky if they have a paramedic or coroner who pays attention. <br /> Then, the U.K. writer of the outline committed several errors that would never pass in American police stories. I'll only give one, since that was when I began writing my own story and not following the outline.<br /> In other words, losing the chance to write the series was all my fault.<br /> In this one action sequence in the outline, the detective arrives on the scene of a possible crime, sends his old and senile, just-waiting-to-retire partner next door to interview neighbors, then, alone, breaks down the front door.<br /> (This is where I say, but don't explain, that once I had to break down a door. It took over five minutes and my shoulder and wrist were damaged for almost a month)<br /> Once inside, the detective looks around, sees no one, so he exits, runs around the house and breaks down the back door.<br /> Here was my dilemma. I should've contacted the London firm and explained how moronic this was. How out of place in American police action and, I'm sure, in English as well.<br /> I should've followed protocol and just maybe I'd be sitting pretty right now. Maybe I'd have a new car. <br /> The problem is I'm not cut out to write someone else's story. I never will be. That wasn't my agent's fault, nor was it the fault of the London firm. They had a simple outline for me to follow, and all I had to do was follow it. <br /> But I couldn't. The person(s) who wrote this outline, and were destined to write the sequels, had no clue how to tell an American story. They had no knowledge of police procedures, of the feel of small American towns (another subject, but trust me) or even American family relationships. I never want to insult a reader by giving him or her something that isn't true, and this is where I come back to my same little horn. You'd think I love tooting it. But I don't really, I'm just driven as a reader or a writer to find logic in fiction. <br /> I could've written it, I could've been a pretender. I really didn't mind. I think I could have turned it into a hell of a series. But that's not what they were asking for. I love to write. I want to be successful at it, and I want people to enjoy the stories I tell. But I'll keep carving this little trail, because that's where my heart is.<br /> I'm preparing the sequel to A Thousand Bridges for release on Kindle and the rest soon. It's called The Foothills of Heaven. I hope someone, lots of someones will read it. I have more, including a brand new MacDonald Clay book in the works. But I doubt I'll pop up here and there ghosting for someone else. I found out that wasn't for me.<br />Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-80571414323482684982012-04-20T13:40:00.000-07:002012-09-29T19:55:44.189-07:00The Angina MonologueSo, as near as I can tell, I've been running on piss and vinegar, caffeine and whiskey for the last few years. Blood had nothing to do with it.<br />
Finally, after a week of hanging from an aluminum step ladder, a ratchet and socket in one hand and my chest in the other, saying things like, <i>"Damn! The pollen is terrible this year!"</i> and <i>"Do you think I might have the flu?"</i> Maggie dragged me to our doctor who shook his head and said, <i>"It's not pollen, it's not the flu...it's you're heart, and you're going to the hospital....but you knew that."</i><br />
A trip to the hospital riding backwards in an ambulance, chatting about ADD with the EMT, a faster-than-life trip through prep to the operating room, where I heard someone say, <i>"he's having a heart attack," </i>and finally it dawned on me. <br />
I was having a heart attack. I found out from the doctor later that I'd probably had another one the day before.<br />
Three stents needed to hold open the big artery. It was totally blocked, the others only about 70 percent. I'm a Southern boy....I salt food before tasting it, then I add more salt. I like late nights and early risings, and when I'm working on a book I have no sense at all. Night and day, weekdays and weekends, they're all a blur to me. <br />
<br />
The week before my ‘surprise' heart attack, as I just happened to be reading about clues to my ragged health online, I discovered I had the symptoms of Angina. Maggie and I laughed about me having an angina, and she said mine must be a Mangina. Still, I made no connection to those puzzle pieces and a heart attack. <br />
That's called denial. <br />
My dad died at 47 of a heart attack, we have heart disease on both sides of the family and I had rheumatic fever as a child.<br />
So why would I suspect it could be my heart?<br />
A week of learning in the hospital, from the startling discovery that <i>Mrs. Dash</i> might've been in construction or law enforcement, but she damned sure wasn't a cook, to the taste of unsalted food. What ever tempted the mysterious <i>Mrs. Dash</i> to put so many mismatched and bland spices into a single bottle?<br />
I'll never know, but the same hour I got home from the hospital, as Maggie dashed out to get prescriptions filled, I began experimenting with spices - New Mexico red chile powder, garlic, curry, finely ground almonds, thyme and rosemary. From there I developed an even half-dozen blends that allowed me to still cook and eat fine foods. Without salt.<br />
Life is good. <br />
<br />
And this brings me to my latest blog thought, ‘<i>Write What You Know</i>.'<br />
In my novels, I've tried to write what I know, though what I know doesn't include gunfights, being famous in New York City or, in a YA book I wrote (in some drawer, somewhere), how it feels to walk on clouds.<br />
We can get our readers to suspend their disbelief as long as we don't jar their thoughts with inconsistencies. I now know how to write about having a heart attack. It's nothing like I thought it would be. When I hear someone had one, it sounds so dramatic, but the truth is (at least in my case) there's no drama, and the one being attacked by his heart is more a spectator than a participant.<br />
I still remember a scene from a Harold Robbins novel I read in high school. It was called <b><i>A Stone For Danny Fisher</i></b>. Danny was a fairly complicated and despicable man, and Robbins, though loathed in ‘literary' circles, could tell a pretty good story.<br />
Danny dies at the end, and the scene describing his death has him floating above the scene, mildly curious about what was happening to his body, and totally calm. That's what my heart attack felt like.<br />
I included an homage to that novel in my first book, <b><i>A Thousand Bridges</i></b>, in a scene where Mac comes very close to death. Elisabeth Kubler Ross mentioned this phenomenon in her great book, <b><i>On Death and Dying. </i></b><br />
We need to try as hard as possible to get things right in fiction. The same laws apply there as they do in non-fiction. I take great leaps of faith in my storytelling, sometimes. When I do, I try hard to get someone besides myself to sign off on it. I'm a Vietnam veteran who didn't have to fight. But I have good friends who did, and I'm known to call them late at night to ask what seems to be simple questions (to them). To me, I can't stand the idea that one of my stories, ‘after' publication, contains some terrible mistake written in ignorance with no chance to correct it.<br />
I mean that. I think of it as I write, get compulsive about it when I edit. <i>The things we don't know that we don't know</i>. They keep me up nights (calling old friends with simple questions). <br />
<br />
As far as writing what I know, I know I almost died without finishing all the things I want to do. Writing isn't at the top of that list, but it's close. <br />
I'll be back.Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-3256498890567155432012-03-25T05:01:00.000-07:002012-03-25T05:01:04.176-07:00The Very Model of a Writer on the InternetI'm posting this for friends on various online forums after being on those forums for awhile. It's what I've learned.<br />
<br />
I am the very model of an author on the Internet<br />I can talk for hours to a thousand folks I've never met<br />I haunt the many forums of those subjects allegorical<br />Make many stupid statements then deny them categorical <br />I'm very well acquainted with the Classics and the Biblical<br />I can speak in Farsi, Greek, and Hebrew (with a parable)<br />And, like the Major General I'm familiar with hypotenuse<br />I can start on solid ground and wind up hanging from a noose<br /><br />ALL:<br />He talks about hypotenuse until his tongue gets tangled<br />He doesn't even know the opposite of a right triangle! <br />He doesn't even know the opposite of a right triangle!<br /><br />I'm very good at integrating you into my argument<br />Using multi-syllables as though I knew just what they meant<br />In short, I'm hoping secretly that my book you'll want to get<br />I am the very model of an author on the Internet<br />Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-21247505568580916142012-02-02T09:29:00.000-08:002012-02-02T09:32:38.197-08:00The Rules of WritingOne of the first reviews of my novel was in a newspaper in Oregon, called <b><i>The Oregon Writer</i></b>. In it, the reviewer said <i>"If you're writing novels of any genre, there's a terrific new study guide - Michael McKinney's </i>A Thousand Bridges<i>.<br /> "</i>A Thousand Bridges<i> is a mystery; but its frontier-of-writing style should hearten every fictioneer. Michael McKinney bent a lot of sacred laws and got away with it. There's hope, he's telling us, that the old steeped-in formula recipes may give way, at last allowing writers to sell individualistic stuff."</i><br />
The review goes on and on.<br />
<br />
My point in this blog entry is to explain one major thing in the way I write. I have no idea what the ‘<i>sacred laws</i>' are. <br />
And, I'm not telling anyone anything. I don't know anything.<br />
That, to me, is a major point in my writing. There are no ‘<i>Rules</i>,' outside telling a good story that makes sense. <br />
I didn't go to college; I didn't take writing courses and I don't go to writers' retreats. I have a hard time spending a weekend at a writers' conference with other writers. And that, like church, is limited to about an hour a day as a group. I can't imagine being sequestered with them. <br />
If that sounds elitist, it isn't. Then again, maybe it is. Of the writers I've met and admired, not one of them is a ‘<i>joiner</i>.'<br />
I love hanging out with people, talking and drinking and singing and stealing other people's words to use later as my own.<br />
Because <i>that</i>, I believe, is what makes a writer different. In one of my novels, <b><i>Bird in Flight</i></b> (which I hope to release online next year), I have a novelist telling an audience that writers are thieves. And, we are. We'll steal everything you hold sacred, turn it upside down, change the facts (maybe) and reveal it to the world. We can't help ourselves. We need your stories like vampires need blood.<br />
There are no rules. <br />
Some, like Saul Bellow, Faulkner and others get to be called Literary Figures. Others, like Harold Robbins and Jackie Collins are known as ‘<i>story tellers</i>.' Hacks.<br />
I don't care which is me. I just love to write.<br />
So, maybe there are a few things you need to ask yourself, to tell yourself, before you launch into that book you want to write.<br />
<i>Does it matter to you which of these you are?</i> Do you have a story you want to tell so much that you'll spend hours, days, months and years ignoring loved ones and responsibilities to write it?<br />
I do. I always do. Maggie understands. <br />
Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-34593825251049289762012-01-26T18:26:00.000-08:002012-01-26T18:26:42.935-08:00FinishingEvery author I know drives him or herself crazy in final edits. That point where you just have to ‘<i>let it go</i>.'<br /> I include myself in this list.<br /> My sequel to A Thousand Bridges is finished now. As long as I never read it again until it's in print. Or on Kindle. When my meddling will no longer matter.<br /> On the periphery of my world these last few weeks were concerts I performed at, long trips with friends and Maggie, and I thought about finishing the damned book the entire time. <br /> It's not just an ‘<i>author's</i>' thought. Finishing the crossword puzzle, the lawn and, dare I mention (?), the garden. There's a thank you on the first pages of my novel to my son Grif. It says to him, "<i>for telling me to finish what I start."</i><br /> He was twelve years old when he said that to me. <br /> There comes a time when you're done.<br /> You believed in it, now do the hard part and prove it.<br /> Let it go.<br /> Have faith in your beliefs, in your effort. If nobody reads it, buys it or loves it, you're still finished with it. Time to move on. <br /> So, to myself I say, "<i>It's time to release the next one. I'm finished here</i>."<br /> Gulp.<br /> Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-67013364913493579302011-12-27T12:12:00.000-08:002011-12-27T12:17:26.294-08:00The Back BurnerI've never really had a plan. My mother wrote poems on the backs of envelopes (still does, at 91) and I've always written stories. In the fifth grade the teacher asked us to write a short story about someone in our neighborhood. That took a bit of imagination, because I lived in the woods. But I wrote about a pretty blond girl whose daddy drove her to school every day, which was unusual back then. Most daddies had already been at work for hours before eight in the morning. But her daddy drove her to school. Even as a little kid, I recognized a girl that pretty.<br />
<br />
I wrote, in that short story, that her teeth shone like the grill on a fifty-eight Buick. If you've ever seen one, there's about an acre of chrome on it, and I thought it was pretty accurate. The teacher complimented me, and put my story up on the wall beside the blackboard.<br />
<br />
I've been a writer ever since.<br />
<br />
But, I've never had a plan. Something small will strike me at just the right time, and I'll worry it like an oyster does a grain of sand. Like a burr in a saddle or a stone in a shoe. it may take years for this irritation to become a story I want to tell, or it may never take shape. But there's always that seed, that irritation.<br />
<br />
There's always the back burner. I try, at all times, to have at least two stories going, because I get bored easily, and like to wander off in my mind. Some days, I don't feel like going to the right, so I need something to draw me to the left. That's the story on the back burner.<br />
<br />
My first published novel, A Thousand Bridges, started there as an odd little tale about a Mexican detective and a cadre of Knights Templar. I swear to god. When finished, it had nothing to do with that idea, but it hit me then as a good story to remove me from whatever tedium I'd encountered.<br />
<br />
(I believe that, if Necessity is the Mother of Invention, then Boredom must be the Father)<br />
<br />
I hate being bored, and often find that, through a lifetime of training, I can appear in one place while also being in another. Like Shrodinger's Cat. Writing is the vehicle that takes me there.<br />
<br />
Sometimes I get paired, at Writers' Conferences, with writers who learned to write in college and spend their summers at Writers' Retreats, teamed up with other writers to critique each other's work. I have very little in common with those writers. I get very little out of critiques from other writers, though I find critiques from readers painfully helpful. When pressed to analyze another writer's work, I always lie. Sometimes (most times) I don't even read it, I just pretend I did.<br />
<br />
Because I don't understand writing as a process, just as an escape from boredom. I love to write, can make entire weeks disappear and wake to find the people who love me have kept me safe while I was gone. I can't not write. I know the sentence is terrible, but it's also true.<br />
<br />
Utah Phillips once sang, "If I could hide the way I feel I'd never sing again."<br />
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I feel that way about writing.<br />
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Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-58838719698766178062011-12-26T05:38:00.000-08:002011-12-26T07:09:57.871-08:00The Dreams of DogsMy dog lies on the carpet and barks, whimpers and growls in her sleep. Sometimes, I put my hand on her and she calms down. Dogs imagine. They dream. Bears have been seen sitting alone, watching the sunset. We pretend we're the ones plugged into Heaven, but maybe we just pretend there's a Heaven. I don't know.<br />
My second rule of life is the Three N's. ‘<i>Nobody Knows Nothing</i>.'<br />
Have a conversation with anyone, friends - strangers, it doesn't matter. Everyone is full to the top with facts, with truths they want and need to share. But nobody knows nothing. "Of course there's a God," someone says.<br />
"Prove it."<br />
"Just look around you," they say, with a sweeping gesture of the hand. "How can you deny there's a God behind all this beauty?"<br />
Even the question defies logic. <br />
In Zen, it's said: <br />
<i>This is all there is <br /> The path comes to an end <br /> Among the parsley</i><br />
<br />
No god, and still there's beauty. <br />
What makes a writer is knowing we can create any world, any fact, and people will believe it long enough to be interested. Vampires, Gods and other fairies, the fiction of history and the future. Our minds are gullible to any story well-told.<br />
That's why there's a responsibility to tell the truth, even in fiction. Truth is nothing but logic. At least, that's my version. Logic, in a story, means it makes sense. Things happen the way they do because they're logical. I've stopped reading more than one story because it didn't make sense, so I try not to have that happen as I write. <br />
Gather the thousand smartest men and women who ever lived (okay, let's just say you can). Give them a hundred years and they couldn't make an earthworm. But that doesn't mean there's a god. It just means life's a mystery, and we're always trying to explain this ‘mystery' to ourselves. <br />
It's why I write. I'm trying to explain things to myself. Sometimes it works.Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-48204584404177532092011-12-20T21:53:00.000-08:002011-12-21T04:47:39.647-08:00Paying AttentionI was prowling around online yesterday when I found an organization where I once belonged, paid my dues, received the newsletter. It was the <b><i>Florida Mystery Writers of America</i></b>. There, like an old flame, was the place that took me in when my first novel was released, and I remembered the meetings, the support as my novel took off, the fading away of it all as the novel fell, ungraciously, from the charts.<br />
Here I was again, unseen at the window, peering in. A bright banner stated '<i>Sleuthfest 2012, in Orlando</i>; and, then, it announced a short story contest.<br />
I read the basic information the form of the story must take (<i>protagonist must be attending the Sleuthfest at the </i>Royal Plaza Hotel<i>, where a kid points to a Mickey Mouse hat and asks the protagonist to retrieve it for him, only to find the beanie is attached to a human head</i>).<br />
<i>I could write that</i>, I thought. <br />
So I minimized the site and began writing. As writers do, I left the real world behind and launched into the story, found my voice and finished it sometime early this morning. I read it, re-read it, thought of a title, practically beaming.<br />
Dozens of projects were left undone. Christmas on the way, and I spent ten hours writing, fearlessly flying through my imagination.<br />
So I opened the contest site again and read all the way to the bottom this time. <i>This contest is open to the attendants of Sleuthfest 2012 only. </i>That's what it said at the bottom.<br />
I then searched out the registration site for Sleuthfest. <i>255 bucks for FMWA members, 275 for non-members.</i><br />
<br />
What makes a writer isn't always the <i>paying-attention </i>part. But maybe you should get all the facts first. That applies to story telling, and it applies to life itself.<br />
Oops. <i></i><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
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<br /> Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-56287636554174057342011-12-17T06:51:00.000-08:002011-12-17T06:56:38.952-08:00Whatever Became of Me? <br />
The last communication from my long-time agent in NYC reads almost like a suicide note. And he's been in the thick of it for over thirty years. Times change.<br />
<br />
Friends with very good books, who are struggling to find a way to enter the book business, are asking me how this new eBook adventure of mine is going. I feel as though I'm leading them astray, when ‘<i>good</i>' advice would tell them to hang in there and wait for the business to revive itself. But I've lost faith in that resurrection. <br />
<br />
Celebrity sells, period. And the Cult of Celebrity remains shrouded in mystery to me. I have no idea why some people become celebrities and some don't. The finest duo I've ever heard in Americana music struggles to find gigs. Others seem to find concert venues wherever they look. I have no idea why. <br />
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When I hear that an 18 year-old celebrity has written a memoir I think it must be like a newly laid egg writing of what it feels like to be fried, boiled and scrambled. <br />
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People tell me they're sorry that I've never made it. I know what they mean, but they don't have a clue.<br />
<br />
I've been married for almost forty years to a woman who still makes my heart beat faster by simply walking into the room. I have a seven acre farm, where I grow nothing that doesn't just pop naturally from the ground....like trees and wild blueberries. <br />
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I've written four more novels and two children's books, and feel that I've gotten better as a writer with each book. They may never sell, but I'll write another anyway. It doesn't matter. I'm a writer, so what else will I do?<br />
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Maggie and I have 8 CDs of our original music that sell around the world. We've played the main stages of major folk festivals and a sold-out concert at the legendary <i>Linenhall Arts Centre</i> in Castlebar, Ireland. We've stood on wet slate atop an Irish castle in the rain, watching a wild river run far below. We've toasted the lights of the French coast from Sark, an island at the farthest tip of the English Channel. We've played shows in Newcastle, England, and Bandera, Texas. We're pirates at the Conch Republic Festival in Key West, and at the Florida Seafood Festival in Apalachicola, Florida. We're hired every year as entertainers at major Celtic festivals in the Southeast. We're photos in ten thousand family albums.<br />
<br />
So I guess we've achieved ‘celebrity' status in our lives.<br />
<br />
‘Making it' means different things to different people. After just a little over a month of this self-promotion thing online, I feel like a hack. <i>"Here, little kid,"</i> I say. <i>"Here's a dollar. Now do you like me?"</i><br />
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Maggie just looked over this part about self-promotion and said, "I'd call it ‘Brag and Gag.'"<br />
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True.<br />
<br />
I hope my novel ‘<i>makes it</i>,' because if it does there are more waiting restlessly in the wings. The first in line is a finished sequel to <i>A Thousand Bridges</i>. I'm impatient, at sixty-four. Maggie would tell you that's nothing new. <br />
Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-41483719349572550362011-12-12T04:46:00.000-08:002011-12-27T13:04:04.674-08:00ClutterWhen I walk into someone's house, I'm always surprised by how tidy they are. Just the right amount of books on each shelf; spaces between with little statuettes, one book leaning against another as though it had just been read. No dust anywhere. <br />
Kitchens are so neat and clean, no half-filled glass on the counter, no piece of toast surrounded by dark crumbs. No jelly sitting out, no milk ring on the tiles. <br />
There are no closed doors. You can glance into any room and they're all spotless. Closed doors hide clutter. I know, because I always have at least one. Behind each closed door there's a room dangerously crowded with cardboard boxes, overfilled with paper, with half-read books, lists (always lists), songs we haven't learned yet, and even those we have. We only throw paper away when lighting a fire. <br />
I'm the kind of writer who needs a paper copy of each draft of my novel, and I edit every time I read. So there are mountains of manuscripts; all that paper, all that ink. Years of rewrites and false starts. I have no idea which is the newest because after I read it I put it with the others. Careless, but I doubt I'll change.<br />
There are guitars in every room. There are drums and mandolins and even a banjo, though the strings rusted and broke years ago. Someday, I think....someday I'll buy new strings and learn to play that banjo. <br />
It's an ancient house with no closets. Handmade shelves for the books, handmade cabinets for the plates, the pots and pans. No doors on any pantry anywhere. I know it drives some people mad, but it will never be different. There are too many exciting things to do, too many places to go. A new treasure to bring home. The bottom of an old brass fire extinguisher holds a half-dozen canes, at least that many swords and maybe even a pistol somewhere in the depths. Though we dust, there is dust everywhere. We live in the woods.<br />
Maggie loves hanging things from the ceiling fans. Feathered angels, little bells, potpourri in pretty brass balls, mobiles that tinkle and dance each time I walk under them. There are wires here and there that I always mean to move. Over twenty five years of projects still undone leaves extension cords where there should be outlets in my cluttered house.<br />
But there's always so much to do....places to go, people to see. A meeting for lunch somewhere with salad and wine, a tournament at some overly decorated miniature golf course with tigers in the trees, giraffes on the fairway. Whiskey tastings and concerts, road trips to play music at festivals, trips to Europe to play music on so many stages, in so many clubs. Up early and out late, it's just who we are.<br />
And then, there are the books still unwritten. Always scraps of paper in my pockets, on any flat surface, most with a short description of an event, the way an eyebrow had been raised. The shape of a tree limb, maybe, or the flow of a dress. I'm always writing, though rarely at my desk. I have an endless filing cabinet in my head with a system only I know for recovery. It disappears, then spills out when I write, usually in the right order. <br />
No one knows how to write. Writers just do what they must, and that's all. Writers write, even if it's on the walls.Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-19713365331725757442011-12-06T08:09:00.001-08:002011-12-06T08:18:04.777-08:00ViolenceAs I've begun skimming all these writers' blogs, I'm fascinated by how so many writers spend their days doing ‘writery' things. Pacing in front of a typewriter, glass of whiskey in one hand, giving a seminar at some conference, some woodsy retreat.<br /><br /> At a quarter to seven this morning I was standing barefoot in my yard holding a twelve gauge shotgun as a sick, possibly rabid, raccoon stumbled toward me. Maggie had taken our dog in the house and closed the door.<br /><br /> I grew up in the rural South, where husbandry is often linked to violence by necessity. I grew up around guns, and a gun culture. At my high school almost every truck had a gun rack, every car a pistol on the seat. But we never shot anyone. ‘Beat the hell out of each other, maybe, but I don't think I ever had a discussion with my friends back then about killing, except in war. <br /><br /> So I killed the raccoon. Put it in a box and called animal control, some forty miles away. I sit here now, still waiting for them to arrive, over three hours later. Not unusual, here in the deep woods.<br /><br /> But I didn't just kill a raccoon. I committed an act of violence. I felt it, viscerally, from the bile in my throat to the ache in my shoulder, a vibration through me by this act of violence that is still here. Violence is visceral. It is physical. It leaves a stench that other animals recognize.<br /><br /> I spent almost an hour bleaching the kill spot first, then hosing the area down over and over again, in case the results will come back positive for rabies. After I let my dog out, maybe ten minutes ago, she went straight to that spot and put her nose to the earth. We leave a trail behind us, all living things do. It's why people are compelled to travel a thousand miles to touch a piece of highway where a loved one was killed. To leave a little cross in the grass, a handful of flowers.<br /><br /> I write mystery fiction, political thrillers mostly, from a private detective's point of view. There's always a body count. But unless your protagonist is one of those rare, true sociopaths, he or she will not wade through rivers of blood with a smirk saying things like "hasta la vista, baby," or "I'll be back."<br /><br /> Violence takes a toll, even if it's necessary. Occam's Razor (also known by the curious term The Law of Parsimony) applies to animal husbandry as well, as it did this morning. My options were to leave it alone, close the door and hope it would wander off to maybe infect another animal or human, or to kill it.<br /><br /> I killed it. <br /><br /> And here's where this becomes writery. I served during the Vietnam war, though I never had to kill anyone. In the course of my long life, growing up rural, I've had to kill beloved pets because they were in terrible pain with no chance of recovery. I've held them in my arms and kissed them goodbye as I ended their lives, and as I get older it gets harder. <br /><br /> I could say I ‘put them down,' but that wouldn't tell the real story.<br /><br /> Never treat violence in your writing as though it had no consequence. It does. From a slap in the face to a murder, it's an unnatural act. In the land and the time of my raising, boys fought all the time. We didn't even have to be mad at each other, we just liked the sting of pain, the rush of adrenaline. The odd relaxation that followed. <br /><br /> To those who didn't grow up this way, the act of striking someone with your fist isn't natural. It causes such a rush of adrenaline that a person, sometimes, finds it hard to stop. Or, the thought of it makes it impossible to raise that fist against another. Shooting at a target isn't the same as shooting at a living thing. I know...I've done both. <br /><br /> One of my dear friends, who fought through WW Two under Halsey's command in the Pacific on the deck of a ship, told me how he once stood on deck in underwear and a flack jacket, shooting a fifty caliber gun into the air at diving Japanese planes, shouting over and over the whole time, "God, please don't let me kill anyone!"<br /><br /> He's gone now, and I miss him. Violence should never be used lightly in a novel. Never. <br /><br /> Mike <br /> Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-34839586325047586482011-11-29T12:47:00.000-08:002011-11-29T12:57:31.280-08:00Lights are on....nobody's homeI grew up in the rural South, where everything begins with a story. I love stories. What I love most is words, and the way a good writer can make one lean against the other in a perfect fit. Like an old stone wall in Ireland. How Shakespeare or William Faulkner or Solzhenitsyn make their words come to life.<br />
<br />
When Solzhenitsyn tells, in <i>Cancer Ward</i>, of how the little dog who was afraid of water apologized, first with his ears, then with his tail each time they approached the lake, I can see that dog. That's magic.<br />
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In the summer of 1991, I decided to write a novel. (My second, though the first will probably always live in a closed drawer) My wife, Maggie, long ago adjusted to the ADD center of my being, how I could sit beside her, or stand in a crowded room, interacting while my mind was a thousand miles away. She nudges me sometimes, and whispers in my ear, "Lights are on...nobody's home."<br />
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I'm always making up stories. I've done this for as long as I can remember. Telling myself bedtime stories to get to sleep - I still do, at my age. <br />
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Maggie and I have an old farmhouse in the Florida Panhandle, deep in the lush jungle that borders the wild Gulf of Mexico, where there are no street lights and, on moonless nights, stars, thick as dust, make a pure white light that can cast shadows on the ground.<br />
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Our house is surrounded by huge pecan trees, and skirted with a wide porch filled with chairs and little tables, and we sit there (as the old folks say) "<i>of an evening</i>" and listen to the night. There was a time, in the early Nineties, when we could hear rapid arms fire and helicopters not too far from our house, just across Econfina Creek. Always in the dark of night. I began to imagine the ‘what if's' of Contras training there in that large area beyond the creek, fenced and patrolled to keep riff-raff like me out, which only increases my curiosity; so with each distant burst of weapons fire, each thumping of helicopter rotors in the dark night, I began to create a story. The story became a novel, and I found first an agent then, through him, a publisher. My title,<i> A Thousand Bridges</i>, held on and the book was published to critical acclaim in 1992.<br />
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The reviewers called it a political thriller, a detective mystery, but I think of it as a love story with a lot of death in it. I called it <i>A Thousand Bridges</i>, after one version of a saying fighter pilots in Vietnam passed around: ‘<i>You build a thousand bridges and you're an architect, but just let one of those bridges fall down on market day and you're a bum again</i>.'<br />
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A recent review from a blog called it "<i>An amazing fore-shadowing of today's current political climate!</i>"<br />
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<i>A Thousand Bridges</i> was released by Walker Books, NYC. In a hardbound edition, it received a coveted Starred Review in Publishers Weekly, who also chose the book as one of their Top Ten First Fiction of the Year.<br />
Fantastic reviews followed in publications like Kirkus Reviews, The San Francisco Chronicle and The St. Petersburg Times, among others. The Library Journal chose it as one of their top First Novels in the October 1992 issue, which had the effect of delivering <i>A Thousand Bridges</i> to public libraries all across America. The Associated Press sent a lengthy review out on its news wires titled <i>A Thousand Bridges Bats 1,000</i>.<br />
Then, the division of Walker Books that released the novel folded. Times change.<br />
But I believe this novel is as vital now as it was when it was first released. Kiki Olsen, a reviewer from Philadelphia, PA, wrote in a review published in the St. Petersburg Times Sunday edition, September 27th, 1992, that it was " <i>an astoundingly articulate novel set in Florida...</i>"<br />
She says of McDonald Clay, the protagonist, <i>"Mac is a supremely engaging hero. He is brave, honest, bold and begrudgingly romantic....The all-but-impossible mission McKinney sketched out for him is packed with action, desire, suspense and mystery.<br />
McKinney does a sensational job of putting his ‘it could happen here' story together, and much of his art lies in the economy of words. He is succinct and precise in moving the action and emotions, making it unnecessary for readers to slog through dreary, unnecessary descriptions."</i><br />
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More reviews followed in The Times Picayune (New Orleans) and the Buffalo Times. Jerome Sterns of NPR, writing in the Tallahassee Democrat, said <i>A Thousand Bridges is a thriller with just enough resemblance to today's political weirdness to make it downright scary. The cast of villains are involved in the stuff of today's headlines. Dope dealing and arms deals that involve the very pillars of the community. Corruption wrapped in the cloth of high righteousness and the American flag. A avidity for power and money that violates all notions of decency. And most interesting of all, an impatient intolerance with the inconvenient people of America - "them," as Pat Buchanan put it in a recent speech."</i><br />
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My mother, Lucy, instilled this love of words in me in such a way that it has remained a single, driving force in my life. I'm a sixth-generation Floridian, and love writing about the land that created me - the land I love.<br />
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I'm a Vietnam era veteran who never had to fight, but I still hate the sound of helicopters. I was stationed at Tyndall Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle when I met Maggie. I worked on the flight line and she was leading the anti-war protests on the marina. It was love at first sight. We've been together for a long, long time, and we spend our lives mostly as a singer/songwriter duo called "<i>Lucky Mud</i>". We've had the chance to play our original, lyric based music around the world, but Florida is still our home. We've played the main stages of the Florida Folk Festival and the Will McLean Festival, and tour the West of Ireland every year. It's a heady thing to know our CDs are being played from Florida to Texas, from Ireland to Denmark. We've just now released our 8th CD on CD Baby, called <i>Into the Night</i>. Our son, Griffin, resides in Mountain View, California. <br />
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Michael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3163469648760502987.post-25976195725993530542011-11-29T12:20:00.000-08:002011-11-29T12:26:04.929-08:00Sleeping in the ChairWriting takes time, and there's never enough of it. Every writer I know writes while his family sleeps. Every fortunate writer has a family who forgives, friends who overlook the things we do to feed our compulsion.<br />
<br />
"I'm Michael McKinney", I say to the circle of strangers, "and I'm a writer."<br />
<br />
My novel, <i>A Thousand Bridges</i>, came out in 1992, and because of the good reviews I was guest author at a lot of writers' conferences. At each of them, there was the inevitable panel of writers. We sat on some raised stage, behind a table, each with a little microphone, imparting wisdom to a crowd of hopefuls.<br />
<br />
I sat there listening to so many writers as they told the audience how to write. There was the reference to Hemingway and the fact that if you didn't write at least a thousand words a day you couldn't call yourself a writer.<br />
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Bullshit. Hemingway also stood up to type and blew his brains out when he was still young enough to create more great stories. I was honored to share a page in Publishers Weekly, and a writer's conference, with Lorien Hemingway, and she's one hell of a writer. Both our books were chosen by PW as Top First Novels in the same year. I remember she said that, in her family, it was "kill or kill yourself."<br />
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Don't kill yourself. Write. Don't let anyone stop you. <br />
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Nobody knows how to write, as though there were a manual somewhere with exploded diagrams and a handy index.<br />
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Whether it's music, novels, paintings, any form of creativity, you alone know your heart. Your timetable is yours alone. You know where the dark corners are, the sharp edges, the peaceful fields. You alone.<br />
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What I try to say at each conference is the only thing I know to be true to me. No one, at the end of your life, will stand over your casket and say, "He was a good man, but he never wrote a book."<br />
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Or a song. Or painted a picture. You're the only one who cares. Don't create if it hurts you. I hear authors tell a crowd, "Writing is like cutting my wrists with a rusty razor."<br />
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Then, don't write. If revealing the truth inside you is that painful, maybe you should keep it to yourself.<br />
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The only thing you have to do to be a writer is to write. Books, songs, poems, it doesn't matter. Published, unpublished, you're still a writer. Don't let anyone say you're not. I've heard so many authors talk about how the ‘<i>only</i>' way to write is to block off a section of time, regular as clockwork, and force your Muse to sit there, stroking you while you think.<br />
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Maybe, if you have that kind of Muse.<br />
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My Muse is more like a lover; showing up when she wants, staying as long as she wants. She'll leave in a huff over the smallest argument and be gone for weeks. All I can do is hope she's away on business, some mission of mercy and not in the arms of another man.<br />
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Sometimes, she taps shyly on the door, other times she rips it off its hinges, bowls me over, sits on my chest and whispers in my ear, "Do what I say and you won't get hurt."<br />
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She doesn't like it when I get in the way, when I try to mold a song or story in my image. ‘<i>They're like children</i>', she says. ‘<i>You give birth to them but they're not reflections of you'</i>.<br />
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Creativity is a great mystery, and there's nothing like lying in the arms of the Muse afterward, listening to the rain, feeling the cool air, the sheets, her warm breath. <br />
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Writing is a dreamworld to me. My wife, Maggie, and I have lived together, close to each other for almost 40 years and though she's a great songwriter we've never written anything together. My creativity comes from a place unlike hers, the paths are different for each of us.<br />
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I'm fortunate enough to be a published author, with a well-respected agent in NYC, but that business is on the ropes. Of course, so is pulp wooding, so are the sawmills here at home. Hard times are everywhere.<br />
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And I'm not sure I have any advice that would help you, or anyone, with writing. I've never written at the same time every day, or even every day. I don't set a goal of a thousand words, or a limit, either. I've been known to party when others work, and to write for days on end. Without sleep.<br />
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Now, I'm trying to imagine how to start a blog that might be readable. I guess I should say here that I have a website called http://www.athousandbridges1992.com and it has links to Kindle, Nook and the other eBook readers. Now that I've decided to re-release the novel as an eBook, I'll hold my breath, hoping someone notices, because I have a completed sequel to it, and four other novels ready to try out this wonderful new medium.<br />
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I know this is long-winded. Sorry. I wait to hear from you, and to learn the etiquette of blogging.<br />
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MikeMichael McKinneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17841260754500394955noreply@blogger.com3