The Back Burner

I'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.
   
     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.
   
     I've been a writer ever since.

     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.
  
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.

     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.
   
     (I believe that, if Necessity is the Mother of Invention, then Boredom must be the Father)

     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.

     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.

     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.

     Utah Phillips once sang, "If I could hide the way I feel I'd never sing again."

     I feel that way about writing.


   

The Dreams of Dogs

My 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.
     My second rule of life is the Three N's. ‘Nobody Knows Nothing.'
     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.
     "Prove it."
     "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?"
     Even the question defies logic.
     In Zen, it's said:
     This is all there is                           
     The path comes to an end
     Among the parsley

     No god, and still there's beauty.
     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.
     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.
     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.
     It's why I write. I'm trying to explain things to myself. Sometimes it works.

Paying Attention

I was prowling around online yesterday when I found an organization where I once belonged, paid my dues, received the newsletter. It was the Florida Mystery Writers of America. 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.
     Here I was again, unseen at the window, peering in. A bright banner stated 'Sleuthfest 2012, in Orlando;  and, then, it announced a short story contest.
     I read the basic information the form of the story must take (protagonist must be attending the Sleuthfest at the Royal Plaza Hotel, 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 could write that, I thought.
     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.
     Dozens of projects were left undone. Christmas on the way, and I spent ten hours writing, fearlessly flying through my imagination.
     So I opened the contest site again and read all the way to the bottom this time. This contest is open to the attendants of Sleuthfest 2012 only. That's what it said at the bottom.
     I then searched out the registration site for Sleuthfest. 255 bucks for FMWA members, 275 for non-members.

     What makes a writer isn't always the paying-attention  part. But maybe you should get all the facts first. That applies to story telling, and it applies to life itself.
     Oops.


    




   

Whatever Became of Me?

 
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.

     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 ‘good' advice would tell them to hang in there and wait for the business to revive itself. But I've lost faith in that resurrection.

     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.

     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.

     People tell me they're sorry that I've never made it. I know what they mean, but they don't have a clue.

     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.

     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?

     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 Linenhall Arts Centre 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.

     So I guess we've achieved ‘celebrity' status in our lives.

     ‘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. "Here, little kid," I say. "Here's a dollar. Now do you like me?"

     Maggie just looked over this part about self-promotion and said, "I'd call it ‘Brag and Gag.'"

     True.

     I hope my novel ‘makes it,' because if it does there are more waiting restlessly in the wings. The first in line is a finished sequel to A Thousand Bridges. I'm impatient, at sixty-four. Maggie would tell you that's nothing new.
    

Clutter

When 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.
     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.
     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.
     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.
     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.
     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.
     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.
     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.
     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.
     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.

Violence

As 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.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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."

     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.

     I killed it.

     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.

     I could say I ‘put them down,' but that wouldn't tell the real story.

     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.

     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.

     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!"

     He's gone now, and I miss him. Violence should never be used lightly in a novel. Never.

                                                Mike