Americana

Reading Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem ‘Johnny Nolan has a Patch on his Ass', 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 - "There's a place in the sun, and before my life is done....."
     He plays the song over and over.
     (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.
     "Click-click-click," my friend said.  "All night long.")
     One tour of duty and I was out and gone. The military isn't for everyone.

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.
     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.
     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."?
     There is no way to say it. Her songwriting is exquisite. Nashville has the ‘formula' for success. It's that simple.
    
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.'
     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.
    .
     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.
     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,
"Ain't no time to wonder why
Whoopie! We're all Goin' to Die."
     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.

    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.
     "God damn them all
       I was told/ we'd sail the seas for American gold
       We'd fire no gun/ Shed no tear
        Now I'm a broken man on the  Halifax Pier
        The last of Barrett's Privateers"

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.
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.
     
     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.
     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.
     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.

     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?
     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.
     The only cancellation was Eric Taylor, who got iced in after his gig in Atlanta the night before. He called to apologize.

     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.'

     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.
     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.

     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.
   

Writing the Past

 "A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel." — Robert Frost

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."
      And such shit as that.
     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.
     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.
     Bryant went from spokesperson for the orange juice industry to the anti-gay superstar of the Right when, in 1977, she said things like, "As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children."
     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 Flower Children and there was The Summer of Love. 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.
     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, "Is that legal?"
     The first time I heard someone (Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog) say ‘fuck' 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.
     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.
     All this from watching a few minutes of ancient film footage of the Rolling Stones.
     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.
     Writing ‘what you know' 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.
     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.
     Just my opinion.

Keeping Up with the Times

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.
     There are no pay phones.
     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.
     Then, along came the silicon chip. Micro-electronic engineering. The story was still good, but it didn't survive the change.
     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.
     So, we have to pay attention - something I'm spotty at doing. We have to be aware of the Present 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.

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.
     Gas was pumped for you by ex-sailors and banks gave away toasters.  
     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.
     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 Blue Tooth, 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 Kindles and Nooks, their computers. Not just a few but almost all of them are in their own little worlds.


     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.
     I was born into a post WW Two world of dirt road Southerners, fields still being plowed with mules and Separate While Unequal Rights for the races. Towns that closed on noon Wednesdays, and from noon Saturday until Monday morning. No ATMs, no weekend banking. All stores closed on Sundays. Separate entrances to movie theaters, to doctors' offices - on one door WHITE, on the other, COLORED.
     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.
     When I write a story about ‘Now,' it has to reflect ‘Now.'
     Here's hoping I get it right.

Gods and Other Faeries

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.
     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.

     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.
     Happy Halloween.
     Mike

In the beginning, God made day and night
Then Abraham got tired of the Canaanites
So he decided to go off and start his very own clan

Well, he finagled some sheep and a couple of cows
(you can read the bible if you want to know how)
But then he saw the flaw in his little plan

See, he and Sarah did it night and day
They did it in the desert and they did it in the hay
They did it and they did it until they almost wore it out

But Sarah said, "Sorry"
And Abe said "Thanks,
I can't be sure who's shooting blanks
So I'm gonna have to leave it up to you to work this out"

So Sarah gave Abraham a jug of wine
Then she gave him Hagar, the concubine
and nine months later, there was little Ishmael

So it was Sarah who was barren as a dry creek bed
But she couldn't get those pictures out of her head
and it would be an understatement to say she did not take it well

She was in her 70s and she thought she'd had it
But she and Abraham kept going at it
And along came Isaac, her own little bundle of joy

So she said, "Abe, I'm gonna need more room for the baby
A place for the bassinet so do you think maybe
You could get rid of Hagar and that dirty little ugly bastard boy?"

Well, Hagar begged and Abraham whined
But Sarah stood firm and she toed the line
And before you know it, Hagar was on her own

Well, Abraham didn't have to do it,
but he thought it over and he figured, "Screw it,
It's the easiest way I know to keep a happy home"

So with the clothes on her back and a baby at her breast
No food to eat, no place to rest
Hagar began to starve in abject deprivation

But God looked down, and God took pity
And Ishmael lived, and he built a city
And soon he was the leader of a brand new Arab nation

Now we all know that sooner or later
The Middle East will be a nuclear crater
And we're all gonna die trying to fulfill some biblical matter

That was written on papyrus with camel dung
By some dim bulb on the bottom rung
Of the entire human evolutionary ladder

About a naked couple that was left to grapple
with Life and Death and Snakes and Apples
And a God that would let some guy kill 10,000 people with the jawbone of an ass

So, don't you think it's time that we got rid
Of hating somebody 'cause your daddy did
and finally put our history in the past

But, there's only one real question I have for you......
Don't we need better reasons for the things we do?

A Good Cook

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.
     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.
     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.
     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).
     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:
     "I dunno....he seemed so quiet. You barely knew he was there."
     The writer seems glib, if you only know his/her work. Knowing the writer is all together different.
     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.
     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.
     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.
   
    

The Zombie Tour

Leaving Halifax behind

We spend a day in Hall's Harbour

 "I don't think much about zombies," I said.
     "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.
     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."
     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.
     "I know this is going to be a long road trip," I said, "so I needed something to start talking about."
     "Zombies?" Maggie said.
     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.
     I thought zombies would be a good place to start.
     "Sometimes," Maggie said, "you're just too weird for me."
     "Like now?"
     "Yeah, like now."
   
     I don't understand the fascination with zombies. There must be some social connotation that I just don't ‘get.'
     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.
      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.

Maggie at the rail, returning across the Bay of Fundy on the Ferry, Princess of Acadia

    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.
     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.
     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.
     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.'
     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.
     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.
     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.
     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.

On Halifax Pier, Nova Scotia

     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.
     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.

A wonderful little house overlooking the Atlantic. Someday, we'll rent it.

       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.
     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.
     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.
     (Support Local Music)
     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.

Happiness

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?
     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.
     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.
       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.
     We call it ‘the Groove.'
     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.
     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.
     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.
     That's happiness.


(Tim Fik and Bridget Kelley joined Maggie and me on the Under the Oaks stage at the 2012 Florida Folk Festival Memorial Weekend )

Ghost Writing

It'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.
     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.
     The first thing he does is mix it up with a newspaper writer in the ‘little' town.
     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.
     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.
     In other words, losing the chance to write the series was all my fault.
     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.
     (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)
     Once inside, the detective looks around, sees no one, so he exits,  runs around the house and breaks down the back door.
     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.
     I should've followed protocol and just maybe I'd be sitting pretty right now. Maybe I'd have a new car.
     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.
     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.
     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.
     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.

The Angina Monologue

So, 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.
     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, "Damn! The pollen is terrible this year!" and "Do you think I might have the flu?" Maggie dragged me to our doctor who shook his head and said, "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."
     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, "he's having a heart attack," and finally it dawned on me.
     I was having a heart attack. I found out from the doctor later that I'd probably had another one the day before.
     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.

     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.
     That's called denial.
     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.
     So why would I suspect it could be my heart?
     A week of learning in the hospital, from the startling discovery that Mrs. Dash 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 Mrs. Dash to put so many mismatched and bland spices into a single bottle?
     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.
     Life is good. 
  
     And this brings me to my latest blog thought, ‘Write What You Know.'
     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.
     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.
     I still remember a scene from a Harold Robbins novel I read in high school. It was called A Stone For Danny Fisher. Danny was a fairly complicated and despicable man, and Robbins, though loathed in ‘literary' circles, could tell a pretty good story.
     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.
     I included an homage to that novel in my first book, A Thousand Bridges, in a scene where Mac comes very close to death. Elisabeth Kubler Ross mentioned this phenomenon in her great book, On Death and Dying.
     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.
     I mean that. I think of it as I write, get compulsive about it when I edit. The things we don't know that we don't know. They keep me up nights (calling old friends with simple questions).
    
     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.
     I'll be back.

The Very Model of a Writer on the Internet

I'm posting this for friends on various online forums after being on those forums for awhile. It's what I've learned.

I am the very model of an author on the Internet
I can talk for hours to a thousand folks I've never met
I haunt the many forums of those subjects allegorical
Make many stupid statements then deny them categorical
I'm very well acquainted with the Classics and the Biblical
I can speak in Farsi, Greek, and Hebrew (with a parable)
And, like the Major General I'm familiar with hypotenuse
I can start on solid ground and wind up hanging from a noose

ALL:
He talks about hypotenuse until his tongue gets tangled
He doesn't even know the opposite of a right triangle!
He doesn't even know the opposite of a right triangle!

I'm very good at integrating you into my argument
Using multi-syllables as though I knew just what they meant
In short, I'm hoping secretly that my book you'll want to get
I am the very model of an author on the Internet

The Rules of Writing

One of the first reviews of my novel was in a newspaper in Oregon, called The Oregon Writer. In it, the reviewer said "If you're writing novels of any genre, there's a terrific new study guide - Michael McKinney's A Thousand Bridges.
     "A Thousand Bridges 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."
     The review goes on and on.

     My point in this blog entry is to explain one major thing in the way I write. I have no idea what the ‘sacred laws' are.
     And, I'm not telling anyone anything. I don't know anything.
     That, to me, is a major point in my writing. There are no ‘Rules,' outside telling a good story that makes sense.
     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.
     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 ‘joiner.'
     I love hanging out with people, talking and drinking and singing and stealing other people's words to use later as my own.
     Because that, I believe, is what makes a writer different. In one of my novels, Bird in Flight (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.
     There are no rules.
     Some, like Saul Bellow, Faulkner and others get to be called Literary Figures. Others, like Harold Robbins and Jackie Collins are known as ‘story tellers.' Hacks.
     I don't care which is me. I just love to write.
     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.
     Does it matter to you which of these you are? 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?
     I do. I always do. Maggie understands.
 

Finishing

Every author I know drives him or herself crazy in final edits. That point where you just have to ‘let it go.'
     I include myself in this list.
     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.
     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.
     It's not just an ‘author's' 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, "for telling me to finish what I start."
     He was twelve years old when he said that to me.
     There comes a time when you're done.
     You believed in it, now do the hard part and prove it.
     Let it go.
     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.
     So, to myself I say, "It's time to release the next one. I'm finished here."
     Gulp.