Month: November 2019

Boom Days

Boom days are here. I’ve had four or five great writing days in a row. The muses have arrived on time and sober each day and fed me the tale, sharing character details, pointing out the story arc and plot lines like they’re good friends. They’ve been amazingly generous…so far.

Ah, good times. One hundred pages are completed, twenty-seven thousand words, on It Begins, the novel-in-progress begun at the beginning of this month. I know, doesn’t sound like much, but this is the foundation stage. Once things are established, the story starts flowing more quickly. Ten main characters have been introduced. Think of it as And Then There Were None, but in reverse.

Having multiple main characters with separate points of view and varying story arcs complicates matters a little. I solved that (for now, at least, as it’s working) by focusing on one or two characters, writing their scenes until they reach a major plot pivot point where the first three characters stopped. Today, I continue to focus on Selena, the four-year-old. She amazes and surprises me.

I’ll take the boom times. I know from my experience that there will be bust days sooner or later, forcing to take a deep sigh and a long swallow of coffee, gird myself with grit teeth, sit down and type, damn it.

But for now, all is well.

Meanwhile, I’ve not heard anything from agents on my previous offering, April Showers 1921. Three expressed interest a few weeks ago and requested more material. That was sent. Now I wait. Is longer time of waiting good or bad? It’s a Schrödinger situation, innit?

Got my coffee. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

 

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

News stories stayed with me late yesterday as I finished walking and headed home. Too many tales about murders and suicides, impeachment and politics, wars and disease. It all felt a little heavy.

Some lyrics stole into my stream:

Been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will

It’s been too hard living, but I’m afraid to die
‘Cause I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky

I couldn’t remember more of the song, and worked on that as I reached home and made lunch. Other pieces came in but not enough for attribution. It seemed like an old song. I was finally forced to Google to find it.

There it was, Sam Cooke, “A Change Is Gonna Come”, from 1964. It’s dismaying to think of that song being written in the early sixties because of what he endured in Shrevesport, LA, one night. How humans treat others because of their differences remains a sad situation. We’ve made some progress on this, but we’ve also slid backwards. At times like these, I fall back on Parker’s quote, “The arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice.” Parker was a clergyman in the 1800s. I always thought the quote belonged to Martin Luther King, Jr., but I found in reading that he was quoting another.

No matter who first said it, it endures. As Sam Cooke wrote and sang,

It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gon’ come, oh yes it will

I’m indebted to Metrolyrics.com, Songfacts.com, and Wikipedia.org for refreshing my memory.

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Floofedly

Floofedly (floofinition) – In a manner that shows tenacity and grim persistence.

In use: “The dog floofedly sat at the window, waiting for anyone — human, animal, squirrel, or mailmeat — to trespass on her walk.”

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Floof-exchange

Floof-exchange (floofinition) – Place where animals go to enter quantum portals that allow them to live better lives in alterverses. Sometimes they take their current bodies with them but have the power to leave that body behind, sometimes later returning to that same body. Because of the floof-exchange’s nature, it’s possible for animals to arrive seconds before they left so it appears that they never departed at all.

In use: “Multiple floof-exchanges exist wherever humans lived, but humans lack the intelligence and skill sets to see or understand them, and the animals use them freely.”

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Shufflefloof

Shufflefloof (floofinition) – 1. Activity where a person moves one pet or animal only to have another one engage them. 2. Game with a complex points system where pets take whatever place a human or other pet vacated. Higher points are given if the points are from an animal different from themselves.

In use: “Classic games of shufflefloot are constantly being shared on social media, such as the one about the cat, Dylan, who keeps stealing a woman’s spot whenever she moves.”

 

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Monday’s Theme Music

I was standing in my grass in my bare feet, breathing the morning air, looking around and remembering my dream. A shaft of sunshine found me, or I found it. I called the cat, Meep, aka the Ginger Prince, ‘real name’ Papi, and he came up and over the fence, flying at me with heroic music. I was thinking about change still, so some of the lyrics to “Change” by Blind Melon (1992) chugged into the stream.

And when you feel life ain’t worth living
You’ve got to stand up, and take a look around
And you look up, way to the sky
And when your deepest thoughts are broken
Keep on dreamin’, boy
‘Cause when you stop dreamin’, it’s time to die

h/t to Genius.com

I remembered the words well enough but like copying and pasting lyrics sites like Genius.com to get them correct. I continue dreaming in the nocturnal sense and the hopeful sense of pursuing goals. I’m always looking at the sky.

I don’t have any broken dreams, just dreams refined and postponed. I feel that I should note that Shannon Hoon, who wrote and sang “Change” passed away from a drug overdose when he was 28, just as they found greater success. The song was released well before his death, but I listen to it differently after he died.

Cheers

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Differences

I was thinking about how different people think, how approaches vary, from the balls out risk-everything, take no prisoners approach to the more cautious haste makes waste angle. Each of us develop preferences. We evolve and refine these from watching and listening to us, and then addressing our approaches based on our results.

I remember a philosophy class I took decades ago. The professor was a good friend. We regularly socialized outside of class before I ever took any of us classes. He and I were of very like minds, and I expected the class to be similarly aligned.

Most were. These were University of Maryland classes on Okinawa. Most attendees were military members or dependents. In this class, one woman, a security police airman who was a few years younger than me, was fearless about stating her positions.

I found her positions pretty shocking. For fun, she and her friends liked to drive around at night and deliberately run over animals. She yearned for days like the ‘wild west’, where if you thought someone was guilty, you called them out and shoot it out.

Those were two of the more extreme examples of how her thinking diverged from mine. The final part, however, was how she declared herself to be a good Christian. While I could appreciate and understand someone having views different from mine, and accept (with much disgust) that they thought so lightly of life that they killed for fun (and regaled us about how she and her friends thought it was so funny), I couldn’t grasp how she reconciled her views as a Christian with these attitudes toward killing and justice.

I still don’t.

And as I think of Donald Trump, and all that he’s been shown to have done, from his marriages and affairs, bankruptcies, attacks on others’ service to the United States, repeated lies and empty boasts, I think of his supporters. Like that woman in my philosophy class, I do not understand how they reconcile what they see, hear, know, and believe. I try to understand, partly from intellectual curiosity as well as trying to satisfy for myself that I’m not missing something, that I’m not living in a silo. I also try to understand it from a motivational point as a writer, feeding my characters.

Reality can be stranger than fiction, but I imagine that many of them don’t understand me and wonder how I’ve come to be a progressive liberal, because they think I’m destroying the nation, if not the world. Possibly somewhere, there’s a novelist trying to understand how I think, so they can feed their character, too.

 

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Floofhop

Floofhop (floofinition) – One-legged hopping movement people employ after stepping on a floofberry or floofack.

In use: “Walking barefoot through the dark, Michael felt a cold squish under his toes and instantly began the floofhop.”

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