Storyteller
As part of my random pimping of good creative work, allow me to present Mr. Delbert McClinton.
I knew the name, but really nothing about the artist. After hearing this, I’ll have to give him another look.
Here’s a writing confession: I really like to write to music. Have ever since I started working on my first short stories in the last century. My wife, as a singer, has more sensitivity to sound than I do, so she finds doing creative work with music in the background maddening.
Me, I think it creates a kind of aural wall inside of which I huddle with the waking dreams. When I’m on a roll, I rarely hear the music, but sometimes, when I lift my head from the keyboard, it’s kind of a refreshing surprise to remember how much I like that soundtrack (can’t go wrong with “Last of the Mohicians”) or that old
Of an excessively festive week, this is the kind of review a brother welcomes:
This was from a reader named Anamarie Neumiller, and if you are out there Ms. Neumiller, you have my thanks.
My son’s mother, my second wife…yes, I’ve been married three times. I’m either terrible husband material or a serial optimist. Don’t judge.
As I was saying, my second wife found fault with some of my reading choices. For a while, I was reading a great deal about UFOs and folks who believed they had interactions with aliens. The contacts ranged from variations of “turn your head and cough” type exams, to very distressing reproductive procedures (including “and here’s your hybrid offspring, say hello to mummy, darling”), along with occasional tours of other worlds or galaxies, often polished off with warnings about the impeding global disaster. Note that none of …
It’s spare and powerful. As a writer myself, sometimes I am captivated by the way songs can encapsulate emotion using a very simple presentation. Someday, I hope to write something as starkly emotional and as cleanly presented as Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia.”
That may not be possible in a novel. I think Hemingway pulled it off once or twice before it became a parody of itself.
File this under “things writers ponder early in the morning.”
When writing a novel, there is a place where you brain is going “Only 20 pages? Are you nuts? You have to write 40 times that to finish the book!”
I also run into that when researching the places and times for the next novel. Pick up a source you think will be great, read 80 or 90 pages before you realize the author is only interested in relaying nominally interesting anecdotes about high-level goings on, with none of the detail of daily life I’m looking for. So I’ll put that aside, grumbling about the lost time, and pick up another.
Like the brilliance of the original version of this song.
However, sometimes we can get a new appreciation of just how much genius was contained in the original by experiencing it from a different perspective. This version is damn good, as well.
As I’ve mentioned before, my research takes me in odd directions and inspires new ambitions in me.
Now I want to learn how to do this. If only I didn’t have 15 novels to write, the day job to maintain, and various human relationships to nuture.
But, still, it’s awfully cool to watch.
This past Sunday, I finished the first draft of the second Cthulhu, Inc. book, The Auditors of Doom. That clocked in at 340 pages, over 78,000 words. I’m taking a week off to clear my head before diving into the revisions/rewrites.
In the meantime, waiting anxiously for the revised cover of Book One The Thing from HR. Aiming to have that ready and released right around Memorial Day: nothing says “beach reading” like the misadventures of a Shoggoth down among the Hairless Apes.
And, since life has a way of happening even while I’m living among the characters in my head, I’ve been rehearsing
So while I was home recovering from some sinus surgery (yeah, that happened)…
…I was in my office trying to read when out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of something flying low past our fence, toward the back acreage.
It turned out to be this fine fellow, a great blue heron, probably checking out how well stocked we keep our little pond.
I like seeing stuff like this. A bald eagle apparently nests about 8 miles from here. Some day, I’ll get a photo of him, too.
Oh, and the surgery tuned out great. Only downside to me not snoring is that my wife kept thinking I’d died in my sleep. Fortunately, that hasn’t