I believe in starts

I needed a bench to cut wood using my handsaw. I wanted something low enough that I could hold the material in place with my foot but not so low that the tip of my saw would strike the floor of the garage. I mocked up this invention with cardboard, then bought some scrap wood at The RE Store, our local, one-stop, scrap-wood emporium.

Then I was sidetracked by other things—that is, life.

One day I decided I needed a bench to cut wood using my handsaw. While thinking this over in our garage, I spotted a rectangle of plywood that was the exact size I wanted for this project. I had already measured the damn thing and bought the wood. Yes, the Enterprise was once again stuck in a time loop.

Before I could drink enough coffee to gear up for this project, my wife and I went to an estate sale where I discovered a wooden, slatted box from a wine distributor. It was sturdy and it was the approximate dimensions of the bench I had designed in my head. I turned it upside down and borrowed a bubble level that was on sale. The box didn’t wobble and the bottom was exactly level. I bought it. My project was done!

Back around Memorial Day, I decided to cut my novel up with a handsaw. In other words, I required a Big Think. When I picked the book up again last week, I had done my thinking, but I had forgotten which files I was using, and the file names I had concocted in May and June were somewhat opaque here in September. I can’t say if I was back in a time loop or if my brain required a defrag and disc clean-up, but this predicament forced me to engage with each file and understand them all over again. I’ll call that a win.

So my first week of the end-of-the-year writing challenge (I should’ve thought of a better name for this) turned out to be mostly some frantic reorganizing, but by the end of the week, I was writing. A slow start is still a start, and as Joey “The Lips” Fagan proclaimed in The Commitments, “I believe in starts.” He wasn’t talking about tomato plants, either.

Good luck to you as we lurch into Week 2!

Writing tip of the day

If one of your characters is working in a profession you know little about, listen to some podcasts. Podcasts are an insanely proliferating species. If two people are in the same career, you can be certain that one of them has begun a podcast about it and asked the other to make a guest appearance. This is the fastest way for you to gain this information.

Look over their episodes and search for titles such as “How to Be a Success in Your First 90 Days” or “Top 5 Mistakes to Avoid.”

Consumer warning: Most podcasters are not trained broadcasters. They speak too slowly, they say um, you know, and like like like. They’ll wander off the point and waste time. Also, shows about professions often degenerate into festivals of self-congratulation or tales of how we did things in the old days. That’s why God invented the Skip function. Use it!

Thank God It’s Monday 19

I know this is appropriation. Kokopeli belongs to someone else’s culture, not mine. I can’t resist him. He’s always messin’ ’round with his tricks. Unlike Secret Agent Man, who, according to the song, “Odds are he won’t live to see tomorrow,” Kokopeli will always be with us. He can’t wait to see what will happen next. If necessary, he’ll make something happen.

Kokopeli is all about aeronautics. It was no trouble for him to meet the Apollo astronauts on the Moon. I filled in his outline with a black marker to match the stark light and shadow contrasts.

Note the Lunar Rover in this 1969 postcard. Most shots of this vehicle were taken not at this distance but from close range.

After an adventure in space, a little wing-walking is easy. And if you think this is far-fetched, watch the documentary Man on Wire, about Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974.

This postcard, which is also from the late 1950s, was one of the last cards to be hand-painted from a black-and-white photo.

Tomorrow is September 1. Our tightrope challenge begins!

End-of-the-year writing challenge!

Greetings, writers. And when I say “writers,” I mean you. Yes, you.

  • Even if you’ve never published a thing and you’re still waiting for someone to say yes to your novel.
  • Even if your novel is still a first draft. I feel like my first draft is a drawer full of No. 2 pencils that need sharpening.
  • Even if what you have is a Word file you’ve thrown everything into, like a blender or a dumpster.
  • Even if the shapeless thing you have in your head exists only as scribbles on blue and yellow Post-its you stuck to your refrigerator.

Because we are all kicking it.

I often say that writers have one hobby in common: Complaining. This is not true. Our hobby is time management. We have plenty to do just getting ourselves and the people we love through the day. Archimedes, who was a writer just like us, said, “Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the world.” (We know this because Archimedes’ wife, Clarice, immediately wrote this down on a Post-it and stuck it to their fridge.) Time management is the lever we use to move the world and find precious time to write.

If what you want to do is write, and if you are still writing, even if it has been years since you embarked on this dream, then you are a success. Ray Bradbury said you only fail if you stop writing. And we know that because Clarice was visiting the Bradburys and she wrote that one down, too.

I have a 75,000-word first draft that I am still trying to revise. I haven’t made much progress since June, but John O’Hara never made much progress in the summer, either. He titled a collection of his stories Waiting for Winter because winter was when he wrote his novels. Like me, this famous novelist spent his summers surfin’, sunbathin’, and cruisin’ through the hamburger stand now.

August is about to end. School is about to start. Here in the U.S., the Labor Day weekend has always seemed to me to be invitation as irresistible as the finale from the William Tell Overture. We have four months until the end of year. I know that the world seems like shit right now, but let’s remember that people still lived their lives and loved who they loved and tried to be creative during both world wars and no end of plagues.

Turn your attention to the writing project that lights you up, even if you can only find 15 minutes a day for it. I want to report substantial progress by the time I climb into my tux for New Year’s Eve. I want you to report the same. Remember the words of writer and windsurfer Albert Camus: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

Stand up on your hind legs and roar!

Thank God It’s Monday 18

It’s still summer, so here are two vacation shots.

Falling woman goes anywhere. Literally. To match the birds in flight, I used a black market to color her in. I love these silhouette cards, which are always from the beginning or the end of the day.

A typical wife at the beach. She’s about to turn to take the relay from the outfield. Stamping on photographs is tricky. I got lucky with this one.

I’ve been asked what stamp pads I recommend. For black, Versafine or Ranger. Versafine, made by Tsukineko, bills itself as “the longest lasting pigment inkpad available.” Ranger, from Ranger Industries, calls its pads “archival.” I’ve had excellent results with both. Versafine and Ranger pads are thick enough to stand above their plastic frame. That means you can ink up a rubber stamp image that’s larger than the pad itself.

Do NOT spend your money on stamp pads that are advertised for school or office. They don’t last. Even the U. S. Postal Service, which is not exactly a champion of technology, uses self-inking stamps.

At a recent estate sale I ran across a picnic table of art supplies. I picked up stamp pads I’ve never seen before: A deep-sea blue from Inkadinkado, a teal from MementoLuxe (also made by Tsukineko), and three weird colors, including “pesto” and “pool,” from Sea Brights and Adirondack (both made by Ranger).

I also bought a letter set, but as usual I was disappointed. Searching through a letter set one letter at a time to find the one you want is like hunting and pecking on a typewriter. At least on a typewriter you get the little bell at the end of the line and when you’re done you don’t have to put the letters away.

I’m in love with this thing, which was made in the 1950s and is surprisingly quiet. I haven’t convinced anyone to buy it for me…yet.

Can’t anyone here play this game?

Once upon a time, a recruiter contacted me about a communications job at a financial services company. I was unemployed and happy to have an advocate, but I returned from the interview with some concerns. My chief concern was my co-workers. They were mostly women, which I thought was a good idea, but mostly a year or two out of college, which I thought was not. Why would they hire someone as old as me?

My recruiter, who was my age, was shocked, shocked, that anyone would discriminate against older workers. “We are not going to play their game!” she declared. What game we were going to play, she didn’t say. Baseball? Battleship? If she had said chess, I would’ve been all set.

I didn’t get that job, but the male founder and CEO was eventually accused of inappropriate behavior toward his largely female staff, so I guess it all worked out.

I was reminded of this blip on the radar screen of my career when I thought to apply last week for a fellowship.

If you’re a writer, your money comes from publishers. (If you’re self-published, your money comes from your friends and relatives and your more generous connections on Linkedin.1) But you can apply for free money: grants and fellowships. The United States is chock-full of organizations that want to fund your writing.

Most of this money is not exactly free. Even if you outrun the competition, you might then be required to teach a class or organize a community event. That kind of stuff I understand. What I don’t understand, and what stops me, is when they want you to describe your project and provide an artist’s statement.

I am not going to play their game.

Describe my project? Your grant period doesn’t begin for four months or more. I don’t know what I’ll be into by then. What if I finish what I’m doing and start something new? What if I get excited or bored or end up in a cul de sac? What if I follow Hemingway’s suggestion that I start with something I know and go to something I don’t? Hey man, don’t box me in.

My artist’s statement? Does that have something to do with intersectionality or interiority? Using these words makes me feel like a freakasaurus in a clothing store for teenagers and somebody’s mom just spotted me and called mall security.

I like to write! Writing is fun. Sometimes I write something serious. Sometimes I write about my family, or a job, or sex. One of my goals is to write something that includes all three. This paragraph is as close as I’ll ever get to a statement. And I’m choking on the word “statement.”

Sometimes I think these magazines would benefit from a little more oomph. Like…can’t there ever be a murder? Or a sci-fi story? Or just something fun! Like somebody falling in love! Or somebody having an affair! (Naomi Kanakia on The Yale Review)

I’m happy that these arts groups exist. They help a lot of writers. Acknowledgements pages often mention these benevolent institutions. Perhaps if I had spent a chunk of my adult life in academia, I might feel differently about this process, but I haven’t touched the stuff since Watergate.2

Alicia Jo Rabins said, “If you aren’t rejected from 90 percent of the things you apply to, you aren’t aiming high enough.” Rabins wrote a musical about Bernie Madoff, so she’s probably someone we should listen to. I aim plenty high. I’ll let someone else apply for these things. But if someone out there is handing out free money…I hope they’ll think of me.

My title today was of course uttered by Casey Stengel during the New York Mets’ traumatic first season. If Stengel could’ve traded a couple of infielders for some arts administrators, he would have.

Next week: Where my novel is. That’s a game I do know how to play.

1 You indie authors are too easy to pick on. Did you know that half of all self-published books today have been written (I mean, generated) by an artificial inteligence?

2 Just to say something positive about academia, my journalism instructor, Boston Globe columnist Jeremiah Murphy, taught me how to write an obituary and how to meet a deadline, two skills that have served me well in almost every job I’ve ever had.

Thank God It’s Monday 17

Some postcards are as common as crows. The Tacoma Totem Pole was erected in downtown Tacoma in 1903. This postcard, published in the 1920s, shows up again and again at postcard shows, usually in the bargain box. This has given me multiple opportunities to deface it. Here are two:

The pole, by the way, is no longer the world’s tallest and in fact is no longer in this world. It was removed in 2021 in consultation with local tribes, as it

  • doesn’t represent them
  • is carved in no known style
  • was probably carved by whites, and
  • was stuck there in the first place because Seattle had already stolen a pole from a tribe in Alaska, set it up in Pioneer Square, and bragged about it.

Tacoma wanted something to brag about, too. At least they didn’t steal it.

Writing my way out of the penalty box

Last month, I spoke with a journalist who told me that journalism was hard to leave. She was attracted to the fast pace, “the quick hits,” and the rewards of daily or weekly publication, “As if someone is handing you cookies.”

I understood what she meant. I enjoy the combination of relief and excitement when I hit a deadline. And I have always enjoyed cookies.

I worked in journalism, where stories were often held up by the race to find one last quote or check one last fact. I also worked in software, where projects were held up by the engineers, who spent most of the day chasing each other with shotguns and starships before finally writing the #@$!&* code.

Now I set my own deadlines. Last month at the Port Townsend Writing Conference, I set one in public. On Tuesday I accepted the challenge of one class with four prompts and on Thursday I read what I’d written at an open mic.

From this experience I deduced that I needed more deadlines in my life. Quick hits, not the long march through the hundreds of pages of my novel that I must revise. So I started revising a story I wrote a few months ago and that I’m unhappy with. Surely I could do this in a week! And surely it would read like that, too.

If I were playing fútbol, the referee would’ve held up a yellow card, pointed at me, and cautioned me for time-wasting and deliberately delaying a restart. Which brings me to Henry Miller’s advice from way back in 1964: “Work on one thing at a time until finished.” Don’t rush off in different directions.

Miller knew what he was talking about. Everything he wrote was banned in his own country until he was 70, but he never stopped writing.  

“Forget the books you want to write,” Miller said. “Think only of the book you are writing.”

And so I return to the book I am writing.

I still want cookies, though.

Thank God It’s Monday 16

I’m laying down the law. Don’t buy white ink pads.

This postcard was published in Germany before World War I. There are probably beach towns up and down the West Coast of the United States that claim the same scene but with their name on it.

Here’s another example:

This card was published in the 1920s in the USA. The style has changed; it’s more painterly than photographic. Also, the printing is not as crisp.

I managed a related scene with an airy, all-black image.

Unfortunately, a white stamp pad will pick up every other color you use, unless you steam-clean each stamp before you use it. Trying to safeguard the precious bodily fluids of a white stamp pad gets really boring really fast. I tried it twice and gave up. A white stamp pad is about as useful as a white No. 2 pencil. (I’ve tried that, too.) Now I’m back in black.

Can writing be taught?

My answer is no. Last month, at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference in Fort Worden, Wash., I was prompted, challenged, and possibly transformed. But on the day I arrived, I already knew how to write. I doubt that any of my fellow students, all 150 of us, came to the conference to learn to write, either.

But let’s hear an opposing point of view.

The Famous Writers School of Westport, Conn., was not an MFA program or even a low-residency MFA where you do everything online but meet in person once a year. The Famous Writers did business only through the mail. The school imploded over shady business practices in 1972 but lives on in a lengthy entry on Wikipedia.

Those of us who were reading magazines in the 1960s (I was young and precocious) remember their ads, usually featuring an authoritative, mature white male, under headlines such as “We’re looking for people who want to write” and “I FIRE WRITERS…with enthusiasm!”

The 12 famous writers who lent their names to this enterprise did not prepare lessons or grade homework, though that was the promise. A bunch of second-string drudges did that. The true story was broken by Jessica Mitford, who has her own lengthy entry on Wikipedia.

(Among the Infamous 12 were three writers I respect: Bruce Catton, Max Shulman, and Rod Serling. Everyone has to eat. Oh, also Bennett Cerf, the co-founder of Random House and a long-running joke in my house because of the title of his book Try and Stop Me.)

The Famous Writers School was a hustle, and yet somebody learned something. I recently found one of their flyers inside a book I bought at a library sale. The flyer, from about 1969 or 1970, offered these testimonials:

  • Sells fourth book: “Your training has paid off! I’ve sold my fourth book to the New York publisher, Abelard-Schuman.” Eileen Panowski, Los Alamos, NM
  • Sells 11 stories in 6 months: “Just received a check from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. That’s 11 stories in six months.” S. Novak, Wayne, NJ
  • Lands job as society editor: “Thanks to you, I was recently hired as society editor of our local newspaper.” Mary Neatherly, Hardin, Mont.
  • Cracks science fiction market: “After two years of trying, I sold to Fantasy & Science Fiction a few months after enrolling.” R. Lory, Richmond, VA
  • “I can see the good life now,” says a former police officer, William W. Blanks of LA. “Recently I sold three more articles, which means that so far I’ve sold everything I’ve written since enrolling in your School!”

Who were these folks?

Eileen Panowski (1920-2011) wrote six mystery novels for “teen or intermediate” readers. The Apache Gold Mystery (1965) was an Edgar Allan Poe Award nominee. (Source: Nebraskaauthors.org, where they misspelled Allan)

Mary Jean Neatherly (1920-1989) worked as a secretary for the Hardin Herald, now the Big Horn County News. There’s no mention in her obituary of being the Herald’s society editor, but that might be because of the era. The paper didn’t value her contributions because she was a woman writing for other women and she performed this function while also serving as a secretary. She was a member of the Poetry Writers Association of America. (Source: Findagrave.com)

S. Novak received a check from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. I’m sure it wasn’t a subscription refund. Unfortunately, EQMM does not maintain a public database of its authors. There’s a Steve Novak writing today, but he is way too young to have received a check from anyone in 1970.

Robert Lory (1936-2020) graduated from the Famous Writers School in 1964. He wrote dozens of novels in the 1970s, including the nine installments of the “Return of Dracula” series. (The title that intrigues me is Dracula’s Brothers. I love an involving family saga.) But check this out: His story “The Star Party” was selected for World’s Best Science Fiction: 1965. His neighbors in that book included Fritz Leiber, Philip K. Dick, Thomas M. Disch, and John Brunner. “The Star Party” is the story Lory mentions in his testimonial. (Sources: Wikipedia, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, Library Thing)

William Winfield Blanks (1928-1989), the former cop, wrote two episodes of the 1976 TV series The Blue Knight, based on the novel by Joseph Wambaugh, a former cop. (Source: A poorly written site called Prabook and the Internet Movie Database)

To judge from the Wikipedia write-up, the Famous Writers School failed almost everyone. But a few writers were able to say that they could see the good life. The people pinch-hitting for Bennett Cerf, Rod Serling, and the other authors of this authorial scam really did teach them how to write. Or did Eileen Panowski, Mary Neatherly, and their colleagues already possess that superpower? Maybe all they needed was some acknowledgement.

We will never know.

Don’t any of you send me your copy of Dracula’s Brothers.

Thank God It’s Monday 15

Stamping on modern cards with a plastic surface (referred to by deltiologists as “chromes”) is chancy. You might achieve a smart finish and you might achieve a smear. I did well with this one:

How did I stamp the space shuttle behind the red line? Analog fussing at its finest: First I used tracing paper and a pencil to get something the same width. I cut it out and placed it over the line. Sticking it down was simple: I used a Post-it at each end. I inked the stamp and hoped for the best. It worked!

I probably stamped this 20 years ago. The image eventually dried enough for me to scan it, but even today, if I touched it, the natural oil on my skin might ruin it.

This may be one of the few beach postcards ever published to feature a Dad in a bathing suit.

Here’s an example of how not to do things:

This is another Oregon beach. Note the light on the driftwood. The sun is setting. The card’s surface took the ink well. But I should’ve left the sails alone or painted them a pale blue or gray to blend with the sea and sky. And I definitely should’ve masked the bow’s shadow. The stern’s shadow is correct for this coast and this time of day, but not the bow’s. Using this image taught me to follow the light. We should all follow the light.