Month: July 2025

Time enough at last

When I turned 13, my pre-school sister believed that I had attained godhood. “You’d better watch out,” she told some preteen hooligans at the beach. “He’s a teenager, you know!” This almost got me into a fight with a pack of pudgy 11-year-olds. I would’ve had to hack my way out with a paperback copy of Starship Troopers or a rolled-up issue of The Writer.

I don’t know how I got hooked on The Writer, but I do know that The Writer introduced me to Lesley Conger. Each month, Ms. Conger (a pen name for Shirley Suttles) wrote a column called “Off the Cuff” that seemed written expressly for beginners, dreamers, and starry-eyed dragon-slayers. Count me in. She was the only writer I knew (I felt as if I knew her) and she was encouraging. Her plain talk made a career in writing seem possible.

(I’ve just been informed that WordPress will not allow me to bring my parents back from the dead to offer their perspectives on their son’s choice of career.)

Ms. Conger, in a reflective moment, wrote that in high school her vision of herself as a writer included a Swiss chalet, a fire in a stone fireplace, reams of fresh typing bond, and her typewriter. No worries, no responsibilities, no interruptions. Just words dancing down the page. In high school, I tried to replicate her vision in my parents’ basement, excavating a place for myself in the gloom of the cast-off and the forgotten, but after awhile it began to seem like solitary confinement down there.

Recently, I learned about writing residencies.

There are more than 500 residencies in the United States. Their programs are, literally, all over the map. Some offer you a cabin in the woods, where you can sit all day and open a vein and try to write and they bring you meals until you blow your brains out. In other programs, they want you to write but they also want you to teach a class, deliver a lecture, visit folks in a nursing home, pull toddlers from a three-alarm fire, and collaborate with your fellow residents, who could include artists, sculptors, choreographers, UFO contactees, etc.

I am not moving to a chalet in Switzerland or anywhere else, but I could go away to one of these cabin-in-the-woods places for two weeks. That sounds like a dab of heaven, and a lot more comfortable than a basement. There are pluses and minuses, though. No dogs to walk, for example, but also, no dogs. No wife to contend with, but also, no wife. This summer, after some discussion with my wife and many guilt-ridden biscuits supplied to dogs, I applied to two programs where the only money I have to come up with is for transportation there and back again.

If this doesn’t work…I’ll stay here and keep dancing down the page. Word count as of today: 63,200.

Tango is our resident performance artist.

How to unstructure a novel

We like to go dancing on New Year’s Eve. We never know what kind of band will play for us. The earnest young people who tone down their playing so as not to spike Boomer blood pressure? The cool old guys who always wear Hawaiian shirts?

The uncertainty is part of the festivities, but there was a band years ago that swung into “Sharp Dressed Man” and immediately revealed that they didn’t know it. Deborah thought maybe someone had described it to them. Why else would they rip the bass line out of “Smoke on the Water”?

Years ago, I envisioned the climactic scene of my novel, from the circumstances that birthed it to the moment when the Forces of Good triumph. I even imagined the soundtrack. I started writing this scene in late May, and here it is July and I am still writing it. The scene, which keeps surprising me, so far covers two chapters and 25% of the entire book. Perhaps my readers could read that and skip the rest. It would save time.

Anyone reading what I’ve written so far would wonder if I had ever read a novel. Perhaps I’ve only had a novel described to me.

Well, it’s the first draft. I’ll fix it in post.

Word count as of today: 61,144

Until next time, keep your head in the clouds and your paws on the ground.