Day 30: On Writing

I love writing; writing's a bitch. The cliche about the terror/tyranny/loneliness of the blank page and all that. Thirty posts in thirty days is hard, but don't break out your tiny violins for me. I choose it. This year when deciding whether to do NaBloPoMo it all came down to this: Anything that puts me in the chair in front of the blank page is a good thing. 

My hope was to create a habit, and then in December sit down every day and write something. I've got unfinished short story manuscripts, and a book project that needs a solid reworking. And I have in the back of my head a novel brewing. But life things are still unsettled and instead of being a distraction from life, life is a distraction from writing.

Make no mistake, writing a blog is an exercise in egoism. Most of us know our readership is small. Ansel Adams used to say that he photographed to please himself and if other people liked it, that was a bonus. That's true about all of art, I suppose. All I know is if I go too long without writing something I get really antsy. I also know that when I get really involved in a project I obsess on it. 

I don't know if I'll do Blog-a-palooza next year. The first time I did NaBloPoMo was 2011 and I wrote 13 posts. I didn't try in 2012, but made 30 in 2013. Last year I didn't participate either. For some reason it felt like I did more than that but really, folks, it looks like I've only completed NaBloPoMo once before this year. 

What I don't like about it is that some days the posts are not up to my standards. Some days I just dash off something to make deadline. I don't like doing work I can't be proud of. Thank you for reading the good and the bad.

As a thank you, I leave you with the opening for my current short story. It doesn't have a title yet.

On his twenty-second birthday, Julius Worthington III boarded a bus bound for a small, northwest Pennsylvania town, where he hoped the locals had short memories for newspaper headlines. At the Erie county courthouse an indifferent judge did a double-take at the name, peered at him for a short minute, then whisked through the rest of the hearing, after which Julius returned to Philadelphia as Julius Applebite. He had already settled upon Gordon, his mother's maiden name, until he passed a series of Burma Shave signs on U.S 6 and thought Applebite just sounded better. He would tell people it was Dutch.

On the trip home, Julius studied the map of Philadelphia's outlying areas. He didn't know where he wanted to go, exactly, so he started by calculating bike-able distance. But then he figured everything was a bike-able distance if you got an early start. Lots of little nowhere towns in New Jersey, he thought. Tomorrow he would ride.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

First, this post has been cooking for about a week but I have waited to go live until after NaBloPoMo. I didn't do NaBloPoMo this year because of stuff you will read about in a minute, and because I was busy re-doing the blog, but I was with the bloggers in spirit. I hope to join my brothers and sisters next year for all the blogapalooza fun.

Second, let me say Changes is for me only a medium-favorite Bowie song (though I really like the lines--And these children that you spit on / As they try to change their worlds / Are immune to you consultations / They're quite aware what they're going through), but I can't title this post Young Americans, after all. Or Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.

It's been a period of changes for me. As many of you know I tore my quadriceps tendon back in March. I had surgery, then spent most of the summer in various casts and splints and wheelchairs and walkers. And just when I was released to go back to work, my relationship with the Aurora Kennel ended. So now I'm working on strengthening my leg and searching for a job.

So what I've done is re-brand this blog. It is now called Time and Change, which are some of the words to the Ohio State Alma Mater, Carmen, Ohio. I kept most of the posts but deleted a few, and tidied up the junk. .

In the new blog I'm going to feature my writing a little more prominently, to which end I've also freshened up my web site.

And I'm going to try to use the blog to promote my real estate business, though not in an annoying way, I promise. For those who didn't know, I've been in real estate for several years, but I've kept it on the down-low to avoid any conflicts with my other job. But now I'm pulling off the cloak of invisibility; I'm ramping up my intensity.

[Quick Annoying Promotional Segment] If you know of anyone who is thinking about buying or selling a home, or is interested in investing in real estate, or is interested in a career in real estate, leave me a note in the comments and I'll contact you.

But this isn't going to be just a real estate and writing blog. It's going to be a music blog and an arts blog and a world blog and a blog that makes silly lists and shows you the picture of the elephant with his head stuck in a peanut butter jar as long as I can relate it back to something personal. In short I'm going to post the same wide range of things I've always done, trying to entertain and maybe make you think a little. If you have forgotten what those posts were like please take a few minutes to browse the blog archives, Personal favorites include How to Play the Cymbals, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, and Sometimes a Parade is Not Just a Parade.

And if you know of a job, let me know.


Thanks for reading---FJS

The Greatest Rivalry in Sports

At least that's what we like to call it. I'm sure Army-Navy fans would beg to differ and I couldn't really refute that, but the armed services are far too humble to make such proclamations so we're going with ours.

I will say that as much fun as it has been beating up the skunk-weasels the past few years, The Game will suffer if we aren't nearly equal. So I'm thinking we cream them this year and see how it goes after that.

Here now is a little thing to get the juices flowing (I'm up against deadline and this is the fastest thing I could put together. Ah, the inner working of blogapalooza).




Thanks for reading.

A little music for you

It's a good thing we're 70% done with this whole Blogapalooza thing, because I'm running low on ideas. I have a long one in draft mode and maybe I'll finish it tomorrow, so meanwhile here's a new song by one of my new favorite bands.






Thanks for reading.

How we talk to dogs

 I don't know about you, but there are things I say to my dogs in private that I would never say in public. In public I'm all, "You're a fine specimen of a canine, Leo my good fellow," and in private it's, "Whaddagoodbubsiesdogmywiddlepuppypuppy."

In that light, enjoy!

Blog-a-Palooza is off and running

A couple of years ago someone had the bright idea to make November National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo), in the fashion of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), except for people who don't intend to write just one giant story. The plan is a post a day for the whole month. I did it two years ago but skipped last year. The writing muscles are twitching for action but the brain is screaming, "I don't have any ideas." The brain tends to use all caps and excessive exclamation points, as in, "I DON'T HAVE ANY IDEAS!!!" My brain has never taken 'Strunk and White 'or the rules of shouting on the internet seriously.

So, this is post number one, on day number one. Consider yourselves warned.

But, we begin Blog-a-Palooza 2013 with a note of sadness. Yesterday we lost one of our furry friends. Custard, the grand orange kitty, came a few weeks short of turning nineteen. He'd taken a turn during the past few days and last evening we helped him along.

I'll tell Custard stories this month, but not tonight.