Blogs of Note: A Writer's Edge

The blog world is populated by, among others, an expansive community of writers. Writers who earn their living by writing….writers who want to earn their living by writing…writers who will never earn their living by writing but who write for the sheer love of it…writers who write because the words filling their minds and their souls and their feverish imaginations demand to be set free…writers who write because that’s what writers do. It’s a gentler madness…a wondrous calling…a sublime compulsion…

A community of writers is almost an oxymoron because writing is, in so very many cases, a solitary endeavor but a community exists just the same. There are many blogs for and about writers…for and about the art and the business of writing…so very many to explore, to learn from, to draw information and inspiration from. Georganna Hancock’s A Writer’s Edge is my favorite of these. It is warm and welcoming, very well-written and wonderfully informative.

A long-time resident on my blogroll, A Writer’s Edge has always been a blog of note to my mind and now it’s a Blog of Note officially :-) If you’re a writer, you’ll find an excellent resource with a compelling and charming hostess…if not, you’ll still find it a wonderful reading experience.

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And, of course, the previously featured Blogs of Note are still heartily endorsed:

Worldman

Michele

(The post on Michele's wonderful blog also features links to other Blogs of Note)

Gather.com First Chapters Writing Competition

FYI (and, yes, for your consideration :-): My entry is Gather.com's First Chapters Writing Competition went live today. In their words: The Gather.com First Chapters Writing Competition is a first-time author's gateway to publication. One novelist will win a publishing contract with Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, a $5,000 cash prize and promotion by Borders.

I’ve entered my novel Soul Deep.

If you want to check it out, the link to my entry is here.

My first chapter will be up and available for voting for the next 14 days. It will then be taken down and the votes tallied. The highest rated chapters will then move on to the next round with the second chapters from the novels being posted for another round of voting.

Only Gather.com members can vote (Gather is a free social network for adults who like things like books and music and current events and other everyday interests and concerns and passions and interacting with other like-minded adults who like those kind of things.) If you want to join Gather, the link to do so is here

Once you’re a member, you can vote in the competition if you wish to (again, my entry is here :-), enter your own novel (the deadline for entries is March 15^th I believe), or just enjoy the social networking (Gather is like MySpace…only with a lot fewer kids and no unsigned pop bands trying to sell you their music :-)

Namaste, y'all.

...and on some days...

And on some days the words flow freely…tumbling unabashedly one upon the other until pages and chapters are given life at an almost breakneck pace.

After a few days of not being in touch with my muse because of yet another family emergency…the preceding generation of my family always seemed invulnerable and immortal to me but, of course, they are not…I returned to my desk…to my novel of family interaction…and the words seem so anxious to get out that they often threatened to outpace my fingers on the keyboard.

Watching the end…and yes, the end is definitely in sight…come into focus…coming to grips with the fact that being true to the story means that one of my favorite characters has to die despite the fact that I dread writing that scene…feeling the words flow from my fevered psyche through my fingers and onto the screen…I am filled with bursts of excitement, trepidation, and fulfillment. And ain’t it grand.

I’ve written for the better part of 9 hours…with the dog (Autumn) and two of the cats (Bart and Mr. Gambino) taking turns being quiet company on the floor near my desk…with Emmylou Harris, Cassandra Wilson, Julieta Venegas, Nellie McKay, Elvis Costello, and Allen Toussaint serving as the inspirational soundtrack for the day…with a scant few minutes taken out to make lunch out of some leftover tuna salad from the refrigerator…and I’m done.

For now anyway (one never knows what’s going to happen after supper :-)

embracing chaos

It's hot. Not oppressively hot...but uncomfortable enough for we South Californians who are slaves to our usually temperate climate (the Santa Ana winds...blowing dry off the desert...are no friends to us.)

But we soldier on (being the troopers we foolishly imagine ourselves to be.)

My less frequent updating of this site is not at all connected to the weather. It is, instead, completely related to the progress of a novel...an extremely intimate work that waited for years (after several abortive starts) to come to flower now (I wasn't ready...or able...to write it before but, for whatever reason, I am now.) The eventful greater part of a year in a boy's life...it's not autobiographical (except for the parts that are.)

I eschew continuity in the writing this time...capturing scenes and chapters as they come to me and then placing them into the narrative as they fit (some entire scenes may end up not fitting at all and they will be sacrificed for the greater good of the finished work)...a modular novel of sorts.

More than two dozen characters have claimed speaking parts thus far. The prologue and first four chapters are set...the final chapter is almost completely finished...the longest, most emotionally taxing chapter (the heart of the piece) is done...other scenes and chapters are in various states of completion...the epilogue is sketched out in my head...

It's chaos. And it makes perfect sense. And, thus far, it's working (knock on wood.)

I love writing.

Sleep Writing

Last night I slept fitfully for some reason. Not sure why...it was humid but it's been humid, off and on, for a little while now. At some point...round about 3 AM (and yes I remember thinking about the Matchbox 20 song "3 AM", I very often associate music with things going on in my life...including and especially the seemingly insignificant moments)...new pages for my novel in progress flooded into my head.

Or at least I thought they did.

At this point, the separation between the dreaming world and the waking world was quite blurry and so the scene of me tumbling out of bed, powering up the computer, and, after my eyes had adjusted to the intense glare of the computer screen (did you know these things shine like the sun in the 3 AM darkness? Yeah, me neither...), adding 3 new pages to the manuscript could have been either a vivid dream or an unawake reality.

Stumbling out of bed (again?) at 7:30 after continuing the fitful slumbering for a few more hours, I had my first cup of tea and made my way here...to the computer. Microsoft Word was open as was Soul Deep. But there weren't 3 new pages...there were 5 new pages.

Wow. Sleep writing. Unbridled creative impulse or troubling sign of an unchecked id? You decide...me, I'm just going to go with the flow (hey the pages flow nicely into the ongoing narrative and that's all good with me :-)

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After reading over the pages, I checked the e-mail and found a copy of press release announcing that I was one of three inaugural winners of a biannual writing contest. New pages written into my novel while half sleep and now $400 worth of swag for another story...this writing stuff is pretty cool sometimes :-)

Blame it on Harry Potter

I just realized that it's been over a week since I last posted here.

I blame boys in novels...mine and J.K. Rowling's...for the absence.

I've been working on my own novel...a very personal story based loosely (very loosely...it is not autobiographical...except for the parts that are) on a specific series of events from my childhood...and have spent the last two days reading the latest Harry Potter tome (about which more here) and have had scant time to linger in the blogosphere as a result.

It's a strange and wonderful thing when words...the ones flowing from you and the magical ones woven by others...take greedy chunks of time with nary a care for whatever else you might want to do :-)

I come up for air...the city, wrapped today in sheaths of debilitating humidity and in seemingly endless waves of political turmoil, conspires to shake my concentration...and immediately look forward to (done with Mr. Potter for the nonce) to diving back into the sea of words trying to turn into Soul Deep (the working title of my novel.)

Perseverance furthers.

Happy Anniversary

One year ago...on Monday July 5, 2004....I started blogging with a short, innocuous post (see here) which was quickly followed with a recap of a visit to the local County Fair (see here.) Time really does fly when...well, you know...

I'm not exactly sure how many posts have been presented on this site since that beginning (Blogger's stat-thing stopped counting at 196 some months ago) but there's been a bunch of them...short stories, sprawling serials, vignettes, the occasional photo, meme, or poem, tributes, personal asides, experiences, and observations, some navel gazing (including answering one of the Proust Questionnaires and later writing "roughly 950 words" about myself), even some political stuff early on (I stopped because there are plenty of others doing that more passionately than I could or would want to)...some more interesting than others but all having some merit (at least to me) when they were published.

I doubt that many people were reading this blog for the first few months (I didn't join any services like Blog Explosion until January of this year) but I wrote for it regularly just the same. It was, as I said in the first post, a way of keeping focused on my writing (Bread and Roses had an earlier incarnation as a self-published literary journal which had a small but loyal subscription base.)

Looking back through the archives, it's been an intriguing, often engaging experience. I've discovered interesting blogs (all of the wonderful sites on the blogroll on the left and many, many more as well), been cheered, charmed, and challenged by comments, and have basically had a grand year.

Onward to year two...who knows what I/we will discover in the space in the days and weeks and months to come. As a wise man once said: perseverance furthers.

Namaste, y'all (and thank you very much for your kind attention.)

The Blank Page

One of the reasons I started blogging last year was fear.

Fear of the blank page.

Okay so maybe “fear” is a bit strong but as a writer there is sometimes nothing more daunting than the blank page (or nowadays perhaps it’s more appropriate to talk about the blank screen…I used to have to start any writing longhand on legal pads and then, after having written a couple of pages, I would type it into my word processing program and continue on from there; I very rarely do that these days because my typing is faster than my scrawled printing and I’m used to writing here now.)

This blog…and my other one, Neverending Rainbow…serve the task of getting me past the blank page by giving me forums where I have to meet a self-imposed goal of producing new writing on a semi-regular basis. And, thus far, it has worked.

Working on writing exercises both short and, especially, long (like “Joshua and Rosa”, my stab at a romance story which was recently serialized in the space) have not only met that goal but, as I hoped, jumpstarted my other writing.

I have, for example, recently returned to working again in earnest on my third novel. It will be my third novel completed but the first one that I actually begun (more years ago than I care to count.)

It been started several times over the years…there is a drawer full of notes and drafts in my bedroom…and stopped just as often. It is…will be…some of the most personal writing of my life…a semi-autobiographical (emphasis on the “semi”…it’s not my life, just a life that holds a number of remarkable similarities) story of a quiet boy, his family, and his best friend with a special emphasis on the relationships between fathers and sons. It never felt like the right time to finish it...until now. Two chapters in and it’s flowing nicely in all of its bittersweet, “any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it)” glory.

Sometimes being a writer is such a rush :-)

Writing

Will the things we wrote today
sound as good tomorrow?
Will be we still be writing
in approaching years,
Stifling yawns on Sundays
as the weekends disappear?
- Elton John and Bernie Taupin -

When I was in the third grade (at Menlo Avenue Elementary in Southeastern Los Angeles near USC and the L.A. Memorial Coliseum) my teacher (Miss Levy...I remember her through the vague, rose-colored prism of youth...not long out of college, still filled with a passion for nurturing young minds, pale and brunette and often smiling as she taught arithmetic and reading and such to her mostly brown and black young charges in room 16) gave us an assignment to write about our "favorite color".

Now as I've grown older, I've noticed a slight preference for blues and earthtones but back then I, being relatively non-discriminating about such things, couldn't really pledge my allegiance to one particular hue. So that night, wanting to get the assignment done before my favorite TV show at the time (Batman, a camp classic that my younger self took oh-so-seriously) came on, I picked a color at random...orange, for reasons which escape me all these years later...and wrote the piece on a sheet of notebook paper, put it in my notebook and gave it nary a second thought.

Miss Levy read our papers the next morning while we were in our "reading time" (an hour each day where we read books we'd gotten from the library at our desks) and at one point she called me up to her desk and with my orange essay in hand she asked me if anybody had helped me write it. It was an odd question to me and I just shook my head and said no. I remember her smiling an odd smile before sending me back to my book. Miss Levy got up and tapped on the door that connected room 16 to room 17 and, after a couple of moments, Mrs. Jacques (a tall, plump blonde who would be my fourth grade teacher come the next year) opened it. Miss Levy and Mrs. Jacques whispered something and Miss Levy handed Mrs. Jacques my paper. They both kept glancing at me as they read. I was feeling incredibly exposed and self-conscious at this point wondering what it was I had done wrong (shy, overly-sensitive third-graders always presume the worst when they become the subject of adult scrutiny.)

That evening, Miss Levy called my mother to ask her if anyone had helped me write my orange essay. My mother, who hadn't even known about the assignment, found it to be an odd question and said no...said that I always did my homework alone and only asked her questions every now and again if I got stuck with something.

The next day, Miss Levy returned the color essays to the class...except for mine, which she announced she was going to read aloud. My young heart almost stopped...I was intrigued, apprehensive, and mortified all at once...and I don't really remember actually hearing her reading my words to my classmates. Afterwards, she returned the paper to me with a big red grade...A+...slashed in fat marker strokes just above the title; she told me to take it home and show my mother and then asked if I could bring it back after having done that. Mutely, I nodded to the affirmative. I took it home...my mother read it and smiled...and I took it back to Miss Levy the next morning. Miss Levy asked if she could keep it and I, wanting the strange fuss to be over, shrugged and said "sure". I never saw the paper again (and I don't remember exactly what I wrote...I vaguely remember something about sunsets, fireplaces, and Halloween pumpkins.)

It only occurred to me years later that that was the point in my life where the writer in me was truly born...that that was the point where I knew that words had power and that I was, on the good days, both a conduit and a thrall to that power.

I think about that episode now and again...when writing is slow and I wonder, as I always do, if I will ever write anything worthwhile ever again (it's a fleeting concern...there's always more writing to do sooner or later...but it comes often enough just the same) and, especially, when I'm culling through pieces I've already written looking for things I think are worthy of submitting for publication and/or competition (a periodic process I've been concentrating on for the past couple of weeks.) The story still makes me smile...wistfully, gratefully, indulgently...after all this time (and I wonder, foolishly I suppose, if Miss Levy still has that orange essay...)

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The opening quote is from the song "Writing"
...music by Elton John, lyrics by Bernie Taupin...
from the Elton John album,
Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy.