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“With nothing left, she would … cling to that which had robbed her, as people will. ”
I was preparing to put away the Halloween decorations for the year when I felt compelled to let these two hands clasp. Perhaps I was reminded of William Faulkner’s story “A Rose for Emily.”
Current Photo Friday theme: Obsession
Every other obsession I have can be traced to words and how they become story. All art and photography, all that I read, dogs, dolls, music, people, nature, places, things. I process or frame everything my senses experience with story. This has been true as long as I can remember, so how could I have become anything other than a writer?
I’m hoping to GET SHIT DONE today. I got up and let the dogs out while I mopped the library. Half the library, anyway. I did today’s Lord Cuttlebone post on Instagram. I’ve also paid bills and…
This is embarrassing, but I’ll share it anyway.
The last TJB novel was published in 2007. There was a TJB email account where readers could contact us. When you’re not publishing, those emails dwindle to nothing. In 2013, Timothy and I became involved with an animal rescue organization that kept us busy, and from that time forward, the TJB email didn’t get checked. This morning, I logged into it for the first time in… well, eight years. There were almost 700 emails, most of which could be deleted, some of which were business-related and needed to be filed, and then there was, yes, reader email that spanned five years.
I answered those without knowing if any of those people still have those email addresses. Or if they remember TJB or those novels. Or if they care. Or if they’re even alive (I HOPE THAT THEY ARE ALL ALIVE AND THRIVING!).
I then did the same for a pseudonymous account under which I’ve written short fiction. It had about half as many emails, only business and junk, no reader emails. So at least THAT author behaved better.
I think any email for the Cochrane Lambert novels (2004 and 2005) went through our gmail. accounts, which are still active. Maybe. I can’t remember. They’re from so long ago that I doubt any reader has tried to reach us.
I’m going to take a shower and then spend the day writing novels that will likely have few readers, hopefully NEVER neglected ones.
Eep!
Remember way back when several of us who blogged or journaled started the “reading is hot” campaign, and many of our readers sent photos of themselves reading our books. That was fun. Reading was hot long before us; it will remain hot for infinity.
Cut me some slack here; this is a challenging request. Let’s begin with Dennis reading a comic book. Looking very smart and sexy in those glasses regardless of the material.
September 24 — Reading a book ©still looking for copyright attribution
Reading about one of his favorite pastimes.
©still looking for copyright attribution
Reading a weekly trade paper after landing in England for a tour. To the right, that’s Paul from Paul Revere and the Raiders Featuring Mark Lindsay, who were on the bill with the Beach Boys.
©Disc Weekly
I’ll tell you a secret. Several of the novels comprising the Neverending Saga contain characters with certain physical features based on Dennis Wilson and Mark Lindsay, among others, because as you may recall, Lynne and I were musician/band-loving teenyboppers on the edge of groupie-dom eons ago when we began inventing our guys. Saga characters have developed way beyond those early versions, but it’s still fun to remember where they got their start.
If you did not know I’m a longtime Richard Marx fan, now you do. I was happy to get his memoir in a special signed edition, as well as a new CD from him. The CD features songs he talks about in his book–some of his own hits, but also hits he wrote for other people. His versions of some of those are on the CD along with other gems.
I’m super busy writing at the moment, so it may take me a while to get to the memoir. But the music I can listen to while I write. =)
In November 2007, while in the middle of a remodel at The Compound, I posted this photo on my blog (back then, it was LiveJournal). The back row includes McDonald’s Happy Meal Barbies from the early 1990s. I’m not sure who the front left is or her era, and I have no idea who front right is, but not Mattel. They were given to me by various people, including my nephew. No idea how he ended up with them, because I doubt he was eating McDonald’s Happy Meals as he was college age then and also a vegetarian. Plus I doubt a cool skateboarding kid with great taste in music was into Happy Meal Barbies.
The reason I share them again was because I found another mini set, this time Made to Move Barbies, at Ross. The only actual doll from this group I have is the Baseball Barbie, but I do like this series because they’re posable. Not really buying any female dolls right now, though the one on the right with the microphone might be interesting.
One of my LJ friends with whom I’ve remained in contact, Rio, sent me a link last week to show me some Barbies that are about to be released. I WILL NOT SUCCUMB TO TEMPTATION. (Translated: I probably will.)
Standing on the shoulders of all the Barbies who came before.
One of my recently finished coloring pages.
I finished my big edit of the first novel in the Neverending Saga. It was a lot tougher than I thought it would be. I’m rereading it now in preparation for a fresh printout and a move to the second book edit.
It was fun to talk about some of the challenges of writing these with Rhonda and Lindsey last night. It was really gratifying for them to tell me they can’t wait to read them.
Three such small devices: my original Nook, my newer Nook, and my iPad. The Nooks are for my Barnes & Noble ebook purchases, but that old Nook also contains many books I downloaded from Kobo using my Murder By The Book account. They’d then get a portion of the sales. I can still do that as a way to support a local, independent bookseller, but now I can do it using the Kobo app on my iPad. My iPad also has a Kindle app.
Three little devices packed with hundreds of fiction and nonfiction books. There are many I haven’t read because I bought them just before the pandemic or during the pandemic, and I haven’t read any fiction during those months. I’m not sure there’s a reason for that or what the reason is.
Maybe I’m just too lost in the world of my own fiction.
Those pages are the draft of my newly completed third novel in the Neverending Saga. I’m pausing here, because I’ve moved back into the home office from the writing sanctuary. I’m going to do a thorough edit of all three books at my larger desktop computer.
The first book needs better chapter divisions and the storyline needs scrutiny and a few enhancements due to many things I’ve come to understand about the characters over the course of the second and third books.
The second book is way too long. I have good ideas about where to trim it without losing any story.
By the time I’ve finished those edits, I’ll be ready to read the third book again with fresher eyes. Then I’ll hit the ground running with Book 4, which promises to deliver some fun, some growth, and some changes to these characters I love so dearly. Even the ones who aren’t lovable, because sometimes they’re fun to explore.
Yeah, I know people think my fascination with dolls is weird/silly/a waste of time. Longtime readers know dolls were my first characters as a youngster. I wove stories for them in my head long before I put pencil or pen to paper or used Daddy’s typewriter. Letting dolls stand in now as characters often amuses and inspires me. That’s a good thing. I realized when I put them all together to shoot a photo, five really important characters are missing, but it’s only because I haven’t surveyed my inventory yet to match them to dolls.
People can be driven and/or comforted by a variety of passions. Mine is creativity. To get to creativity, I draw from art, music, nature, and my relationships and life experiences. Through creativity, I examine, contemplate, explore, reason, feel, advocate, and speak my truth and my conscience.
Will my Neverending Saga ever be on tiny devices? I have no idea. The first time I ever saw the phrase below, it was on a wedding gift to Tom and me. It still makes sense.
“Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome.”
Sometimes opening one of these and doing what I could was enough during the last sixteen months. A few of them are older, one is new. If you write; get stuck in a mindset you want to shake; need an idea to prompt creativity; or need a diversion from the world or your thoughts, these books are good pals.
Those twenty pages on the left took one solid month to write. That is because they don’t include the thirtyish pages that were written and discarded in the attempt to create this chapter.
This is a truth: Sometimes you think you know a character well, and you keep writing from his POV, and it goes nowhere because you are not hearing your character’s directions, or you are mishearing them. On this trip you’re taking together, you drive yourself down dead-end streets again and again.
Very often, for me, the way off those streets is to scour my surroundings for objects that will make me turn right, turn left, do a U-turn, anything to find a road into the story my character’s trying to tell me.
An old novel… a hippie van… a hotel towel, discolored by time and decades of storage, that was once taken from the backstage dressing room of a pop band as a memento of a wonderful day. All of it led to a different character who said, “Let me help you. I know him. Listen to me since you’re not hearing him.”
And it worked.
Bonus: The drawing is one I modified from a coloring book for an imaginary tour. It put the fun back into what I was trying to write.