Starting Over

By Thomas Kies

This will be my last blog of 2020. I certainly won’t be sorry to kick this year’s butt out the door and embrace 2021.

2020 had it all. First and foremost was the pandemic. Sitting in my little corner of the world, I felt relatively safe. A horde of tourists felt the same way. Tourist season here on the coast has literally broken records. Travelling by air seemed risky, but driving here, renting a vacation home, and sunning on the beach felt safe.

But now, covid seems to be creeping closer and closer. Our daily number of infections continues to climb, hospitalizations increase, and now people I know have contracted it. One individual, in his fifties and healthy, died from covid complications.

In addition, 2020 saw out of control wildfires devastating parts of the western United States. Fires seemed to completely consume the continent of Australia, wiping out forests, killing billions of animals.

One after another, hurricanes made landfall, battering the Gulf Coast states and Central America in particular.

Unemployment skyrocketed. Food lines continue to grow. The government seems unwilling or is too dysfunctional to help.

Winding things up this year, an RV in downtown Nashville is packed with explosives and detonated outside of an AT&T Data Center. A recording of a woman telling the immediate area to evacuate immediately is blasted over a loudspeaker on the RV before it explodes. An extravagant suicide? An attack against the communication center? As of this writing, it's a mystery.

Somehow an appropriate way to end the year.

An end of 2020 bright spot? For now, there's toilet paper on store shelves.

Strange year.

So, when I say that I’ve thrown out the first hundred pages of my next book and I’m starting over, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal.

Why did I do that? If I’m bored writing it, the reader is going to be bored. That’s literary sacrilege.

I didn’t have to completely trash it all though. The characters are basically the same, only better…or worse, depending on if they’re a good guy or a bad guy.

The plot is basically the same, except better. The pacing is faster, the dialogue snappier, the descriptions of the scenes more vivid. More show, less tell.

So, writing that first hundred pages that ended up in the trash wasn’t a complete waste of time. If only we could throw 2020 in the trash and start over.

Oh, wait. We are.

At the end of 2016, I’m wondering…

by Rick Blechta

So now I’m down to my final post of the year. I’m sure I’m not alone with how I tend to look forward and backward at this time of the passing season. It’s pretty well unavoidable.

It has been an “interesting” 365 days, hasn’t it? Sadly, I feel life has been tilted more to the bad side than the good in 2016. Politically, the world is a mess. The climate issue should be at the top of everyone’s list — and it isn’t. Corporate greed is running rampant. Problem is, like many things in life, we find out far too late when we’ve done something stupid. Climate change is that, in spades.

Personally, my year has been “good enough”. I had one novella published. (Vicki D always makes me feel so lazy when I see what she’s been up to. Actually, she could make any three authors feel lazy.) I’m working on a full-length novel, but I really need to turn on the afterburners in 2017 if I’m going to finish it and hand it over to my long-suffering agent before we reach this point in a year.

My problem with writing was my day gig of graphic design. The really big news of 2016 is that I finally was able to stop doing it. However, the bad part was that closing up shop took until December to be completed, even though I started the process in July! Now I’m getting used to the wonderful feeling that I no longer have to worry about clients and their deadlines. Deadlines I have now are ones that I make myself.

As for looking forward, I wonder what the next year will bring to book publishing. Self-publishing has become huge, but its practitioners are still viewed as “outsiders”. Will this be the year where self-published novels start racking up big sales? Will a big-time author take the plunge, begin self-publishing, throwing the industry into a blender and hitting frappé — because that’s what it would do. All the paradigms of our little world will be thrown right out the window when that happens. Frankly, I believed it would have by now.

I also hope that so many good people don’t shuck their mortal coil in the coming year. We lost a huge number, didn’t we?

I’ve made my resolutions for 2017, and over the years I’ve gotten better at keeping them. I won’t share them with you here because a lot of them are personal goals, but I will say that the top of list say: write more — every day!

So to all you out there: All the best in 2017 and may we all convene here at this time next year to see how it all turned out.

I hope we’ll all still be here…

The season of hope

As I’ve wished people a happy and prosperous new year, I’ve gotten back comments more than once on how bad 2014 was, not just for world, but personally for the people to whom I was speaking.

But last Thursday, we all turned the page on a bummer year and opened up a brand new 12 months, everything bright and shiny again.

I don’t know about you, but I always find the turning of the year to be a hopeful time. Yeah, it’s a reminder that I’m another year older and more personal doors seem to be closing than opening these days, a process sure to accelerate as the years move forward, but for every bad, there’s a good. That’s just the way life moves, and when you look at the bare bones of it, you can either embrace changes that naturally occur or spend your time shaking your fist at fate. Faced with that stark choice, I prefer to look at the hopeful side.

Like many, every year I set goals for myself. This year, they’re mostly physical ones. I’d like to lose weight (and how many years have I been saying that?). I would like to walk more, maybe play a little pick-up ball (or at least play catch with my wife or sons — and now, also my grandson!), simply get out and about rather than allowing myself to be chained to my computer. That’s a really worth (and sensible) goal, don’t you think?

Finding time for writing remains a challenge. I waste too many valuable minutes every day, allowing myself to get distracted by things that really don’t need doing. Since I’m usually up ahead of my wife, you would think that would be an ideal time to write. Unfortunately, every morning, I fire up the computer and (of course) wind up checking the overnight news, wishing friends a Happy Birthday on Facebook, stuff like that all worthy, but also not necessary when there’s writing to be done. The internet is a seductive place, and if you’re naturally curious as I am, it’s a real danger to moving my writing forward. Solution? Don’t turn on the computer; just sit down with pen and paper and lay down some more deathless prose. Sure, it will take longer doing it that way, but as I’ve said here more than once, I find I think more clearly when having to get my thoughts down more slowly. The proof is that my “manual” writing needs far less refining than when I type my words directly into the computer.

Being a musician, I have to practise daily. (“You’ve been playing how long and you still have to practise?”) Unless you’ve taken music past a certain point, you probably don’t know what a joy it is to spend quality time with your instrument of choice. Currently for me, that means the trumpet, something I never really set out to learn, by the way. There is a joy in making music as well as a real rush in being able to perform in front of an audience. In order to do either successfully and at a high level, that means slogging it out every day. I’ve played particular scales and exercises tens of thousands of times and I still manage to get a kick out of doing them. Why? I can’t really tell you. Sure, I could plod through them because I know how necessary they are, but it goes beyond that. I simply enjoy buzzing my lips at the small end of a brass instrument to receive a glorious sound out the big end. It’s as simple as that — even if I’ve done the same set of notes every day for forty years.

This year, I have a lot I want to accomplish, and to do that, I need to be very organized to make the most of each 24-hour daily allotment. To that end, I’m decided to make a daily “To-Do List”, organized into “must-dos”, “need to dos”, and “like to dos”. I’m also writing down my new year resolutions, but that’s more for historic reference next New Year’s Eve — just to see how I did.

The bad part of being faced with too many things to do in too little time is that you never can allow yourself to stop and smell the flowers. A little downtime is a good thing, too. Somehow I have to figure out how to schedule that in — without it feeling like I’m scheduling it in.

In the end, life is always a matter of balance, isn’t it?