7 things I’ve learned along the way

Seven things I’ve learned along the way to posting 1,000 consecutive daily blog posts, of which, in case you were not counting, this is the 1,000th:

1. I can do it, one day at a time.

2. A person tends to repeat herself from time to time over 1,000 days, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.

3. The universe in general doesn’t give a flying flamingo about you — but some people do, and they make all the difference. Thank you for that.

4. Theodore Sturgeon said 90% of everything is crap, but if you look carefully, you’ll find much more than 10% of what you’ve done was worth the effort — and so, perhaps, 90% of Sturgeon’s assertion is crap.

5. A person who sets out to do something, a little bit at a time, can exceed his own expectations many times over. After all, my intention was to post every day for three months, 92 days in all. Nine hundred and eight days after that, here we are.

6. There is a force that hates success. Is it Satan? The Dip? The Resistance? I lean toward calling it Satan, because such evil lurks there. As the last 10-20 days loomed, the distractions that kept me from sitting down to write, from writing, from even thinking about writing, became close to overwhelming. Even as I write this 1,000th piece, I have not yet finished numbers 997, 998, or 999, and so I continue to stagger toward the finish line. (Yes, yesterday’s post was the actual 1,000th daily post, but I presented it 999th — kind of like the second Star Trek pilot was presented third, or the first Firefly pilot was aired last.)

But know this:

7. I am just a more or less ordinary human being, with aches and pains and big dreams and big shortcomings — so, if I can accomplish something, one day at a time, SO CAN YOU.

Two anniversaries and a milestone

One of Facebook’s nicer features is Memories, which reminds you of things you posted on this day in the past. On Monday, April 24, it reminded me that I published The Adventures of Myke Phoenix on April 24, 2008. I hadn’t remembered the date.

Around 1988-1990 I came up with the idea for Myke, kind of a mashup of the original Captain Marvel and Superman and most other superheroes, with the idea of writing not a comic book but a monthly text adventure, a modern-day Doc Savage or the Shadow. I didn’t feel like I had the time to write a 50,000-word novel every month with the day job in the background, so I aspired to write 10,000-word novelettes.

I actually completed four of them, and flirted with the idea of self-publishing the series, but that was an expensive proposition in 1990, and I didn’t have a way to fund an expensive proposition, and those facts discouraged me from moving forward with it. With the advent of print-on-demand, by 2008 one could self-publish a book virtually for free, and so I went for it, pulling the stories out of wherever I had stored them and slapping a marginally adequate cover on the package.

I still wanted to try writing a monthly series, and I actually wrote 12 more Myke adventures from about November 2013 to October 2014, but once I completed the major arc of those stories the fire went out. They’re all collected as Myke Phoenix: The Complete Novelettes. If I ever come back to Myke, it will be to write novellas or novels, in order to prevent the assertion “Complete Novelettes” from becoming obsolete.

While April 24 celebrates a book more than two decades in the making, April 25 marks the third anniversary of my book that went from idea to the printer in one day: How to Play a Blue Guitar.

On that day in 2020, I sat down to look over the strange mix of blog posts, short stories and poems that I was thinking about compiling into a book. I had 24 pieces so far.

I read them through and all of a sudden they felt like a cohesive whole. On impulse I hit the “Compile” button on my Scrivener folder, and a couple of hours later How to Play a Blue Guitar was uploaded to the Kindle store and Kobo and ready to be discovered.

The paperback followed not long after. I designed it like a record album, with the 24 titles listed on the back and none of the usual cross-promotion of other Warren Bluhm books in the front and/or back. I even dropped a line from old albums on the back cover: “Stereo records can be played on today’s mono record players with excellent results.”

Neither The Adventures of Myke Phoenix nor How to Play a Blue Guitar has made me a wealthy man, but they allow me to say “I’m an author, I write books,” if I ever get the inclination. I still lead with “newspaper editor” or “journalist” when people ask me what I do. I wonder what reaction I’d get if I started saying, “I wrote the Myke Phoenix superhero series and I’m working on a new series about an interplanetary, inter-dimensional time traveler named Jeep Thompson.” Who cares if the answer is, “Never heard of them”? It sounds like something else.

Speaking of milestones, tune in tomorrow.

W.B.’s Book Report: The Wizard of Oz

We’re not in Kansas anymore.

People come and go so quickly here!

These things must be done delicately …

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

I’ll get you my pretty, and your little dog, too!

How about a little fire, Scarecrow?

Are you hinting my apples aren’t what they ought to be?

Put ’em up … PUT ’EM UUP!

Shucks, folks, I’m speechless.

I am the great and powerful …

… And without thinking, I banged out 10 quotes that you can use the next time someone posts that meme “Give me a quote that people will instantly know what movie it came from.”

In his introduction to The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum said he hoped to create “a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out,” and his story of the little girl from Kansas who finds a magical land far from home has become just that. A handful of the phrases above — not in Kansas anymore, the man behind the curtain, for example — crop up in everyday conversation from time to time.

Of course, his legacy is greatly enhanced by the 1939 movie — there’s no reference to Oz being “Over the Rainbow” in the original book, of course, and the screenplay adds and subtracts a lot from the book. In either incarnation it’s a wonderful story about how we often find we already possess what we’re looking for — the scarecrow who wants a brain solves several puzzles along the journey; the tin man who wants a heart is one of the most compassionate travelers of all; and the cowardly lion who seeks courage acts courageous over and over again.

And who can resist a story where the great and powerful ruler of the land turns out to be a humbug?

I have owned all 14 of Baum’s Oz books since the 1970s, but I can’t remember ever reading more than two or three of them. With one of my Audible credits, I bought an audiobook of all 14 not long ago, so I’m planning to rectify that during upcoming commutes. We need a little fantasy in our lives, and Mr. Baum was all too willing to help us along that way.