Author: WarrenBluhm

Wordsmith and podcaster, Warren is a reporter, editor and storyteller who lives near the shores of Green Bay with two golden retrievers, Dejah and Summer, and Blackberry, an insistent cat. Author of It's Going to Be All Right, Echoes of Freedom Past, Full, Refuse to be Afraid, Gladness is Infectious, 24 flashes, How to Play a Blue Guitar, Myke Phoenix: The Complete Novelettes, A Bridge at Crossroads, The Imaginary Bomb, A Scream of Consciousness, and The Imaginary Revolution.

Trusting in the possibilities

The possibilities are endless.

I look around my room and part of me is overwhelmed. How does it always get this messy? I’m like a kid who doesn’t know to put away his toys, leaving a pile of stuff everywhere I turn.

It’s like that when I sit down to write some mornings. What could I possibly write? It’s not: “I got nothing.” No, it’s: “So many choices!” How do you pick just one toy?

What wonder have I assembled within a couple of steps and an easy reach. Here are books collecting the first 50 editions of Fantastic Four, the first 40 editions of Spider-Man, similar collections of Batman and Captain Marvel and Zot. Not far away are A Treasury of Sherlock Holmes, a collection of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poetry, all of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter stories — right here at my elbow is the Emily Dickinson paperback I pulled off the shelf a couple of weeks ago, and Carole King is singing “Smackwater Jack” from the turntable.

Is there a more perfect album of songs than Tapestry? OK, Blue and Judee Sill are also within reach, so I can think of plenty of contenders just in my own collection. But still … “When my soul was in the lost and found, you came along to claim it …”

The robin eggs under our back deck have hatched, and mama is tending what were little fluffballs not long ago but this morning look, amazingly, like little robins.

And what a few weeks ago was a white landscape is now awash with green. It has always been my favorite color, green, speaking as it does of life and warmth and growth.

Sometimes I sit in my chair, pen posed expectantly over the page, and my fingers just hover. It’s not that I don’t know what to write. It’s that the possibilities are endless.

At those moments I have a choice to be frustrated, or I can remember the story of a friend who needed to start work on a promotional video for his nonprofit, but so many things called for his attention, he didn’t know where to begin.

“Just get started,” smiled the renowned actor who had agreed to appear in his video. “The rest will take care of itself.”

And so I send my fingers across the page — or the keyboard as I’m doing now — and see what happens. It’s not magic, it’s just trusting in the possibilities.

I suppose I should pick up some of this mess. What would company think? If I keel over unexpectedly today, how rude of me to leave this for someone else to pick up. It’s like wearing dirty underwear to the emergency room.

Even more important, though, there may be something miraculous waiting to be rediscovered. How cool is that?

Teaser Trailer #1

The young woman who was destined to save the worlds grinned and held her finger over the ignition switch.

“Ready, Blaine?”

“Ready as I’m ever going to be,” drawled Blaine, who was a vampire. “Punch it!”

“OK, here goes. I hope Mom knew what she was doing when she built this thing,” she said, holding on to the wing-shaped steering wheel and flipping the switch.

“Wait,” said Blaine. “What? What does that mean, ‘I hope Mom knew what she was doing’?”

Everything began to vibrate.

“Next stop, Venus!” the girl cried.

“Are you sure about this, Jeep?” the vampire said.

“Of course not!” she shouted over the rumbling. “Who’s ever sure about anything new? That’s why you do it!”

Something pinged against a window.

“And then there’s the little matter of those people shooting at us!” Jeep shouted. “Ready or not, here we go!”

And she punched it.

The machine burst through the garage door, and she aimed for the field. Light pressure on the accelerator sent them careening forward, accelerating from zero to highway speed almost instantly. Alarmed men and women in suits and sunglasses dove out of the way, some of them firing weapons.

“Yikes! This thing goes a lot faster than I expected,” she said. They quickly reached the edge of the clearing, and she pointed the machine down the length of the grassy field.

“STOP, JEEP! YOU DON’T KNOW HOW IT WORKS!” came an amplified voice from behind.

“She’s got that right,” she told Blaine, “but I don’t like the idea of being shot or arrested or something.”

“But it’s set for Venus!” Blaine said, his calm voice perhaps a little higher-pitched than usual. “Shouldn’t we aim for somewhere a little closer?”

“No time!” Jeep said. “I can probably adjust the direction once we’re airborne.” And as if to punctuate her words, several more pings pinged against the windows. “Gotta go!” she said and punched hard on the accelerator. “I hope we can clear the trees or this is a short trip.”

Not only did the vehicle clear the trees, but it shot almost vertically into the sky, zipped through the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere and exosphere and left Earth’s gravitational pull in the time it took her to say “this is a short trip.”

“Good newt!” Blaine shrieked. “Are you kidding me?”

(It occurs to me that perhaps we should explain a little bit about who Jeep and Blaine are, how they happened to be flying to Venus in a machine Jeep’s mother built, and why those people were shooting. Once upon a — Oh, dear, It’ll have to wait. Something’s happening.)

“Is that what I think it is?” Jeep shouted.

“If you think it’s Venus, I have to say I think you’re right,” Blaine shrieked.

“We’ve only been flying about three minutes,” she said. “How is that possible?”

“I have no idea,” Blaine said, “but that’s a planet, and it’s not Earth, and we aimed for Venus, so do the math.”

She pulled back on the throttle-thing, and the rumbling drew back to a more manageable and somewhat pleasant vibration. The huge green orb ahead grew at a more reasonable pace, and they began to believe they would have a chance to land there rather than splat against it.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Jeep said.

“You don’t need my permission to think so,” Blaine sniffed.

warrior giel © Rudall30 | dreamstime.com

“Say, on the dark side of the planet,” Jeep said. “Are those lights? like the lights of cities?”

Blaine peered into the darkness.

“They’re lights,” he acknowledged. “I’d have to be closer to know if they’re cities.”

“But they could be.”

“Have you ever been to Venus? Neither have I,” he sniffed. “I don’t have a clue what causes light during the night on Venus.”

“But they look like the light of Earth cities.”

“As you like to say, my dear: Duh.”

“That’s all I’m saying!” Jeep said.

“So: Venus inhabited?” Blaine raised his pointed eyebrows.

“Not in any universe I ever knew about!” she cried. It’s amazing how true that particular statement turned out to be.

“So: Shall we land on the day side or the night side?” Blaine asked. “I vote day.”

“Makes sense. How do you suppose you land this thing?”

“Oh, dear. You made taking off look so easy, I just thought you knew how to land.”

Jeep peered at the controls.

“If this thing flies like an airplane, I may have a fighting chance of getting us down,” she said. “Assuming a real airplane reacts like a video-game airplane.”

“Oh, my,” Blaine sighed. “How did we get into this?”

Comparisons, and an update

One of my morning stops around the web is a particular writer whose work has helped me to the point where I consider him a mentor. When he writes about writing, I pay attention.

More often than not, he just writes about what project(s) he’s currently working on. Some days it feels more or less like advertising or promotion. On the other hand, I’m kind of interested: So this is what a prolific full-time writer does, day to day. It’s instructional, although not as instructional as when he writes something specifically about doing the craft or running a writer’s business.

I have had nothing approaching the long- or even short-term success that this writer has had, so I feel self-conscious when I update my projects here. What does anyone care about my comparatively meager efforts? If anything I’m the bad example to counter his constant activity.

For example: A few months ago I celebrated passing the 10,000-word mark on Jeep Thompson and The Lost Prince of Venus, a novella or novel of at least 40,000 words that I have promised you and myself and God will be published this year. I’m only now closing in on 15,000 words, including one stretch in March where Jeep didn’t move for more than a month. Five thousand words is a good weekend for my mentor.

OK, he’s full time in the business, and I’m back to 40 hours a week at the day job after a 2020 that saw the hours cut back to 22 for quite some time. I have less time for writing these days. And I did get a handful of books out the door last year.

I’m almost ready to release Full, my next collection of thoughts and poems and random fragments to join A Bridge at Crossroads, How to Play a Blue Guitar and Gladness is Contagious on the shelf. I said a couple of weeks ago it may be out there by June 1, and it may. I am flirting with making an audiobook of it and waiting to release the ebook, paperback and audiobook all at once, except I couldn’t do that by June 1 so it feels like stalling.

This is the 294th consecutive day that I’ve posted something on the blog, and I expect to complete a full year of daily posting on July 31, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. Don’t get me started on my mentor; his daily streak is in five figures, and I have two years of this before I even hit four figures.

This post is a fine example of how comparison-itis works. Full will be the 16th book currently in print-on-demand that I have written or edited. Jeep is already the longest bit of fiction that I’ve written in almost a decade. And I never, ever blogged as many as 294 days in a row. When I compare myself to my mentor, I’m a very small fish in a very big pond, actually an ocean. When I rightly compare myself to myself, I’m wide-open floodgates.

I’m not that guy. I’m this one. I’m a writer, and I’m writing. As the mentor at the top of my list, Ray Bradbury, said: “You only fail if you stop writing.” It’s a good thing I taped that sentence to my computer.

See y’all tomorrow. And watch for my next book.

born free

We are born free

… and we see that other people are free, too, and everything works pretty well if we all agree we’re free as long as we don’t hurt others or their freedoms

… but then we start building little walls and barriers over what we can do, and then we encounter the permission-givers and who appointed them anyway

… and the little walls and barriers grow into cages, and we don’t step out to test the limits as much, and so we don’t realize how far we can go and we forget we’re free

… and people encourage us to think outside the box, but the box is comfortable, so very comfortable that we forget it really doesn’t exist, and we sit inside a box of our own making, free to come and go but not daring to be free

… so very comfortable that we don’t see the permission-givers building a real box where the imaginary walls had been

… until it’s too late.

Until it’s too late?

Actually, it’s almost never too late.

You’ve been free all along, and still are.

Remember the part where it works really well

and get back there.

A cup of coffee and a lifetime ago

I drank my first cup of coffee the morning of May 19, 1975, after successfully negotiating four years of college, including all-nighters, without the beverage.

It was the day after graduation from college. I had spent the night in an old old hotel in Waupaca, Wisconsin (I was there not long ago — Waupaca, that is, not the hotel, because I went to where it was and it wasn’t anymore), and I reported as requested at 5:30 a.m. to the WDUX Radio studios on Tower Drive, where my first newscast as a professional journalist was due to be broadcast an hour later. Or wait, maybe it was two hours later, around 7:40-ish after Paul Harvey. Funny how the details blur after 46 years.

The morning man — I can see his face, but not quite his name, which is OK because it wasn’t his real name, everyone had radio names then; I would be Warren Phillips for five months, chosen because Wally Phillips ruled Chicago radio at the time — said you look tired, kid, have a cup of coffee.

I don’t drink coffee, I said, I never got around to it. No time like the present, he said. I poured a cup and tried it. And another. And another. And a rest-of-my-life caffeine addiction settled in.

Would my college career have been different if I’d surrendered to the coffee gods earlier? Hard to say. But waiting until that morning helped cement the fact that my new life had begun. Living in an ancient hotel until I found the apartment above the TV store a week or so later? Check. Starting my first full-time job in the adult world? Check. Drinking coffee? Check. I even attended my first Waupaca City Council meeting that night so I could experience my first 5:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. workday. Or was it 10?

I get nostalgic this time of year. WDUX recently remodeled and posted photos of its remodeled studio on Facebook, and I could see the bones of the old place in the pictures. That was the summer I bought my 12-string guitar and recorded an album’s worth of songs on a Sunday afternoon in the radio station’s production studio and kissed a girl shortly before midnight while “Dance With Me” was playing that time I substituted as a Saturday night DJ. I remember doing a remote broadcast from the newly opened car dealership out on the edge of town, which is now a mile or so from the edge of town because of all the development that 46 years can bring.

I only spent five months there. They never got around to raising my salary from $120 a week to $125 a week after three months like they said they would, and then the station at my adopted hometown of Ripon called and said they wanted to hire me away but could offer only $170 a week. It’s one of the only times I made a career move for mercenary reasons, but it worked out well enough that I can say I lived in Ripon for 11 years, not just the four.

Sometimes we drive through Waupaca and I see what’s different and what’s still the same, and I wonder how my life would have evolved if I had stayed. But mostly I remember a bright sunny summer and all of life ahead of me, and that first cup of coffee, and changing my name back to Warren Bluhm after introducing myself in Ripon with my radio name and having two or three people say “I thought your name was Bluhm, didn’t you just graduate up at the college?” Ah, small towns.