Category: Writing

The Starting Line

To build some consistency into my writing habits, I said to myself in late July 2020, “I bet I could write a blog post every day from August through October. I did the math: 31 days plus 30 plus 31 equals 92. And thus was born my 92-day challenge.

If you search the internet, you will find times when I announced big plans. I will release a Myke Phoenix story every month. I will write a trilogy of novels about a kaiju (big monster in the tradition of Godzilla, if you don’t know the word). I am writing a novel about a girl, an alien, and me. I am starting a mystery series about a detective and his pookha partner, who resembles a 6.5-foot-tall skunk.

I wrote 12 monthly adventures and stopped. The novels are half-written. When I challenged myself to write every day for 92 days, I didn’t want to make a big declaration and stop, again.

So I didn’t announce that I would write every day. I just wrote. And what do you know. I posted every day for 92 days. And then it was 100 and 200 and I grew committed to writing a 365th consecutive blog and calling it a year.

This has been an illustration of one of the lessons they teach you: Don’t declare to the world what you’re doing, just get down to doing it. “I made this” is a more powerful statement than “I’m going to make this.”

Shall I now declare that I will keep blogging every day until I depart this mortal coil? I actually did declare that it has become a daily habit, but as I learned when I started a habit of writing a monthly superhero adventure, habits are easily broken. The road is cluttered with the wreckage of well-intended new habits.

I thought of calling this little piece “The Finish Line” and celebrating a pretty nifty achievement, because yes, I have never blogged every day for 365 straight days before, and that is cool. But the lesson I learned from the lack of a 13th consecutive Myke Phoenix story is to decide what’s coming next before you reach the finish line.

“Good for you!” Steven Pressfield’s mentor said when he finished his first novel. “Start the next one today.”

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end” is the brilliant line in the song “Closing Time.” And so, “The Starting Line” and not “The Finish Line.”

What am I starting? I’m not saying; that’s gotten me in trouble before. But I plan to keep sharing every day, so you can see what I make along the way.

The moose at the top of the bookshelf

There’s a moose at the top of my bookshelf,
His antlers are touching the ceiling.
He always looks warm with his sweater and scarf
And he sees everything in the room.
He never says a word, just surveys the scene
And reminds me to look to my whimsey.
He doesn’t mind if my poems don’t rhyme
And forgives when my words are too flimsy.
At least I think he doesn’t mind because, as I said,
He doesn’t speak. He just sits up there being cute
While I slog along forgetting he’s there
Until sometimes I look up: I raise my eyes
And see and remember. I think everyone
Needs a moose at the top of their bookshelf.

+ + + + +

“That’s not a sonnet,” Beauregard sniffed.

“It has 14 lines, a certain rhythm,” I offered.

“It’s not consistent, there’s no rhyming pattern,” he insisted.

“Fair enough, I won’t call it a sonnet,” I conceded.

“Thank the stars,” Beauregard exhaled.

“I like it just the same,” I exulted.

The affair of the fedora

The fedora had sat untouched at that jaunty angle for months. Did it miss my head? Was it forlorn and feeling forgotten? Would it ever move again?

All of these thoughts would be rushing through its head, if it only had a head. But fedoras being fedoras, it needed someone else’s head to be complete.

I picked it up and settled it on my head.

Sure enough, it whispered, “You complete me.”

“I hear the voice of a fedora,” I said. “Yes, I have passed through the zippy door into insanity.”

Here, in this silly space, I am comforted to learn that insanity doesn’t make me dangerous — only detached from reality. As such, I am a perfect citizen, compliant and oblivious.

“Are you insane?!” an old friend cried. Why, yes, yes, I am. Just ask my fedora.

The insane, in fact, have conquered the world. That makes more sense than any other conspiracy theory.

J Alfred in the foyer

WB’s note: There’s something odd about the WordPress editor that makes it laborious to add indentations and spaces between words, which in turn makes it hard to reproduce a poem that has uneven indents. So here are pictures of the pages. The main thing you should know is that only one blank line is intended between “gaudy masterpiece” and “page after page.” Thank you and please enjoy.

P.S. This is what I wrote on Page 70 (and 71).

A point of perseverance

This is Day 358 of my “blog every day for 92 days” personal challenge. Barring an unforeseen catastrophe, next Saturday I’ll complete a full year of daily blogging for the first time in my decade and a half since discovering how easy it is to have a blog.

Will I quit shortly afterward, like I quit shortly after accomplishing a full 12 months of monthly Myke Phoenix adventures in 2014? Will the urgency fade, like the half-dozen novels I announced and have (so far) left unfinished? Or have I finally established a habit that will last until I drop the pen and the keyboard forever?

I imagine that all depends on me. I don’t have millions of readers to encourage me to show up every day, but even if I did, it’s still up to me to show up every day.

I do have other, probably greater, priorities. The deck needs restaining, I have bacon to bring home, and I really do love the novel that is slowly crawling out of the muck of my brain. Surely I should be devoting my writing time to that adventure?

Yes, but the daily ritual keeps the flame burning even when that flicker is the only creative burst of the day.

“You only fail if you stop writing.” That Ray Bradbury quote is affixed at the top of my computer monitor.

The novel, the poems, even the news stories and op-ed columns, come and go in spurts. The blog is the only constant, my proof that I can show up every day to keep writing.

So now it’s a point of — not pride — a point of perseverance, my little rallying cry to keep going, keep doing, do the best you can for as long as you can.

See you tomorrow, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.

Speak

Speak!
You know what you want to say.
You know what needs to be said.
You know what has been building
in your heart and must come out
So speak.

Speak!
You don’t know what you want to say,
You don’t know what needs to be said,
You just know it’s been building
in your heart and must come out
So speak.

Speak!
It needs to be said,
It wants to be said,
And the world will change
when you say it,
And only then.