Mondays are for dreamers

Dean Wesley Smith quoted from Ingrid Bergman on Monday, applying the thought to the writer’s mindset.

“Happiness is good health and a bad memory.”

Smith encouraged writers to stop dwelling on things that have gone wrong — that is, develop a bad memory — and keep an eye on moving forward. I do spend a lot of my time lamenting unfinished projects and missed personal deadlines rather than my 18 books available in print-on-demand and my plans to produce many more. 18 is a good number.

I have written something professionally almost every day for 47 years as of later this month. I have had a middling career as a writer, and although I may not have written a lot of “what I want to write,” for a time measured in decades I have been assembling words into content, most of it disposable but some of it reaching for the ages.

Of course, like the driver who gives you the finger messes up your whole day even when everything else went fine, like many writers I find myself dwelling on the projects that are stalled or have never been completed rather than the 18 finished projects, 10 with my name as author and eight as the editor. I have five projects within shouting range of being ready for the printer, and for 641 days in a row, I have contributed something to this blog, which I am always mining for future projects.

I took inventory of my fiction projects Monday morning, because those are the projects that I spend the most time lamenting. (All five of the above-mentioned almost-completed projects are non-fiction.) The reason I did the review was not to despair again but to celebrate the progress I’ve managed over time.

What I found was that I have written more than 50,000 words for four of my novels, with at least a dozen more in various stages of “pre-production.” If a novel is at least 40,000 words, I’m more than halfway through one, more than a third of the way through another, and more than a quarter of the way through a third, with a cache of ideas about where to go next after these are completed.

The downside: It’s been three months since I worked on any of my novels-in-progress. That’s very discouraging. But I’m encouraged that for all my whining about wanting to be a book author and a novelist, I actually am one, have been one for some time, and am in the process of authoring several more.

Now, of course, I haven’t sold enough books to make a living at it yet. That’s a whine for another day. 

The saga of Ozark is complete

Red said enough is enough as the closing credits rolled on the series finale of the Netflix show Ozark. It’s a brilliantly crafted drama about a family and organized crime, well acted, with sympathetic characters caught in one of those tangled webs we weave when we practice to deceive.

The final seven episodes landed Friday, and we sailed through them over the weekend. As the final scene faded to black, Red and I looked at each other and said well, that’s that, and let’s not go there again for a while.

There’s something disconcerting about stories where the heroes are crime lords and you find yourself rooting for this character or that to meet a brutal ending and for that character or this to get out of it alive. It makes for the greatest of drama — think The Godfather, The Sopranos, or Breaking Bad — but the depravity of it all is exhausting.

 Ozark does deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as those other three. I would not have written some of the denouement the way the creators did, but they are better at this than I am. The choices they made resulted in a story with a powerful message about the intersection of crime, government, and corporations, specifically Big Pharma.

I’m with Red, though, I think for a while we will seek out entertainment with lower body counts. 

Don’t get me wrong, we loved Ozark, or else we wouldn’t have stuck around for all 44 episodes. We loved the characters — most of them, anyway — and even the most evil of them had a perverse charm.

It’s just that at some point you have to re-focus your mind and heart on “whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy” (Philippians 4:8), to kind of cleanse the palate of blood and guts and an inevitable descent into darkness.

A whiff of strong air

The next Roger Mifflin Collection book is The Story of My Heart, which author Richard Jefferies subtitled “An Autobiography,” even though precious few details of his life actually appear between its covers. It’s more of a love song to nature and bright sunny days walking through meadows. It’s more of a philosophical treatise as he tries to wrap his brain around life and the nature of the soul. It’s a fascinating exploration that challenges premises and angered some people when it first appeared in 1883.

I don’t quite know what to make of it or describe it, but Christopher Morley (through his cheerfully cantankerous bookstore owner Roger Mifflin) recommended it among other tomes that might turn your head upside down. It is, as Roger said, “a whiff of strong air, blue and cleansing, from hilltops and primrose valleys.”

I was a little miffed at myself because I missed my self-imposed deadline for finishing the draft and sending it off to the printer for a proof copy. But then I recalled that my publication date is May 17, so I haven’t missed any public deadlines yet.

Watch for an opportunity to pre-order soon.

Life defies the spring

Spring has sputtered along this year. There was frost on the ground Thursday morning, and the weather people say we had only two or three days of average temperatures this April. The rest of the days have been 10 to 20 degrees below average.

But the leaves on the willow trees are starting to emerge, the ground is getting greener, and the daffodils are coming to life in defiance of the cold.

Life goes on, no matter the inconveniences or the challenges or the obstacles. That’s the reassuring thing about life — it always finds a way through the storm.

It’s less than two months until the first day of summer, when, soaking in gobs of Vitamin D from the sun, we will laugh about the timid spring that was afraid to come out and play, until it did. 

Rabbit hole revenge

 © Batke82 | Dreamstime.com

“Hey! What the —” the rabbit said as I tumbled onto his head.

“Sorry, bun,” I said. “How did I get here?”

“I am so over people like you,” said the rabbit, his whiskers twitching. “You fall into my hole, eyes all glazed, rude as can be, land on my head or wake up my kids, and you have the nerve to ask, ‘How did I get here?’ You know dang well how you got here. You’re just too embarrassed to say.”

These last few words were accompanied by a series of strong finger jabs to my chest. And before you try to tell me rabbits don’t have fingers, let me point out that rabbits also don’t talk.

“Honestly,” I said apologetically, “I’m as surprised as you are.”

“Then you’re not surprised at all,” the rabbit sniffed, and sniffed again. “What did you think would happen? You pick up that insidious device all the time, knowing it can send you down a rabbit hole, and you scroll and scroll until you find a perfect little rabbit hole to dive down. Well, enough is enough. Come on, guys!”

All of a sudden I was surrounded by rabbits. Drumming started to thunder out of the walls, and the rabbits began to sing along with a jangling electric guitar.

“We’re not gonna take it, no, we ain’t gonna take it, we’re not gonna take it anymore,” they sang as they swarmed over me.

I will probably post a link to this story, like always, but as I glance over at my iPhone and contemplate opening Facebook, I break out in a sweat, remembering the hordes of vengeful furry animals crawling on my chest and weighing me down, shouting Twisted Sister in my face.

My therapist says with a few years of hard work, I may be able to function normally again. But in the meantime, I can’t go out in the backyard.

There are bunnies out there.

Squalor sneaks up on me again

The piles of debris are back. I have accumulated new old records and CDs and books, and more papers have been delivered and not filed away or tossed, and so I see chaos everywhere when I sit down in my easy chair to supposedly relax and write. 

It’s not easy to see all of this. When I finish this session, I will have to take some small action against the clutter — at the very least a donation or two to the recycling bin.

I don’t mean to live in squalor. It just sneaks up on me. I mean to come back and read that book, so I set it on a pile instead of returning it to, or making room on, one of the shelves. I want to file the electric bill eventually, so I don’t toss or recycle it after I write the check. We can get a rebate for the dog’s medicine, so the receipt is under here somewhere. Enough little things like these, and pretty soon the room is not a retreat but a constant reminder of tasks undone — even the pleasant tasks like listening to the music I scored at that sale the other day.

On the other hand, this is my little corner of the universe, it’s full of stuff, and I like stuff, especially old stuff like these albums by Lobo and Jim Photoglo that I found in a $1 bin at the library, of all places. And there’s the decades-old copy of The Note-Books of Samuel Butler that I’ll be using to guide my layout of an upcoming Roger Mifflin Collection edition. And I really should dive into that Ray Bradbury tribute collection filled with stories inspired by the old master, so why not leave it where it lies? And for cryin’ out loud, will I ever hook up the microphone I bought to revive my podcast career?!

A little clutter is good for the soul, I think, and Bradbury opened his TV show with a review of his cluttered workspace.

This is not a little clutter, though. This is a lot of clutter. I set some of these papers in a pile because it was important that I review and perhaps file them, but I have gone months in some cases without doing either, and the world has gone on.

Finishing the thought, however, it would be nice to relax and close my eyes knowing that when I open them, I won’t be assailed by the sight of something undone, something that belongs somewhere else, or something urgent that I should have taken care of by now. And so, when I get up from writing this, one or more of these piles must cease to exist before I move on to the daily grind. Really. I mean it this time. Here goes …

Our scary science-fiction present-day

Photo © Wellphotos | Dreamstime.com

Do androids dream of electric sheep, as Philip K. Dick asked? Do smartphones dream at all?

How do they know what we’ve been talking about so they can show us relevant ads? Oh, we know the answer to that, but we don’t face the implications.

We’re entertained by the pretty FBI agents on TV stalking criminals with their cellphone data and the GPS devices in their cars, and we don’t tremble at the idea of constant surveillance.

Scary science fiction was written years ago about authorities watching the innocent 24 hours a day, and it was brushed off as fantasy or a future to be avoided. Now that it’s a reality, we brush it off as no big deal, or even a blessing — we can be found if we get lost. And maybe if the cameras catch us doing something really embarrassing, We’ll win $100,000 from America’s Funniest Home Videos.

The ghosts of Winston Smith and Julia aren’t laughing, though.