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Inspiring

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Photo credit: Ian Dooley on Unsplash

“You’ve inspired me today.”

The person who said this to me is an aspiring fashion designer I’ll call “Jon.” We have never met in person. I have never seen his work. Our sole contact to date has been one telephone conversation that started out in the context of both of our day jobs. And yet. . . .

“You’ve inspired me today.”

It all began when I called the appellate clerks’ office to find out whether an appeal has been filed. In the course of the conversation, Jon asked me to spell the name of the potential appellant. I did so, and he reported that no appeal had been filed.

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Slogging

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Photo credit: Anh Nguyen on Unsplash

I have a calendar in my office where I make a note each time I do non-day-job writing. Whether it’s a blog post, a cat bio, my novel-in-progress, or something else, I jot it on the calendar.

I’m writing this blog post on March 13. “Blog” will be the second entry on the calendar this month.

The second one.

The first was a cat bio on March 4.

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Stealing from Fiction and Life

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Photo credit: qimono on Pixabay

Don’t get me wrong: I know plenty of things.

The problem is that I used most of them in my first book.

When I wrote State v. Claus, I sort of took the easy way out. After all, writing a novel was daunting business—no reason to make it harder. So the main character was a lawyer because I know how to be a lawyer. After decades of appearing in court and reading reams of trial transcripts, the courtroom scenes were a snap to write. Deciding what crimes Ralph would be charged with and what the elements were required nothing more than the legal database I use on a daily basis. The dynamics of law firm life were second nature. Even researching details of criminal procedure was easy: I talked to a lawyer I knew whose practice consisted primarily of representing individuals accused of crimes.

I wish the research for the sequel to State v. Claus was a fraction as easy.

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Rest and the City

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Photo credit: Aleksandar Cvetanovic on Unsplash

My house needs to be cleaned. The laundry needs to be done. The tax documents need to be sorted, totaled, and entered into the spreadsheet for my accountant. The kitchen needs reorganizing. And don’t even get me started on the state of the basement and the garage.

All that said, you know what I’ve done over the past 72 hours?

Practically nothing.

And I’m fine with that.

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The Mystery of the Soggy Air Handler

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Photo credit: Keiteu Ko on Unsplash

When we last met, I recounted the tale of how my air handler turned itself on late one frigid night.

(To digress: I have since learned that some people are not familiar with air handlers. An air handler is the big metal box in the attic that contains the wiring for the fan which is part of the central air conditioning system. Without the air handler to—well, handle the air—none of the cool air created by the compressor (which sits outside) would actually get distributed through the house. I don’t blame you if you didn’t know. Until my first air handler caught fire, I didn’t know either, and the thing had been in my attic for seventeen years.)

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Before the Storm: A Few Thoughts

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My backyard

Here in the northeastern U.S., we’re preparing for Winter Storm Bobby.

(I should point out that it’s hard to take a storm seriously that sounds as if it’s named for a little boy or, for those of us who recall the 1970s, a teen heartthrob.)

Forecasters tend to get excited about such dramatic weather events. I imagine it has something to do with how seldom they occur. Also, if they fail to hype the event enough and it turns out to be a big deal, the same people who complain about they overhype every snowflake will shriek and moan about how somebody should have told them this was going to be a big deal.

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Don’t Waste Your Time

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Photo credit: Aron Visuals on Unsplash

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” ~ Flannery O’Connor

From the time I was twenty until I was forty-six, I barely wrote a word of fiction.

God, what a waste.

A devastating college workshop experience left me convinced I had nothing to say and didn’t know how to say it anyway. On that dark February evening, I sat in stunned silence at a conference table as a handful of seniors mocked my story mercilessly. No one else spoke up (although one student told me later, “I didn’t think it was that bad.”). The professor did nothing to stop the train of ridicule, nor did he ever say anything to suggest that my writing wasn’t hopeless. He gave me an A in the class, but I’ve never believed it.

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Three Jobs, Maybe Four

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Photo credit: Nathan Dumleo on Unsplash

Several years ago, David Handler gave a talk to aspiring writers at the inaugural Writers Weekend at the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. David is a successful author who has been writing for decades. Inevitably in such a setting, someone asked about his writing life. David replied that he spent the morning writing and the afternoon working on his small business.

“What’s your small business?” someone else asked.

“Being an author,” he replied. He explained that in the afternoon, he routinely dealt with the business end of writing, including communications with his agent and his editor, correspondence with readers, and planning talks just like this one.

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Look, I made a story

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Photo credit: Michael C on Unsplash

Today, I wrote a story.

“Big deal,” you think. “You’re a writer. It’s what you’re supposed to do.”

Except to be honest, I’ve been struggling in recent months to come up with something that—in my humble opinion—is worth writing.

Maybe I’ve gotten pickier. Or maybe it’s that I’ve written some stories that I truly think are good, and yet they’ve have struggled to get off the starting block, and so I question my own judgment. One story has been a finalist in two different competitions and was highly praised by the organizers of one of those competitions–but as I sent it off today, I noticed that this was its seventeenth launch. It’s already awaiting judgment at three publications, but I submitted it anyway, albeit with more stoicism than optimism.

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The Grand and Glorious New Year’s Clean-Out

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It’s been a year.

Which is why I cleaned out and defrosted my chest freezer.

The chest freezer is in my basement. I originally purchased it when one of my cats had digestive issues. When all else failed, I cooked for him because that’s what you do for a beloved family member. (Also, it was preferable to the nightly Buddy butt-washes—my sweet boy was rotund, long-haired, and blind, which meant he wasn’t stellar at cleaning his back end after a trip to the litter box.)

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