August Shack Report

August is the best month of summer. Things most anticipated come to fruition; tomatoes, BLT’s,  peppers, melons, vacations.  August is an ending of sorts but a good ending.  August is when summers are reflected upon as promise realized. This one, the summer of 2016, was particularly good.   I’m turning 65 Saturday, entering the safe harbor of socialized medicine called Medicare, and finally reaching the age in which I’m old enough to be officially retired.  I quit working three years ago which some consider early.  It’s been almost perfect, except that at 65 I am still an unpublished writer.  I shouldn’t complain.  The world has been kind to me.

In my three years since retiring I’ve learned a lot about writing and what it takes to be a writer.  I think I’ve improved.  I can see mistakes and edit faster.  I express myself with fewer words.  I’ve learned to rewrite effectively.  But I’ve discovered weaknesses.  I discovered I’m weak in areas of writing I didn’t know were there.

 

Here in the shack I quickly found a significant aspect of writing that exists in addition to creating stories.  There is the actual writing I am doing right now, putting characters together to form words, words to form sentences, sentences to paragraphs and so on.  And then there is working on writing, which I am loath to do.  Working on writing is what you need to do to go to the next level, find a wider audience, get published. I can barely stand thinking about it.  I think I have a block.  It’s not writer’s block.  I’m writing all the time.  It’s something else.  It’s packaging and promoting.  It’s figuring out how to break into that big vault of new readers.  Really, to be successful as a writer, to publish and gain a wider audience, need I both write and work on writing at the same time?  I think so, but so far I haven’t been able to do the latter.   

You read my blog, which I’m very grateful for, and you give me great feedback.  Without readers I’m not sure I could or would be doing this still.  Thank you.  By today’s count I had 646 reads, or at least opens, on my mid July blog post “Out of Selfishness.”  That’s the most I’ve ever had.  Though I can’t determine who clicks on the link via e mail and who accesses the blog through social media I’m pretty sure the growth is attributable to Face Book.  I had a lot of shares on that particular post.  The e mail list only gets smaller.  As my peers in social work retire or worse their agency e mail addresses turn up undeliverable.  Meanwhile on Face Book people I don’t know are reading my posts.   

Twitter is a bust so far.  To be honest I don’t know how to use it.  The only people who seem to respond to my twitter feed are Russian women seeking boyfriends or other equally weird messages.  Consider this message I got last week.

***شرکت نوين گيت***
با سالها سابقه در طراحي ،اجرا و خدمات سيستمهاي درب اتوماتيک و راهبند فروش،نصب و راه اندازي و خدمات انواع درب اتوماتيک (درب سکشنال - کرکره اتوماتيک - کرکره پنجره - درب ريلي اتوماتيک - جک پارکينگي - کرکره شفاف - رول گيتر - انواع راهبند و درب اتوماتيک شيشه اي... ) خدمات 24 ساعته و شبانه روزي حتي در تعطيلات رسمي مشاوره رايگان در تمامي مراحل

I was excited.  A foreign reader?  I immediately replied “I wish I knew what you were saying, but sorry I don’t read Arabic.”  No response.  Then I remembered the Google translate feature.  Here’s what my so called foreign reader was telling me.

The New Company Gate

With years of experience in the design, implementation and service of automatic door systems and barrier sales, installation and service of automatic doors (sectional doors - Automatic shutters - Shutters - Doors rail automatic - Jack parking - transparent shutters -  all kinds of barriers and doors made of glass. Service 24 hours a day, even on holidays.  Free advice at all stages.

I need a Twitter lesson.  It’s not working out.  I don’t understand hash tags.  There’s a lot of work I can do there but I don’t know if it’s worth it.  Twitter is nearly as foreign as that right to left Arabic alphabet. 

I’ve tried other avenues on the working on writing journey with little success.  I bought books about writing, friends have lent me and sent me books about writing, and though I’ve read some of them I can’t honestly tell you what they said.  I have subscribed to writer advice e mails.  There are a lot of them, but most want you to purchase training packages, or pay to listen to mass digital seminars organized by supposedly famous authors who mainly boast of their platforms, followers, and sales.  I couldn’t seem to find anything they actually wrote except for the briefest stuff.  I concluded they were famous for their sales not their sentences.  I asked to be taken off their lists.  I feel like I’m drowning in information about writing.  Writing about writing is also writing, but it’s not what I’m after.

I did remain subscribed at The Write Practice and Narrative.  The Write Practice is a brief and direct communication offering various bits of advice from a number of writers, all short and to the point.  I don’t read them all, but often they answer questions to which I don’t know the answer.  Narrative was recommended to me by a friend.  It’s an online not for profit publication founded in 2003 that is dedicated to advancing literary arts in the digital age by supporting the finest writing talent and encouraging readership across generations, in schools, and around the globe.  Quite a mission.  It also sponsors writing contests.  I just missed a July 31 deadline for their last one. 

That’s a core problem.  Although I’ve been writing off and on all my life I’ve never submitted anything for publication.  Nada.  Zip.  I’m beginning to think that’s a problem.  At the suggestion of a writer I met at Lit Fest in Chicago I subscribed to DuoTrope, a web site that lists and gives weekly updates on every known magazine, ezine, journal, publishing house, you name it that accepts writers’ material.  It’s gigantic, the number of publishing opportunities, paid and non paid.  Absolutely enormous.  The lists seem endless.  I’m put off by its enormity.  DuoTrope provides a program for tracking submissions, makes on line submissions possible, does everything it seems but scan your hard drive, find something suitable for one of the thousand of content displayers, and sends it in for you.  Sadly I have yet to pull that trigger.

I have a hard drive full of blog posts, short stories, and the beginnings of books.  On paper I have journals from trips, college papers, stories never digitized, potential material in my head coming out my ears.   Let me give you an example. 

I found a paper I wrote in an American Lit class at ISU, the one that covers Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman.  In response to a simple and specific assignment to write about images used by Thoreau in his book of  Walden essays I turned in a rambling 4,000 word autobiographical narrative about myself on the farm.  It was a very personal lonely boy sort of confessional tale.  I don’t know what I was thinking when I turned it in.  It was perhaps the first time I had ever shared such personal thoughts on paper with anyone. Don’t ask me why I did it because I still don’t know.  The professor was Elsa Greene whom I now can’t find. 

She gave me an A.  She said this in her comments. 

What to say?  This is a piece of writing rather than a paper for a course-and it’s good.  There are problems with it but I don’t feel like going through them one, two, three, four, five.   If you want to talk about it come in.

I didn’t go in to see her.  She caught me in the hall weeks later after class and insisted I make an appointment.  Would not take no for an answer.  When I went into her office she had made a copy of the paper and had red lined it with additional comments. She said something to this effect.

“You have strings, or very small themes, that run through this piece which pull the reader along and then you tie them together.  That’s hard to do.  I didn’t know where you were going but I was intrigued and then you made it clear.  You have something here.  You know, there are student publications, maybe periodicals, that would print something like this.  It needs work, and I could help you, or someone else could if you prefer.  But I think you should pursue this.  What you show that you are able to do in this paper is not easily accomplished.”

I didn’t know what to say.  The thought of others reading what I was thinking, finding out who I really was and what I had revealed in that paper was daunting.  I didn’t think I was ready for that.  I said nothing in return. After a period of silence she spoke again.

“I’m not going to embarrass you further but why don’t you think it over?  It would not have to be this piece.  You could work up something else.  But I encourage you to keep working at this.  I think something could come of it.”

Again I said nothing. Finally I mumbled a thank you and got out of there

I never told anyone but my wife and a friend about that conversation till now.  I had forgotten about the paper.  And then I found it in a buried folder of old stuff and re read it.  It was clumsy and sloppy.  I rewrote it.  I remember exactly what I was trying to say 45 years ago because it was my life.  It was me speaking.  It was that internal dialogue I’ve lived with for all these years put on paper.  It’s that thing I try to get across to you but cannot express in a sustained book like way.

I have plans for a book of farm stories.  Is it a book of stories or is it a single story?  At one point I cast about trying to find an answer to this question.  Is each chapter of a book its own story?  Or is the whole book one story?  I think it is one story.  That concerns me.  What if I don’t think that big?  My stuff is short, it begins and ends.  How do I chain it together?  Exactly how do I write these books anyway?

I made a vow never to lock myself into a memoir but everything I want to say can be found somewhere in my life and the lives of those around me.  What if family or friends are offended?  The farm stories may read well for men and women now old who never lost the feeling of being on the farm and want to go back, for those who secretly know a part of them never moved to town.  But everything I learn tells me books of short stories are notoriously hard to publish, except for accomplished novelists.  I have to think farm book, but in my mind it's farm stories.

There’s the book about marriage and parenting.  There’s the tale of a college kid trying to sell stories in a grocery store.  There’s the book about building the shack and why it had to be built.  There are travel stories, the cryptic book about the man from the mountains who comes to live by the sea.  If my books were ships on that sea they would be unmoving and still, becalmed, no wind in their sails.  My books are just not what I want them to be.  It feels like they go nowhere.  For a more Midwest closer to home metaphor if my stories were railroad cars they would be that long line of sand cars sidetracked near Grand Ridge waiting for the price of oil to go up, fracking to resume, and Illinois Valley sand to once again in demand, along with the now idle freight cars that carry it. 

Thank God for the blog and the feedback you provide.  I’ve gotten used to exposing my thoughts and feelings there.  Why can’t I let you in on the books?  Imagine how much worse it would be if I had no readers?  I started the blog at work you know and quit work because the blog became the only thing I wanted to do.  And so I stick with it, and you as readers, even though I sometimes think I should plow all my effort into a novel.  Try as I might I cannot make the blogs posts into a book.  A book is a different animal, and I haven’t captured that animal yet.  But the blog gives me much.  I hope it gives you something as well.

So here in August 2016, three years into retirement at age 65, I am not discouraged.  Retirement and my writing in the shack continue to change and grow.  After three years of not officially working I find myself relaxing more, confronting my shortcomings, and rising to new challenges.  I have not produced a book, but I’ve not given up.  I’m optimistic.  I’ll let you know next August what the new year brings.

 I’m open to suggestions.  Thanks for reading all the way to the end.