So I tried this other writing group

in addition to, not instead of, the local group. Meets in Barnes & Noble on Wednesday evenings (2nd & 4th Wed. of each month. What is this fascination with semi-monthly instead of biweekly?) so I've been to three meetings of this group now, and I'm puzzled. I'm often puzzled, but... So there are four other people in the group.

One of them is not a writer, but likes to come anyway. She's a chatter. Nice lady, but contribution is sketchy at best.

Another is apparently writing something - she's shared a couple of chapters - but doesn't share much regularly. She's also one who has yet to be prepared by actually having read anyone else's work in time for a meeting. To be fair, she does pass along commentary outside the meeting, but I sort of expect that when someone's taken the trouble to share something ahead of time for comment, the members would read the work & prepare some comment.

Another one is a guy who has apparently written (and I gather published) some stuff, but he's already shared his entire current novel-in-progress, so doesn't have anything to put on the table. He also hasn't yet had time to read anything & prepare comment in advance.

Then there's a lady who's writing stuff, and shares it, and reads whatever's put on the table and prepares comments. This is great, but offering commentary to her on her stuff is an adversarial battle (she's a defender), and getting commentary from her implies that she will NOT leave a topic until she feels you've acquiesced to her comments and will make the changes she suggested as soon as you get home.

So it's an interesting dynamic, this group, but it makes me wonder why people who don't have time or inclination to write, or read and prepare commentary, are bothering to be in a writers' group.? All sorts of speculation available of course, but it's fascinating, innit?  I"m undecided as to whether to continue in this group. Dragging my sorry old ass out on a Wednesday evening on a ten-mile hike to sit and listen to chat, and get (and offer) a little bit of commentary, and WRANGLE over some of it, in both directions, might not be in the cards as a profitable exercise for me.

The novel seems to be back on the rails,

since I've decided that "the new piece" is in fact "draft 2" of the original piece, and work on the new one is in fact work on the original piece - it has settled my mind considerably, and stopped me from wondering whether I should be focusing on the first one and whether I was procrastinating on the first one by starting the second one. So maybe it's all one big chunk of writing and everything fits in somewhere and I really shouldn't be worried about "what" I"m working on, I should be concentrating on working, and on making that "work" (writing, the act of, the care and feeding of the process, etc.) the most important thing in my day. This is the toughest part of picking up this passion after perhaps 50 years of deferring it. It's a shift of mindset from "where do I fit writing into my day" to focusing on getting some writing done. Then I've devoted some time & energy - at the top of the day - to what's really important to me; whatever else happens in the day after that can be good, bad, or indifferent, but I can look at the day and say "I've gotten some important work done."

It has just occurred to me that "The Willing Detective" - my novel-in-progress

that I thought was "stuck" transitioning from Draft 1 to Draft 2, may well be making the jump into an entirely different piece. That "TWD" is in fact chunks of text to be harvested into the new piece, which promises to be significantly better organized.

At a certain age, I suppose we need to start expecting

to stop being shocked at the news that (another) old classmate - college, high school, whatever -  has died. Loudon Wainwright III's new album Older Than My Old Man Now contains a bunch of tracks more or less themed on the contemplation of getting on in years (he and I are nearly exactly contemporaries, missing by six weeks or so) including a track called "Somebody Else" (a collaboration with Chris Smither) which opens with "Somebody else I knew just died." Well in my case it's a guy from my high school class ('64), someone I knew somewhat but was never pals with or anything. What's got me writing about it is that I'm wondering how I feel not about poor Tom's demise so soon after retiring to his refuge in Vermont, but how do I feel about the guy who has more or less appointed himself the guardian of the class of '64, and operates under the assumption that we ALL want to know EVERYTHING about what's happening to EVERYONE in the class. Now this guy's a decent sort, he really is, heart of gold, yatta yatta. And he has a cohort of (female) minions (well, two, actually, so maybe a pretty small cohort) with whom he conspires to keep mailing lists up to date, and concoct reunions, etc. etc. And more power to them, really, but I foresee that the "Somebody else we knew just..." emails are going to accelerate as we start pushing 70 with shorter & shorter sticks. And I really don't want to email the guy and say "Hey Joe, I appreciate your thinking of me but..." because I don't want to be included out of news from 50 years ago. On the other hand, a LOT of those people didn't matter to me then, and they're not likely to matter more to me now simply because we've topped the crest of The Hill in parallel and are now progressing down it simultaneously. I had a great time in high school, had some good pals, smoked shitloads of cigarettes and burned tankfuls of gas roaming around doing nothing, got my share of nookie, etc. and have warm fuzzy feelings about some of the folks I shared that with. But it's going to get really tiresome hearing about the snuffles and farts of the rest of the 150-some-odd geriatrics as they begin to wheeze and waddle their way down the red carpet that leads out the door of the here & now into the what's next (if anything). I'm not annoyed or anything, just conflicted. More about this, no doubt, as the emails from Joe (or Fran or Pam) begin to become more frequent.

Reading & Writing Journal

I finished the Barth blurted about below (Every Third Thought). Now that it's over with, I didn't like it as much as I was liking (most of) it while I was reading it. It felt like Barth ran out of gas, or interest, about 90% of the way through, and he bailed out with a cheap trick. Don't get me wrong, as ever with John Barth, the writing is superb, finestkind, none better. He is one of the masters at stringing words together; but that - I am discovering - is only part of novelizing, (or fictioning, fictionalizing/ficting???) (And it might be the easy part) (and someone like Barth can probably do it in his sleep). But there's more to the text than the words, of course, and no one knows that better than a pre-eminent Postmodernist like JB. It feels to me ("it" being ETT) as if he has sucked me in by using the (obvious and explicit but probably untrustworthy) association of his narrator/protagonist with the author, led me up to a cliff that he makes me think he's going to jump off, and then sort of trips me at the brink, only to grasp me before I plummet; and then he doesn't (quite) pull me back to safety. (This is all analogy of course, there's no literal cliff at the end of Every Third Thought.) I'm sure that's more or less what he intended, but there's no resolution here, and I'm not enough of a Postmodernist (yet) to think that's satisfactory to the reader (at least not this reader). I'm annoyed with him, he's way better than that.

My own novel is in a phase a bit like buried kimchi. It's put aside temporarily to "rest" like bread dough, or ferment, whatever.  I hear Barkis and Mortie and Evangeline nagging my ass raw, but they know I haven't abandoned them, and I haven't. They know that in the first place I couldn't - I've never abandoned anything, however fragmentary (or stupid) that I've written; sooner or later pieces get picked up & added to or incorporated into something else.

This is a "percolating" time for Barkis. I've read that some writers need to put a piece aside for a while after completing a first draft (or most of a first draft) - taking a break so to speak, letting it ferment.

The key for me is not to get frustrated by it - I know it's not abandoned, and I know it'll get finished (this is something I did NOT know prior to participating in the fiction writing group). The most important thing for me right now is to be writing, not WHAT I'm working on, so I've got new stories cranking up - small ones, shorts, probably 3000 - 5000 words, to fill in and keep the juices flowing; "stringing the words together" is what keeps it alive for me - I'll get back to Barkis, both the one I've got well underway and a couple others that I have the outlines or notes for.

I've joined another fiction writing group as well - we're trying to figure out how to either merge them or at least get some cross-pollination going, but it's tough since almost everyone from my group (which has dwindled to three of us) can't possible do Wednesday nights two towns over, and almost everyone from the new group can't possibly do Saturday mornings. I have a feeling there's a great deal of inertial resistance behind those "can'ts" - the security & safety of a known group is something that lulls one, and makes it really tough to want to barge into another setting with a whole new bunch of dragons.

Barth 2.0

I've sort of rediscovered John Barth recently. Turns out it's more like "the new (though not necessarily 'improved' since there was nothing wrong with the 'old' John Barth) John Barth" or to be more up-to-date, John Barth 2.0 (maybe an even later dot-release). I was introduced to his work in about 1966 or '67, in my junior year of college; the first piece of his I read was The Sot Weed Factor, and it impressed me so much I moved immediately to Giles Goat-Boy, then The Floating Opera and The End of the Road. None of these latter impressed (or entertained) me as much as SWF however, and GGB, especially, got very tiresome. Opera and Road were downers. I took a stab at Lost in the Funhouse, and it was more enjoyable, but Letters and Tidewater Tales failed to engage me completely, and I drifted away from Barth, though retaining my huge admiration for his talent. All this over the first 20 of the last 40 years or so.

Somewhere (on the Lannan Foundation website) recently I stumbled across a video of a 'conversation' between JB and some professional "admirer of artists" so I watched it and was entertained and informed - considerably - about the personality of the now-80-something Barth, so I picked up a recent effort, Every Third Thought - A Novel in Five Seasons, and it's on my Kindle as current workout reading. I'd forgotten how discursive, digressive, and just plain prolix Barth can be, but he does it so well it isn't (at least in this case) as tiresome as it might threaten to be. I've recently taken a whack at David Foster Wallace (Pale King - a sample on the Kindle) and it's exhausting. But I'm delighted that Barth is back (or rather, he's never been away, I've just been wandering in sort of a Barth-starved wilderness of my own making, I guess). Every Third Thought is a glorious example of postmodern confusion (or integration) of narrator, author, and character. I'm a little over half-way through and will offer a full response when I'm done, but for now - if you're familiar with Barth then I recommend it. If you're new to Barth, I recommend Sot-Weed Factor first, it's a glorious entertainment and a highly accomplished work of deeply considered fiction.

Joseph Dobrian’s "Willie Wilden"

There’s much to admire about Joseph Dobrian’s Willie Wilden (Rex Imperator).  Dobrian is narratologically adept, sticking pretty closely to the “show, don’t tell” rubric, and handling potentially awkward POV issues cleverly by the “as told to someone else later” dialog approach. It works well. The prose fabric of Willie Wilden is tightly and attractively woven, neither too flat and pedestrian nor excessively stylized; Dobrian seems to believe (rightly in my opinion) that the most effective style for mainstream prose fiction is that which doesn’t call too much attention to itself. The protagonist, Roger Ballou, is deftly portrayed – we know nearly all we need to know about him as result of his words and actions, with a bit from others around him in the story. Again, well done, in my opinion, to eschew the “Roger Ballou was forty-something and six feet tall and had a receding hairline, yatta-yatta” school of character revelation.

     The rest of the cast is well-sketched, with the level of detail needed deftly selected so that we see enough about each character to form a reaction/response to him or her, but without delving into unnecessary detail or depth of character revelation. Most of the characters who are not Roger Ballou are cartoons or mechanicals anyway, but they’re not cardboard cutouts. My favorite character in the story is probably Effie Hoo, and Dobrian is deserving of particular kudos for handling the very difficult problem of dialect or accented speech quite well. We only need to know that Effie is Scottish, and have her speech peppered with  a consistent use of “ye” and we hear all of her dialogue in a nice – if a bit sanitized – burr.  Skipping the “Och”s and “wee laddies” and “d’ye ken tha’?” and other stage Scots conventions, Dobrian trusts his readers to fill in the details as they see fit. It does seem to me that the “bad guys” are one-trick ponies, and there might be a little excessively overt telegraphing to the reader of desired responses to Wandervogel and Bannister; they’re the only instances of cartoonish bordering on cardboard cutout. It might be lazy to mark out a guy as worthy of contempt by making him grossly obese, and it might be lazy to mark out a female college president as an obvious type by putting her in a sweatsuit in professional situations. It might be… I’m not 100% sure, but these two seemed like straw villains to me.

     I have to accept the plausibility of the plot on faith; never having functioned in or observed such an environment first hand I have no difficulty believing the bridge parties and small-circle socializing and the interactions portrayed here. It seems within the reasonable bounds of “willing suspension” anyway, and the plot points serve the narrative purpose adequately. The injection of outside influence in the form of Runs’ brother being who he was and having the knowledge he had to move the plot in a critical direction as it did might carry about it a whiff of deus ex machina, but I only say “might” and even if it does, it’s only an eyebrow-raiser, not a knee-slapper. It just tested the limits of “willing suspension.”

     The Lee Grossbaum plotline lacked purpose, it seems to me. It might have been gratuitous fantasizing; maybe not, but it didn’t, in my opinion, contribute significantly, and cutting it would not have hurt the story in the least.

     The ideas behind the plot and character are well-formed, reasonably presented, and – to my mind – mostly sound and rational. It does feel though that they are the novel's raison d'etre and that’s perfectly fine, but they don’t, in and of themselves, justify over 500 pages (but in my opinion, not much does, in fiction). There may be some pages here to be sacrificed to succinctness.

     There’s a bit too much fussy detail about too many things unimportant to the story in too many places; about a hundred pages too much, in my opinion, maybe more. This level of focus on prissy (to my mind) distinctions without differences among  things that are not particularly germane to the story could be trimmed down considerably.

     Finally, there’s the characterization of Roger Ballou. We see the workings of his mind, and Dobrian is quite masterful at portraying them (I especially like the demons). But the point is made early, and indeed it’s critical at the end, but in between the story could be improved considerably by removing a fair amount of the “Roger gets the fantods” narration.

     Campus novels* are an honored and admired tradition. I’m not sure Dobrian has joined the likes of Waugh, Amis, Barth, DeLillo, Chabon, and even Sayers and Dexter, mixing genres as they like to do, but Willie Wilden is more than a hanger-on at their student union. It’s an enjoyable, worthwhile book that’s well-crafted and tells an interesting story. There’s a bit too much of it to be as effective as it deserves to be; it could easily be judiciously edited down to a much more intense, affecting story.

* One thing struck me repeatedly – for a comedy, there’s starkly little humor, even so-called “dark” or “black” humor. It’s there, but I only remember actually laughing once (and I forget what it was that made me laugh).

This "taking writing seriously" stuff is a fascinating way to go.

So at a little over 200 "conventional" pages and something over 50,000 words, I am within a few more thousand words of declaring victory over Draft One, and have my battle plan in place for Draft Two (many VERY substantial changes in plot, but satisfyingly few in any characters). What's really scary (I may have mentioned this below/above) is that I have a beginning sketch and prologue already for the second book (same setting & characters, mostly), and a notional nod for a third. What's tough is sticking with the First though. But once I'm officially "working on" Draft Two, I plan to begin Book Two, so I'll be doing new write and rewrite in parallel. I suspect I'll go wacky, but I don't think I"ll burn out.

A dream brought her to mind, but this is not a Dream Journal post

The High School Sweetheart showed up in a dream snippet the other night - played, as usual by someone unknown to me, but who at least resembled the original. When I awoke, I only remembered that she had been in the piece of dream, not anything more about it. Then I remembered that another old HS chum (one of the two with whom I am still connected) apprised me a few months ago that this old HSS's son had died recently, aged 42, "unexpectedly." I felt so sad for her, and wished I could tell her so, and give her a hug, just for all we'd been to each other almost 50 years ago. But it's been almost 50 years, after all, and we haven't seen each other in all that lifetime, haven't been in any contact at all as far as I remember, so what would it mean? What would it carry? I'd like to think she'd be grateful that I'd remember her warmly (for I do) and kindly; of course for all I know she'd have to pause to remember who the hell I was. But I'm sad for her all the same.

Does anyone know how the "shuffle" feature on iPods works?

It amazes me how much music there is on my little teeny 16 gigabyte thing about the size of a large postage stamp - something over 3000 tracks. I don't even think about how they manage that any more, but the algorithms behind the shuffle logic seem really weird to me. You'd think (I'd think anyway) that with the same shuffle list going I should be able to not hear the same song twice in weeks worth of commuting (at about 90 minutes a day on the road). The thing seems to me to go in weird cycles though - lately it's been trying to convert me to some of the more obscure early tracks from Stan Rogers - when he was a coffee house folkie, and hadn't yet become the World's Champion Canadian. Some of the tracks are ok, but mostly I want to hear Barrett's Privateers and Northwest Passage and Mary Ellen Carter, etc. but it's tried to make me listen to "Picture of the Past" (or something like that) about sixteen times in the last four days.

 And Ramblin' Jack Elliott - now it's true that I have quite a number of RJ's tracks (mybe 40 or 50) but over the past couple of days every other damn track is Ramblin' Jack, and a lot of it's just not that entertaining. Why is my iPod trying to make me memorize everything The Carter Family ever recorded?

On the upside, the iPod seems to like Django Reinhardt & Stephane Grapelli as much as I do, so I can't complain there. If anyone really knows how that feature works I'd be interested to hear it.

In the event that anyone's reading this, and is the least bit interested,

The novel (working title is "The Willing Detective") is at about 80-85% first-draft-complete. I amaze myself. What's daunting, and has been part of a huge learning experience, is that stringing words together cleverly is such a small part of writing a sustained work of fiction. Well maybe not "such a small part" it's clearly sine qua non but it's so far from what there is to it. I'm eager to finish the first draft because 1) I'm getting a tad bit bored with the process, and 2) I want to get started on the next one in a more considered, planned fashion and see if it's less daunting that way. I also want to see what it's like to be working on two phases of two pieces at the same time. I could get used to this.

Dream Journal 1/7/12

Another product of a tag-end of sleep. I was driving an old-time VW beetle. I can't say what year for sure, but it was white, and I did own a white one, a '62 or '64 or so, I think. Anyway, I was driving across a very long bridge; then it was snowing like hell, and then there was snow in the road up to your yayas. The bug performed well, even unto dodging around other vehicles abandoned in the right-of-way, necessitating detouring into yards-deep snowbanks. How the little beetle did it I have no idea, must have been my superior driving skill. Then it got bogged down trying to make it around a large piece of non-automobile machinery in the middle, after passing through a thoroughly red light at an intersection (brakes failed to stop it, fortunately the roadway through the intersection was snow-free and there was no visible traffic for miles in any direction.)

Then woke up.

Dream Journal 12/7/11

It was raining out, and I'd just come back from the Wally-the-dog's 0230/0315/or-so pee call, and crawled back for the last few minutes of shut-eye. I've noticed lately that these little tag-ends of sleep after the dog call seem to produce some odd snippets of dreams, but nothing I've been able to track down for recording purposes. This morning though, I guess the rain triggered some dream artifacts, so it was raining in the dream, and I was at someone else's house (dreams for me always seem to take place elsewhere, often at a house that is not my "real waking life" house, but that sometimes is "supposed" to be, in the context of the dream. In this case it was supposed to be someone else's house, and I know the person whose house it was supposed to be, and I know their house too, and this was NOT it, by any stretch. But I was in their bathroom, and it was messy, and the rain was coming in, and the water level on the floor was rising a bit more quickly than was comfortable, and then I woke up.

A lot of my dreams lately are concerned with water being where it shouldn't be. Wonder what that means? Wonder if dreams really do mean anything?

Well Happy Birthday to George (yesterday, the 23rd)

He'd have turned 100 yesterday, so it's a pretty good bet that even if he hadn't died all those years ago, he'd be dead by now anyway. I'm not sure what that means. Children of parents who died young deal with strange thoughts the rest of their lives, I guess. Like "When my old man was my age he'd been dead for nine years." I turn 65 today. It was not all that long ago that I considered the event very unlikely. Maybe even undesirable. But today I'm delighted, given the alternatives, and I have plans for the next 20 (or ten, or thirty, whatever) years; I need to cram my life's work into them, and I consider that I need to get all of my life's work into them, and that life's work would not have ended at 65 or 66 or whenever I choose to "retire" - which really only means stopping the work I don't care about but do for money, and taking up the work I do care about but was unlikely to have made a living at. What if it turns out that I'm really good at it and could have made a living at it? That has occurred to me more than once, and I've allayed any fear of such by deciding that if I had given it a shot 30-odd years ago, and had succeeded, I'd probably be burned out by now and  - like Bronco Bill in Don McLean's song - have nothing left to say. Vonnegut claimed - at a point before he'd actually stopped writing - that he had said everything he had to say and didn't really have any more books in him. But what else could he have done, I guess? So my philosophy now is from Rabbi Ben Ezra, via Robert Browning: "grow old along with me, the best is yet to be."

I bought some new old music the other night

and this morning I've been listening to Bill Morrissey's very early eponymous album, which has - for my money - most of his best work, and some Stan Rogers, (From Fresh Water and Home in Halifax). I haven't listened to much of these guys for quite a while, other than when they turn up on the iPod Shuffle. Dance The Grizzly Bear and The Idiot and The Mary Ellen Carter are among the niftiest songs written in the last half of the previous century (and they're not even these guys' best stuff!)

Some time ago, following the advice of Raymond Chandler

(one of the best writers of popular fiction ever, IMO - in any Top Ten list I'd compile whether "genre" writers in general or any other category), who once said (it's alleged) that if you're stuck in a story, have a guy with a gun enter the room (or words to that effect). So some time ago, having nothing going on with my neverending saga of "not writing" I started out a nice fresh doc file with "A guy with a gun came into the room." (OWTTE). It ended up being a wee poem, and I liked it (I tend to like my own work quite often). Shortly thereafter, the wee poem grew legs (a girl's legs, specifically) and became the beginnings of a short story. I now find myself with a novel growing before my eyes. The interesting thing I've learned is that once you get past whatever wordcount has been your barrier (in my case about 2500 words, tops) you find out what's been daunting you to date: there's so much to figure out about the damned story. Every time I crank out 1000 or 1500 words to resolve some unexplained gotcha or fill in backstory or clarify (or further obscure) the MacGuffin - it leads to lots more questions and more stuff that needs to be clarified (or obscured). A little like life, in that way, I guess. But I really like being able to say (to myself if no one else, at this point) "I'm working on a novel.."

An odd thought struck me this morning, while listening to a Bill Morrissey track

on my iPod, while driving to work ("Just Before We Lost The War") - something made me wonder whether Morrissey had died. I can't think of any reason why I'd have wondered that; but I haven't been listening to much news lately other than major headlines on the All Classical station (99.5 All Classical) so ...

So. So for some reason it was still in my mind when I got to work and got the laptop all connected up, so I browsed Wikipedia - mostly to see what they had to say about Morrissey, and WHAM there it was, poor guy died last month (July 23, 2011 to be exact, in some backwater-sounding place in Georgia). He was 59, and died of heart disease (it says). A sad but very talented man, Bill Morrissey. I liked his music very much; saw him at the Stone Church in Newmarket, NH a few years ago. He was not in top form, but was game & ready to give it a go. Came out on stage and the first words out of his mouth were "I'm home!" He forgot some of the words to "Barstow" and he seemed more agitated than necessary when his pal Cormac McCarthy (not the writer, the other one) was a bit delayed in joining him onstage. His set was brief, but he ended with a nice rendition of "Don't Think Twice."

Summer Sunday afternoons mean

I get to cut the grass. I say "get to" without irony, it is a reward and a rewarding activity for me. We have enough land in grass to justify a riding mower and I'm enough of a peasant dipshit to like the fact that ours is configured to look like a tractor. I enjoy driving tractors, have since I was 14 and worked for Harold Turner and Eddie Wheeler back in North Reading. I also enjoy fantasizing to myself that I'm actually engaged in some sort of physical labor that links me to my ancestors (one G-Granddad a lumberjack in Quebec, another an iron puddler back in Sheffield and Glasgow). No farmers there but something makes me think they weren't all that far separated from their own G-Granddads who probably migrated to the cities from their own ancestral farms.

And the tractor has a cup holder just right for a cold Long Trail Double-Bag Ale.

Sometimes my iPod knocks me out.

As I think I've mentioned, I've reinvented my commute from Hampstead to Nashua & vice-versa by eschewing news and commentary a la NPR and have plugged in to 'GBH's all classical outlet (which used to be WCRB and I guess it still is only now it's public radio), and my iPod, which, though it's teeny, has a capacity of 16 gigabytes which means I have pretty much my entire music collection on it and room for another year's worth of discoveries, etc.

SO anyway I play it on shuffle, and sometimes really nifty stuff comes up (and sometimes something comes up that just puzzles me entirely) and sometimes it just lands on a gem.

This morning's gem was from a compilation album called "Benny Goodman-1935-1936 - Rare Recordings" and featured The King of Swing, plus Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, and Gene Krupa playing "My Melancholy Baby" - the solo breaks were amazing. Another smile-inducer (BG often makes me smile)