THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE HUCKLEBERRY

The rewritten "All About Jane" has already been rejected by a magazine called Chestnut Review which collected a fat $5 fee for considering it. They took all of 5 days to consider it. Fair to say I get rejected a lot. Most writers do unless they have huge name recognition, but 5 days and $5? Makes me think it could be a scam. Easy... form a magazine, put it into Poets & Writers Magazine and charge a $5 reading fee. Publish the magazine online for very low cost and make at least pocket money rather than lose money as I did publishing George & Mertie's Place. Most magazines these days use Submittable to handle mss and Submittable gets $3 to handle a ms. Fair enough, but $5? I'm tearing up my file card for that market. Too suspicious. 

by rob mulally @unsplash

Good news on the other hand. One of my poems has been accepted by current Washington State Poet Laureate Claudia Castro Luna. It appears on the map. You will find the poem by clicking on the red button about 2/3 of the way on Interstate 90 from Spokane to Seattle. A very handy blip on I-90 occurs just below the red dot. The dot represents Huckleberry Mountain in the North Cascades whose name is in the title of my poem "Group Encounter at Huckleberry Mountain".

SMILING LIKE A ROBOT BEATNIK

Seven days since I wrote that my writing days might be over. In those seven days, I've rewritten one story and added three new stories that I believe may be the sort of stories that get published. How it came about?

I was rewriting a tale now called "All About Jane" for the who-knows-how-many times since I first scribbled it long hand on college lined paper when I was struggling in graduate school at Southern Illinois University. That would be 53-some years ago. 

The plot was influenced very much by the symbolic young man I was at the time. It concerned a high school boy who could not bring himself to have sex with a willing wheelchair bound, very intelligent high school girl. She represented the world he was having trouble accepting because it was such an ugly world, but they eventually had sex and all was well with the world afterward. 

Every time I rewrote it, I cleaned up the language [not sexual language], a too florid style. Eventually I changed it so they don't have sex, and the boy much later in life looks back at what he learned. Still not satisfied, this last time I changed the final line of the tale and brought the story into the way I look at us robots these days, and, voila, there it was—finished? Then I wrote three more stories from a robot's pov. 

BEATNIKING THROUGH LIFE WHILE RIDING THE MAX

FB tells me I haven't written in this writer's blog lately, but they always tell me that one or two days after my most recent entry. I put in a good day's work this afternoon on Memoir Of A Nobody. Spent several hours on no more than three paragraphs, writing and rewriting, fine tuning, trying to get the past emotions down just right.

My current emotions are running hot then cold the past two days. Yesterday, I took the Max into Portland, felt recognition of some sort for all my life's work was very near. Everything I've written has been brilliant... then this morning I awake filled with doubt and self-loathing, remembering all the people I've alienated, imagining how no one will come to my funeral. Of course not. I'm not going to have a funeral, no showing, nothing. Wife and I have both decided on how the end of our lives will be without fanfare—drop dead and off to the crematory. 

SILENT BOOMER BEATNIK'S LAST HURRAY................MAYBE

Ninety-nine people recently looked in. Thank you. Three of my haiku may be found on the website Better Than Starbucks. They also appear in a hard copy edition that can be found here.
 
I haven't written anything for days. I'm tired a lot. The memoir languishes. Poetry is hiding out in my synaptic self somewhere beyond my prefrontal cortex. I'm not certain, but I fear my writing days may be over. I have ideas but not energy to get to work. Only time will tell. I'm now reading The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. I took a course in Chaucer as an undergraduate and read the work in its original Middle English. 

My bathroom reading is Ray Carver's Will You Please Be Quiet Please. I met him once in a coffee shop at Eastern Washington University. When I asked him where his stories came from, he replied, "I don't know. I just hope they keep coming."