COULD THIS OLD BEATNICK GO UNDER THE CYBERKNIFE?

The odds shifted in favor of my getting something published by someone other than myself before I die. In our local paper a feature length article appeared about the CyberKnife at PeaceHealth our local hospital. It displays good success at destroying troublesome and moderately aggressive prostate

cancers with little to no side effects. No remissions reported in three years of use. I'm always happy to throw my lot in with science and technology. Well damn, I just realized on rereading that prostate cancers with highly aggressive natures aren't mentioned. Ah, I'll just stay positive until the biopsy results come in on the 25th.

On the writing side of the ledger, I finished the longer than expected rewrite of my story "Haunted By Henry Miller". The story line remains roughly the same but the tone is altered. In the rewrite before this one, I tried to eliminate names for the characters, referring to them by what they did in life or by their age. You'd read a sentence that began "the young teaching assistant". I was going for an anonymity that I thought intensified the cruelty of the main character, but that strategy has changed. For the better I hope. I learned something about me and writing because of the rewrite. I tend to write characters most like me as unsympathetic and cruel. So much for childhood baggage. Now it's back to the rewrite of The Porn Writer.    

Another major change is in the title of another novel that I just sent out to an agent in Seattle. The novel has passed through several title alterations. It's gone from Children of God, to The Road To Difference to Angie's Choice. Now it's become A Desperate Decision. I place some emphasis on the effectiveness of titles. The Seattle agent is the first agent I've mentioned the bucket list strategy to. Let's see how that plays out. If at all.

BLOGGING BEAT BOOMER BEATS HEAD AGAINST WALL... AGAIN!

The query for Angie's Choice I sent by mail came back today, the one that reminded me of how much work it took to send off a query in the old days. I sent it off to the Zoe Pagnamenta agency. She answered within two weeks. NO! I had high hopes for it because of the methodology of the query. Don't know why printing out and mailing my query and sample felt more hopeful. Emotions are mysterious things even though they command our every deed and thought. I need to push the sci fi novel, Ghoul World, more forcefully. I let it languish, but it's a very interesting idea that ought to get at least a moment's attention somewhere.

On a positive note, yesterday, this writer's blog which also goes to a page I manage on Facebook , The Silent Boomer, received 221 hits. People are watching to see what might happen to me in my quest to "get someone other than myself to publish a novel I've written." Or "to produce a movie I've written."  Thanks to all who follow my journey. Many days now, I think it's time to fold up the writer's table and leave the dusty old bazaar to other scribes much younger than myself.

One very interesting thing about writing a movie script. The length of a 90 minute film takes from 90 to 120 pages. I've discovered that my elderly memory is able to keep track of 120 pages more easily than it tracks a plot and subplots through 400 to 500 pages of ms. I've already got several story lines in mind for films that I can't share because they are quite interesting. On my death bed, I'll tell all. 

SILENT BEATNIK BOOMER BANGS ALONG ON ALL THREE CYLINDERS

Find Photo Source Here

Currently reading The Moral Animal by Robert Wright for a second time while plowing ahead on my untitled sci fi screenplay. Nearly finished with first draft, I'm enjoying the process a great deal, and, I already have another idea for a film script. This is an odd trajectory because it's even harder to find an agent for a film script than a novel. 

A couple of days ago, I sent off a query for my novel, Angie's Choice, to a New York agency. But the interesting thing was how I felt about the query process since it was an old fashioned agency and wanted a hard copy query in the U.S. mail service. As I took out the two pages of auto bio and 20 pages of manuscript and tapped them on the desk to align their edges, I experienced a bodily sensation that returned me to the years when all queries and manuscripts were sent through the U.S. mail. I recalled putting together and sending out whole manuscripts, boxed up and carried to the local post office. I felt connected to all the past writers of the world, through all the most recent centuries of the world when manuscripts were ink on paper. 

My children, now all grown up beings in the world, suggested I ought to begin to make these "Silent Boomer" blog entries as videos. They say that many people have found multitudinous followers by doing blogs as video presentations. My oldest boy says that it seems the more awkward and unprofessional the video is, the better followers seem to like them. I'm intrigued and think about it from time to time. I ask myself if that would really help me to achieve the one item on my bucket list: to get someone other than myself to publish one of my novels before I kick it. 

Addendum: Or film script.

SILENT BOOMER EXCHANGES SPAGHETTI FOR TURKEY

Have been doing nothing for the last several days except play games and eat because it was turkey day for those who aren't vegans and spaghetti day for those of us who are, and Mertie and I had family over from Spokane and down from Seattle to feed and partly house. Looking forward to tomorrow and return to sci-fi script I began two [?] weeks past. But I also had the emotional energy for a novel enter my brain tonight and perk up my synapses. If it's still with me tomorrow, I might try to type down the beginning scene for it. It would open with a half-ass suicide attempt and continue from there, backwards and forward in time... maybe. Today, I sent out two queries for my novel The Man In the Mirror and a question about my novel Angie's Choice to a small film company, wondering if they'd like to read it with a movie in mind. Hope everyone had an enjoyable and dietary Thanksgiving. Jeez, we ate so many bagels and pieces of pie with ice cream made with almond milk that our dietary regime blew South with the wind. Current reading is Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask, basically a confessional novel about his homosexuality in the 1940s and 1950s.

NOT BEATNICKING OFF. DONE.

I stole this picture here:

Third rewrite is done, Programming Frank Singletary. Finished yesterday morning then drove into Portland to attend the monthly lunch with Humanist of Greater Portland men. All old timers, we talked about the various ways to maintain erections after prostate removal. Laughing, we said we were relieved no younger members were at the lunch. They'd be traumatized. 

I haven't mentioned that my novel, Angie's Choice, was rejected for publication in a contest I entered. It was 9 1/2 months in process. 

This morning I've tried to do some poetry rewriting to put another poetry ms. together. A practice run for self-publishing on Amazon, but I wasn't inspired. My heart wasn't in it. I must get busy on rewrite of Ghoul World. Think I'll take a course in screenplay writing at Northwest Film Center so I can turn the novel into a screen play too. It still needs work, I'm sure. Tighten up the tension.  

This morning I also gave myself permission to take it easy for a month or a couple of weeks, kick back and read. Can't seem to do it. Think I fear my mental powers further declining.

BEAT ME DADDY 8 TIMES TO THE HEAD

Find photo here:

AAAAARG! I'm still on rewrite of Programming Frank Singletary. Who would of thought it would take so long when I began? I'm wondering if my unconscious is heeding my oft spoken wish about writing something beautiful? Of course, a graphically precise novel about dysfunctional relationships in which things very close to rape happen is not the sort of novel that most people would call "beautiful". Still, if it's writ true enough, it might have a "truth is beauty" of its own. The past week has been terrible at times. I've nearly regressed mentally to the heavy drinking past when I'd experience weeks of anguish, thinking everything I wrote was garbage. I had days, back then, when I could not bear to read my own work without twisting in the wind. Everything I wrote, I was convinced, was garbage. However, currently, as I slave away at one or two paragraphs for a couple of hours, and I see they are becoming more closely related to reality as I know it...I continually see improvement. Only problem, now, is will I be able to rewrite my entire cannon of novels before I die. I awoke in the middle of the night last night with the awful knowledge that the novel, Ghoul World, I've put so much hope into is badly flawed. It's set too far into the future, but if I bring it toward the now, then many other problems present themselves. I already know I must improve the beginning or Angie's Choice. Oh, woe, is me—the plight of the aging novelist.

THINKING LIKE A WRITER ABOUT THREE NOVELS

I'm making changes. I hate changes. I don't want to do the work. I want agents to flock to my novels as written. After all, they're completed. Why do I need to do more work? Probably because I see weaknesses myself. I've decided two of my novels need better starts: Angie's Choice & Ghoul World. Angie's Choice once had an agent, but Ruth Cantor couldn't place it. She sent it to the very largest and best publishing houses. She liked it. It's first and second chapters are used to introduce characters. I've decided to get to the moment when Angie and her husband are taken as hostages more quickly. In a flashback, I'll put the info in later. I see the movie scenes.

I've already made an improving change in Ghoul World, dropping completely Chapter 1. Fortunately, it could be dropped with no other changes necessary. Instead, I'm starting it at what was Chapter 2 when my protagonist, Charley Manning comes into view, sitting at a McDaniel's eating a couple of McNugguts, waiting for a client. As a movie, I'd start in either one of two other locations. Action scenes. I intend to rewrite this one more time for more style changes if someone doesn't pick it up sooner. Meanwhile, so I don't feel as if I'm doing nothing toward publication, I'm sending Ghoul World around with the one major alteration. 

Immediately, because it'll go faster, The Porn Writer is already getting a third rewrite to make every line as simple and forceful as I can make them. It's structure is fine. I just want to take all the fancy writing out of it. This will go fast while I send Ghoul World around. I get lots of erections, working on it. Let us celebrate the miraculous powers of the creative imagination. It can create an erection as easily as it creates god!

BEATNIKING AROUND FOR LAUGHS

Man Preparing To Leap From A Mirror

September was an interesting month. Can report I've now finished entirely with the final, the polishing, rewrite of The Man In the Mirror and wrote a plot outline for it too. It's ready to be sent around. Also, just this month entered Angie's Choice, in two literary contests. Goodbye 50 bucks! I don't have much hope for it in contests since it's closer to commercial writing and less like workshop writing. My progress was like that for me with my MFA when I learned how to write a publishable poem, and, sure enough, some of my poems began to find markets. Did I get better or did I only learn how to please editors who looked for poetry like they wrote and, of course, would think was good poetry? From my own experience with editing, editing is one way to learn about where you rank among poets in your own mind. Also, last month, as reported elsewhere, Toni Partington, Christopher Luna,  Eileen Elliott and I were featured readers at the Angst Gallery celebration for 100,000 Poets For Change/William Stafford Centennial.   A combined affair. September was a busy month.

THIS BEATNIK'S WEDDING TOAST WAS A SUCCESS. LAUGHTER AND TEARS.

USS Hornet a WWII vessel

Sorry, folks, there was my daughter's wedding, but now I'm back with an intention to push rapidly through to the completion of the Manning novel. Things are starting to round out toward a satisfying if disturbing finish. Finish could still be a year away, but I'm over some sort of mental hump for the time being and seeing my way through to completion. Also, the final dusting off of The Man In the Mirror is pretty far done now. I'll soon have two completed novels to send around: it and Angie's Choice. Angie's Choice has had an agent in the past, and I see it as a pretty successful adventure novel with a potential for a motion picture much like the movie called The Desperate Hours. Frank Sinatra was the lead as a bad guy in the 1955 release of that film that came out as I prepared to head off to the Navy at age 17. Nothing much else to add at this time, but felt I had to put something here in a vain attempt to keep a regular offering of blog entries. Supposedly every other day. Not. 

ANXIETY'S A BEAT NAMED THE SILENT BOOMER

Find picture source here:

I'm learning constantly the intricacies of writing a detective novel, specially one set 250 years in the future. Today, I added another piece of complexity to Manning, details about Beaunita and her knowledge (or lack of it) and how that affects her interactions with Charley Manning and how his knowledge of the case will eventually be connected to the new details in Beaunita's own knowledge (or lack of it) about the case. Obviously, the more complex the novel the more risk of inconsistency and implausibility. The anxiety I feel about the difficulty of complex plotting at my age sometimes nearly causes me, like Ken Kesey did, to quit writing. I'll feel all those details out there in space and the impossibility of me remembering them all. Whew!

The failure to recall minute details at my age certainly increases the risk of writing a major inconsistency into the tale. For one example, I forgot that a sinister character, during an encounter, removed one of Manning's molars while Manning was drugged into unconsciousness. It was a warning about future dental work without anesthesia. I recalled the meeting as several things did happen in it, but I forgot the tooth removal detail as part of that meeting. Not central to the plot, it's a detail not to be forgotten since Manning's physical status means the hole in his gum won't ever heal. He'll require a Wayland Patch.

Sadly, the Ooligan Press query about my novel ANGIE'S CHOICE fell through. They decided that "your work does not fit our present needs". However two other smaller pieces having been published already this year brightens me considerably.

THE BEATEST SILENT BOOMER GETS LOST IN HIS REFLECTIONS

klipschutz

The personality trait about myself hardest to accept is that I'm a writer. Came through to me two days ago when a publisher I queried asked to look at Angie's Choice and also asked for "intended audience, marketing ideas for your work". These days the writer not only writes but he must market his work. Panic! I never took a course in marketing, have no talent for selling myself or the book I've written. The thought of selling myself terrifies me. 

my hidden nature

I don't know marketing from grocery shopping or networking from fishnet hosiery. I've been writing about my life and the reality it exists in since high school with absolutely no financial success or major critical acclaim. If I'm not writing a poem or short story, I've been at work on a novel, most of those unfinished. Those times when I'm not working on creative stuff, I'm pounding away at internet debates with strangers, letters to the editor, emails to friends and family, and essays or journaling, now blogging or Facebooking—thousands and thousands of pieces of my reality all over the place—plus those scholarly term papers when I was in school. Several decades ago I got tired of carrying them around and found a home for them in a dirty green dumpster. Could it be, I ask myself, that I'm trying to disprove the idea that if a writer sticks with it, he'll make it. "Make it" itself is loaded with ambivalence and ambiguity. 

Here's the problem in a nutshell: What is it about a human nature that it must have someone other than itself approve of what it's doing before the value of the doing becomes evident to him or her? At the top, I've included a photo of klipschutz, a poet/songwriter who understands the art of presenting the self. His work is pretty damn good also. Take a look at it. We published him long ago in a microzine wife and I published and edited: George & Mertie's Place.

SILENT COMPLETES THE LAST REWRITE OF ANGIE'S CHOICE

A happy note! Wife Mertie did the final reread of Angie's Choice today. Five last chapters and only about six errors found. I will not look at it again, except to send it around to agents and directly to publishers. I culled through the 2013 Writer's Market and built a huge list of possible publishers. More of the kind of work that it would be nice to have an agent do for me as Agent Ruth Cantor once did for me back in the 1980s. 

Today I went into Portland to the Humanists of Greater Portland Sunday meeting. Then took an hour walk in downtown Portland and realized, as I enjoyed my walk, that under my original plan (to get someone other than myself to publish a book of mine) there lies another plan—to make enough money from one or the other of my novels to buy a modest condo in Portland. Well ... I'm 76 now and might just as well dream big as small. Eh? Of course the book I'm pinning my hopes on is Manning (working title). Also in the wings for complete revision is my most serious novel, Delinquent Lives. The Porno Writer could be a scorcher if I can write a final polished draft of it. It's done, but needs polishing. I think there's work enough ahead to carry me to the crematory but into a Portland condo...?

REPORT FROM THE SILENT GENERATION'S BEATEST BOOMER

Picture: Daniel Selmeczi/Steve Bloom / Rex Features

My goal remains to get someone other than myself to publish a book of mine before I drop dead. Currently I'm working on three novels simultaneously. Mertie is making a final reread of Angie's Choice, and with each chapter she finishes, I correct errors she's spotted in that novel. She's only finding one to three minor errors every two chapters. I'm very grateful that she's doing it. When I send out the first chapter or first 20 pages (whatever an agent or publisher requires), I have been very certain that technically it's as correct as it can be. I read sections of it every once in awhile, and I KNOW the writing is solid, and I think there's sufficient suspense to keep an average reader interested. Now, it's like fishing. Have I got the right lure for the pilot fish I'm trying to catch? 

Every day or so, I sit down and slowly transfer the first novel I ever wrote—The Man In the Mirror—a page at a time, typing it into an editable file on my computer. Of course, the new novel, working title Manning, is my full time writing gig. Progress is steady. Today, on my daily walk, I came up with several more plot elements for Manning that will add to its suspense and, I hope, interesting reading for the reader. I can see several chapters into the future. I always carry a small notebook in my back pocket to write down my thoughts. Lately, I've also written some brief reviews on Amazon for the works of living writers I know and appreciate. The walks are getting colder now, and I'm stepping out pretty briskly, enjoying the trees, the clouds and the neighborhoods I pass through. 

Sidenote: on the very northern margin of my neighborhood walks from our condo, I pass through a very upscale neighborhood. Two homes of the wealthy sported political signs. One home had my favorites as their favorites. The other was not as intelligent.

SILENT BOOMER BOOMING ALONG QUITE NICELY

I've been writing non-stop on the new novel. I pull my smoking keyboard to the side of the road in late afternoon to take my hour walk...in time, also, to do my cooking chores unless it's a morning crock pot preparation. I'm continually asking my working wife to have pity on the poor writer and his creative burden. When I awake, I don't even want to take time to eat or shave. I've completed 27 pages, but I see far ahead into the many possible ways this book can go. I continually adjust the characters and plot roots. One flesh and blood character has turned into a robot. I continually go over the same pages to adjust for my changing visions. The place and circumstances of the novel are so real to me I find myself putting too much detail in, and I want to keep the reader hoping along. It's best to salt the action with details rather than pour them over it. I've also written two possible openings or one may follow the other. 

It's all pretty exciting. Angie's Choice felt exciting years ago when I wrote it. Speaking of Angie's Choice, another agent rejection came in: 

Hi, George,
Thank you for your query. While your project certainly has merit, I'm going to pass. As I'm sure you know, it's important that your agent be totally excited by/committed to/passionate about your project, and I'm afraid that just didn't happen here. But opinions vary considerably in this business, and mine is just one. I'm sure you'll find others who feel differently. I hope so! I wish you the very best in your search for representation. 

Warm regards, Laney Katz Becker, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin

Agents are always kind. It could be worse, you know? They could send a photo of an agent gagging on the novel. On the more positive side, I've been asked to read a poem at the Peace and Justice Action Fair in Vancouver on the 7th of September, and another poem of mine will be hung with a piece of someone else's art at the Gallery360 Art Meets Literature Show. Theme was inspiration. Another poem or two may soon find a home, and it sounds as if someone will write a feature article about this poet for the Vancouver Vector. If that happens as expected, I'll include more details later...names and etcetera. You can always find my work at Amazon or Author House if you've a mind to. Thanks for reading.

DETECTIVE CHARLEY MANNING COMES ALIVE

Yesterday at Torque, drinking skinny hazelnut latte, I was anticipating next issue of Vancouver Vector, thinking 'bout what happens next in my campaign to get someone other than myself to publish one of my already completed novels.

Day before that sent query letters to agents for Angie's Choice. Plan two queries to publishers. Other than that, what next?

My wife again put her two cents in, praising The Man In The Mirror—my first novel—as interesting and suspenseful, and her being a mystery reader, I'm tending to heed her words. However, getting that novel into file form's daunting. Typewritten ms is yellowed and ink has seeped into the paper, blurring the letters. Optical character recognition (OCR) software doesn't work. I've tried my own OCR and had Office Max try theirs. Checked into a typing service. Nine-hundred bucks to type the ms into editable files. I hear "edible" when my interior monologue says "editable". Does that mean I think that if I put that much money into editable files we won't be able to afford edible goods? 

I tell you...the new novel, the Detective Charley Manning tale, is rolling along quite nicely and, methinks, it's stolen my heart away. I was going to reveal the current opening paragraphs, but I'm suddenly experiencing proprietary twinges toward the ideas that drive the book. I smell publishing success in ways I've never in my long and harried writing life experienced it.

ANGIE'S CHOICE COMPLETED. ARKANSAS CHARLEY BEGINS???

Angie's Choice final rewrite done. Oh happy day! Gonna have my ever-reading wife peruse Chapter One to approve my additions to the dinner conversation. If I can catch her lively interest I know I'm good to go. Next decision? Got three novels to rewrite, specifically, Delinquent Lives, perhaps the more serious novel, or the one about the failed author turned porno writer who discovers that his fantasies direct his choices of women in real life, or I could continue the new novel I began yesterday which really excites me. Humn? Follow the excitement or do the serious novel? The new novel begins as per below:

Oh happy day!

"Arkansas Charley dragged smoke from a Pall Mall deeply into his lungs and peered down at the telltale wisp of smoke that leaked between the second and third buttons of his wrinkled Paisley shirt. Shaking his head morosely, he plucked two wrinkled tidbits of flesh from his left wrist where the metal watch band had gouged under the skin. Carefully, he balanced the tiny fragments of himself on the shaky tip of his middle finger and held them to the sunlight that streamed remorselessly through McDonald’s front window. To someone watching, Charley appeared to be giving a finger to the sun.

"The fleshy remains of himself on his finger tip were another sign of the inevitable decline all flesh was heir to. Down into the bone of himself, Charley knew and accepted that in a decade or so, give or take a couple of years, he would be nothing but a hank of hair and a piece of bone. Like all of animalkind, except for those beasts slaughtered young and rendered up for the tables of the globe, he would grow steadily worse until his decaying body could no longer support the thoughts and feelings, the actions that all humans called life. For now, he sighed to himself, he would have to give up wearing watches."

POST PARTUM HURRAH...almost

I do affirm and attest that yesterday, at or around the time of 14:30 Pacific Time (daylight savings) said author, George T. Thomas, heretofore known as The Silent Boomer, in a Starbucks beside Mill Plain Blvd. in the City of Vancouver in the State of Washington did complete, wrap up and, for all intents and purposes, put the quietus to a final rewrite of his novel, Angie's Choice, when said author completed work on said book's final chapter, Chapter Twenty-Two. Said author also reported extreme relief and attacks of "what do I do now?" Further, said author reported he is "put out" that due to certain past incidences of EEM (i.e. extreme exuberation malfunction) he may no longer pop a champagne cork and celebrate as he once did in the distant days of his inglorious past.

It should be noted that said author also reports a contradiction, in that said novel, though finished, is not finished? Said author said he may invent an entirely new discussion in Chapter One of Angie's Choice in which the two couples talk about "Boomer stuff" rather than have a conversation about old time radio advertizing jingles as is now the case in said novel, he said. The said author further stipulates he believes the reader must be drawn closer to his four characters (Angie and Curtis Davis and Larry and Marcia Chadwick) as they sit chatting around a table cloth covered table at a restaurant dinner, so that said reader will be drawn to follow said couples deeper into the novel and care more about the horrific things that happen to said couples when they become the said hostages of said two paramilitary killers are even more affecting, he said. The author further said, with a shrug of his shoulders and a sad look on his features that he's having fourth thoughts about the book's title and the said use of the word "said", he said in my article about his said project.

report submitted by Sad Sadie Said, Turkish folk singer

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE SUCCUMBS TO A SILENT'S SKILLS

After five grueling hours today the penultimate chapter of Angie's Choice succumbed to a rewrite.

"Bent at the waist, her hands pressed against the deeply creviced, sticky bark of a Ponderosa, Angie looked down at her feet and gasped for air. Her legs wobbled unsteadily beneath her. For the moment, she could think of nothing but the painful sensation of her laboring lungs and the burning rip of air dragged into her windpipe. After a time, as her breathing came easier, she heard both her captors also gasping for breath. She knew she could run no farther. 

"She'd lost a shoe miles back and reached down to feel the bottom of her bare foot, but its skin was so numb she couldn't tell what the damage was. Jake had been shoving and dragging Angie along for hours through the darkness, both stumbling over rocky ground and carpets of pine needles, scrambling up hills and sliding down steeper slopes. Twice, they splashed ankle-deep through cold, rushing streams. Occasionally, from the vantage of higher elevations, they caught the gleam of flashlights flickering between trees. A helicopter had thumped its way overhead a couple of times, but it’s searchlight couldn’t penetrate the thick forest canopy shielding their movements. Lately they’d heard hounds baying in the distance. Once or twice, a human voice shouted loudly enough to be heard."

Writing at my age is filled with difficulties. For the scene I worked on today with three characters on the run in a forest, I had to keep going back to remember who was sitting down or leaning against a tree or on his or her feet. Those are continuity details important to the veracity of a scene. An old writer, in a hurry as I was this morning, can make distracting errors if his inner eye forgets those details. A man is on his feet who just a moment before was lying on his back. "When did he get to his feet," the reader will ask, and who can blame her?

IT'S A GOOD NEWS MONDAY!

Torque Coffee, tea on a mon(sun)day, bay door thrown up to let Kerouac sunbeams fly and flies in. Framed in bay door of never-ending same dimension—a Hilton's tan plainness on a square of canvass, hint of blue sky and white clouds thin as harem pantaloons in the left corner of a Rene Magritte kind-of painting. Happiness of vision!

YESTERDAY, rewriting at Black Rock Coffee, I was tired in the afternoon (aged man two o'clock nap). Nothing came of the pitiful attempt except drowsiness and drooping spirit...but...

LAST EVE, AN EMAIL: 
George:
Can we use the article you sent recently on 50plusnorthwest.com?  We will include a link to your website.
Greg Johnson
50plusnorthwest

Of course you can, I chirped. Of course, gladly, happily, publish my pathetic, funny essay.... Of course, also, no money. What's new in the current writers' domains? For the barest of moments, I think of Vonnegut. In 1950s, two short stories earned him 1,500 dollars, enough to keep his family afloat for six months. A writer dare not hang at the end of that clothesline. He'll fade in sunlight. Anyhow, damn it, I'm appreciative, and Editor Greg Johnson's acceptance keeps me hyped to my goal, my item on a bucket list—to wit—to get someone other than myself to publish one of my four novels before I die.   

AND TODAY...Happy day, my Chapter Twenty rewrite of Angie's Choice flew by, done before noon. Two chapters remain (and that touch-up in Chapter One to make it more appealing), then I won't look at it again. I'll send it around and around, ceaselessly, until it begs to be let die...or I die...whichever comes next.

SILENT BOOMER AS BAIT FOR ZOMBIE ATTACKS

the open bay (trap) door

I sit in the spacious concrete cavern of Torque Coffee in downtown Vancouver, Washington (not B.C., Canada). We await the next  attack of the undead. The bay door is thrown open to a sunny day, inviting wandering zombies to enter. I sit in plain sight of the bay door as bait. It's an ambush. Across the street, the shell of the local Hilton stands empty, all its personnel zombieized by earlier forays. Bellhops in their bellhop caps make comical zombies, if you can imagine. Remember that bellhop who used to call for "Phillip Morris"? Imagine him as a zombie.

Before I slipped from my home office this morning, I put one last spit and polish to yesterday's rewrite of Chapter Nineteen of Angie's Choice. I planned to begin rewrite of Chapter Twenty at Torque, but (stupid me) I forgot to download that ms with its alterations onto my thumb drive. I can't get more work done today. Oh, I suppose I could work on Chapter Twenty here and save the ms under a different file name, then interweave the two versions by cutting and pasting to the latest ms that sits on the desktop of my desktop computer at home. Trouble is I'd risk erasing valuable changes I made this morning. 

This old Silent Boomer is not immune from making mistakes while transferring data from thumb drive to computers, ms to ms, and vice versa. It's too risky for a hard of hearing old man with poop-stained underwear (an easy target even for stumbling zombies with poop-stained underwear themselves) to accomplish without an occasional error or four. So I'll wait. I've made sufficient progress the past two weeks. Time to relax and enjoy a zombie attack or two.