BEATNICK SILENT EATS & SCRIBBLES AS THE JUICE RUNS OUT

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Recently I came across an article in an AARP publication. A writer mentioned that retirement took all the edge off "writing for publication". His youthful "juices" were dried up. I feel the prune juice running out of me too and may soon need diapers. The dude in the AARP publication had made a living with his writing whereas all my poetry and short story publications have been in the literary world of non-paying little mags & small presses. My goal "to get someone other than myself to publish a novel of mine" before I die is all out of whack according to Jung who said that one ought to make money first and become philosophical in later life. I may have mentioned this in a previous post. Who knows? Seems to me I've been philosophical all my life, seeking the meaning to existence in my off hours.

An interesting aspect about writing speculative fiction concerns too little or not enough. Manning, as you know, is set 250 years in the future. I gotta surround the story with a future culture and that means I gotta decide how much information about the future to present to readers. Enough to keep them interested or too much and they get bored and quit reading?

By the way, I'm currently lunching on a smoothie: carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, frozen strawberries, banana slices, a touch of prune juice, vanilla almond milk, protein powder (since I left out walnuts) and three packs of sweetener. I swear, Granny Thomas, you can't mix up anything bad tasting when you chop it down to its atomic size.

SILENT BOOMER CAUGHT RACING ALONG

Yesterday I shot through the rewrite of Chapter Fifteen in a couple of hours. That pace, I'll be done with Angie's Choice next week—a goal achieved! Today my attention wanders among the words in my head, waiting for them to make a combination that will explain to me who I am today and what I'm supposed to be doing as a 75 year old man at ten-thirty am on a Thursday in July morning, living in America in the early 21st Century of the Year of Our Atheism, CE. 

Me, in the time of writing this....

In brief... should I go walk beside the Columbia River and dream away my remaining hours or should I sit my ass down before a computer screen and peck away at the keyboard until my little fingers burn with arthritic pain?  

Jung said the first half of a man's life should be filled with DOING—establishing a career, making a living, supporting self and a family, all those time-consuming, attention-diverting tasks. (Women can make their own lists.) The second half is to be used for THINKING—philosophy and wisdom. I got it backward. I was a flop in the roles of husband, father, bread winner, son, responsible male animal. Writing never became a bread-winning career. I was diverted by poetry, art, movies, novels, alcohol and my lovely pain. I did all my philosophical suffering early. I frittered away my youth, eating cake and drinking life—both it's frothy top and its seedy dregs. A life of feeling, of dreaming, of thinking.

To this day, almost daily, I write whichever words in my thoughts yell the loudest to be let out (like now), but I do know that some of the most awakened moments in my life arrive when insistent words jar me from a dream and drive me to set them down fast as possible before they escape back into unconsciousness, or when words come alive with their own intelligence as I wrestle with them over the shape of human reality and my fingers are forced to fly over the keyboard to fill the emptiness of a blank screen to get reality down before it disappears back into the silence that is NOW. Hum....

Guess this old ape will keep pecking away, see what's next. These days, love fills up a lot of time. How long it took for that sweet flower to blossom in my stony philosopher's heart. How much failure it took to learn how to nourish it!

3 AM IN THE DARKEST PART OF THE SOUL

Fitzgerald photo from NYTimes

It's midnight as I shut down the process of translating the second novel I ever wrote from typed pages to editable computer files. Only 70 more pages to go of 606 pages. "It's always three am in the darkest part of the soul." That's what F. Scott wrote in his autobiographical collection, The Crack Up. 

I used to feel like that all the time. It's an alcoholic's thing, but I'm free of that for a long time, but I'm amused by my continued striving to "make it" with my writing. At age 75, it's kind of silly, but...what?...I'm not alone in this striving? What writer stops before he drops dead or his mind gives out...if...he hasn't won any recognition? I mean, if he's seriously got the writing bug, if it's something he does almost in his sleep? The few times I stopped writing creatively, I went on letter writing binges and email bombastic adventures or filled journals. If I took all the hours I've sat with pencil and paper, or before a typewriter and, finally, a computer keyboard, I'd pretty near have an additional life...well...a short life, but at least a life of some kind, different from sitting down expressing thoughts and feelings that no one might ever read.

Jung wrote that a "man" was supposed to spend the first half or his life achieving his professional successes and the second half attending to his philosophical life. Well, I did finally do something to shore up my financial picture, but it wasn't doing what I thought I'd love to do every day of my life...writing. No, I did it as a machinist in a machine shop. Somehow, I think I'm trying to combine philosophizing and writing in this last phase of my life. I'm getting pretty philosophical about failure. If it wasn't for my successful and happy life with my wife, Mertie, I'd really be desperate. This is real joy, isn't it?