In the Writing Mood Again

I've thought many times about just abandoning this blog completely, shutting it down and walking away from it, simply because more and more time was passing between spells where I would feel like I had anything to say. However, I'm in a mood to post again.

I've been spending my free time over the last several months getting caught up on my reading, among other things that I'd fallen behind doing around the house while I was taking classes. Sometime last year, I counted all of the books I had purchased but had yet to read. At the time, the number was around 35, I think. However, even though I've been reading quite a few lately, I've bought even more, so now I am behind 60-some books, at last count.

I have read 19 since the first of the year, which is pretty good for me, because I usually average about six a year, and I am within 30 pages of finishing No. 20. Here are a few reviews of what I've been reading:

Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz.
Grade: C.
This was the first book I had read by Koontz, and it wasn't bad, but like many of the reviews I read at Amazon.com, I think the hero and heroine's one-liners during times when Beezo the Clown was terrorizing them were really out of place. Plus, I thought that some of the scenes of peril were really, really drawn out, and then the end came suddenly, and too much was written off as coincidence. I like the flow of Koontz's work and would be tempted to read another of his novels, but this is definitely going into my "To Be Sold" pile, because I know I'm not going to read this one again.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield.
Grade: A
The story begins with an ailing, eccentric, reclusive yet famous author, Vida Winter, summoning a lonely, introverted biographer, Margaret Lea, to write her life story. Margaret is reluctant to accept the job, fearful that Vida will be less than truthful with her because Vida has related her life story differently to different reporters. But Margaret nonetheless accepts the job, and is soon captivated by Vida's haunting tale of twins, ghosts, wealth and family secrets. I first heard of this book through a "Barnes & Noble recommends" newsletter, and I thought it was great. I wasn't able to guess the ending, yet didn't feel cheated, like I have on so many other books in which the writer builds up to one conclusion, then suddenly shifts gears to create a surprise ending. This was a very satisfying read, IMHO.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell.
Grade: B+
A collection essays recounting Vowell's trek through historic sites linked to the deaths of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley, Assassination Vacation is rich with information and wit. I stress the information part, because there is a lot of history I never learned in grade school (or even high school or college, for that matter) in this work. I enjoyed the book, but it left me yearning -- I wish that I, too, were able to pack up and travel around, seeing all of these sites, learning the history first-hand and then make some money writing about it. Sounds like a lot of fun to me.

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.
Grade: B
Ever read a story so vivid that you often stayed up too late reading it, passing the point of being able to easily drift off, and if you did somehow manage to fall asleep, the characters came with you, walking and talking throughout your dreams? That's what this book was like for me, at least for the first half anyway. It's the story of Johnny Wheelwright and how his childhood friendship with Owen Meany, a diminutive boy with a voice stuck in a "permanent scream" and who believes he is an instrument of God, haunts him into adulthood. Once Owen and Johnny are about 16, the book loses some of its magic for me; it's too easy to see the heartbreaking course Owen is on, but I still would recommend it to my friends.

Well, that's all for now. Within the next few posts, I will likely critique some more of my reads from this year.

Basketball days

A few days ago, I attended a basketball game in which one of my nephews was playing. Watching one of my nephews' games always makes me long for the days when I played myself.

Now, I was never good. As a matter of fact, I sucked. Basketball wasn't offered for girls where I went to grade school, and by the time we moved to a school that did offer it, I was a seventh-grader, and I didn't even join the team until the following year. By then, my eighth-grade classmates had been playing for about five years. They were the PKs, as my best friend and I called them, the Popular Kids. Why I even joined the team at such at late date still baffles me. I think it was all the stories my mom used to tell about her glory days playing basketball. And possibly, it was because of the road trips with the boys, but I doubt it. My crush at the time was not very athletic.

But anyway, there I was, on a team full of girls I felt out of touch with, playing a sport I had no skill for and lacking the confidence to believe I could possibly get better at it. I was apprehensive, awkward, unambitious, untalented and so out of my element that I really have no clue what it is I'm fondly remembering these days as I sit in the stands watching my nephew play, wishing I was out on a court playing basketball with a bunch of friends, too. In truth, I didn't hate playing, but I hated feeling like I sucked so badly that I was embarrassing myself. And as out of sorts as I felt with my teammates, they were never rude to me a la "Mean Girls." So, maybe it was a fun time for me, and I just don't recall having all that much fun at the time.

Out with the old?

Every now and then, I get the urge for newness. And so, sometime in mid-December, foolishly believing that I would do something different with my blog, I just started deleting my posts. I wanted direction. I wanted focus. I wanted organization. I wanted, it seems, to just wake up one morning and not be the me I have been for the last 36 years.

It was the plan when I went crazy with the delete button to write concise, well-thought out commentary-type posts, but those kinds of things take time -- time I’m not willing to give right now because I want to fix up my house, catch up on my reading, work on some short stories and a whole lot of other things. I realized my mistake about 10 minutes after everything was gone.

So, while I mourn the loss of everything I had written last year -- despite the fact that the biggest reason I deleted it was because I thought it was stupid -- I begin again, with a whole lot of the same old crap.

Happy freakin’ new year.

Prologue

In August 2004, I signed up for this blog. My thought on that hot, windy August day — (I really cannot remember the weather. This is a safe assumption, however, given that I live in Oklahoma.) — was that crafting a post at least once a week would help me get back into writing. When I was in high school and college, I dreamed of making a living as a writer. I could see me, each day pounding away at the keyboard, which would sit next to a 5-inch stack of completed pages. I’d be clad in my jammies, because inspiration would strike me in the middle of the night, and I’d be wearing dark-rimmed glasses and sporting a ponytail with just enough wisps of hair falling in front of my face to show that I was deep in thought.

That’s the dream. The reality goes more like this: Every couple of months, I sit with my fingers on the keyboard, typing, then immediately deleting, three-word phrases such as “The night was ...,” or “Allison could tell ...,” or “Jake walks toward ...,” hoping that something would spark the beginnings of a story. There are no completed pages next to my keyboard, because I cannot even formulate a plotline. I wear the clothes I wore to work, because inspiration has yet to strike in the middle of the night. I no longer own dark-rimmed glasses, and because of frustration, I pulled on my hair too much to keep my unruly tresses contained within any hair-holding device. The “wisps” I dreamed of consist of every strand on the right side of my head.

I blame the demands of a full-time job, housework, friends, family and the amount of time I spend vegging out in front of the TV for preventing me from getting passed my writer’s block. I read enough advice on the subject to know that the best thing I can do is keep writing. So, I thought this blog might inspire me to spend more time working toward this goal. I figured that I doesn’t matter what I write about, just that I write SOMETHING. Or, at least, that was the thought back in August 2004. Seeing how this is my first post in more than year, I don’t think this has worked so far.

But then, last fall, a friend of mine started his own blog. I am always in awe at the sheer volume of words he posts each week. He comments on movies, novels, TV shows and comic books, and entertains his readers with his adventures, past and present. I haven't done as much writing as he does in one day in ages. AGES. But you know what? I think the blog thing worked for him, because he’s got tens of thousands of words on paper for a story he’s working on. (I have yet to read it. But, I think I be able to make time for it between watching Lost and My Name is Earl. Having read some of his past work, though, I’m sure it’s good.)

My thought now is that if it worked for him, maybe it will work for me, too. So this is me, trying again.

This week, so far, I’ve written 528 words (not including this sentence).