Dear Reader,

Please note that I say “Dear Reader,” in the singular, because the chances are good that if you are reading this blog entry on or about Thursday, Aug. 5, 2010, you’re in all probability the first and for the time being only person to read it. This website got a good boost in the initial month or two, due to some print media publicity as well as mention on a few Internet writing sites, all pegged to the contest gimmick. I was a newsman for a quarter-century, and the old guy with the unpublished novel willing to pay people to read his book does make for a good human-interest angle. But the initial swell of interest has subsided so much and I am fearful site activity may shrink badly enough to consign the site to Google’s Pit of Irremediable Obscurity.

Overall, since the site’s launch on May 3, hits have averaged above 60 per week. But in recent weeks (since I started tracking more closely), they seem to be running at something like 16 per week – two or three a day. No wonder nobody’s posting but me. Nobody’s out there. (Except you, dear friend, and I thank you for the compliment.)

entropi, the winner of $100 for Question 2, which was about Lucy’s career goal, has gotten in touch and his money order went out in the mail either yesterday or the day before, I forget which. His answer demonstrated that he had read with good comprehension, which really every winning answer should show. (Incidentally, entropi, like 10011, winner on Question 1, has a California address. In future, I’ll ask winners’ permission to mention their first name.) Further to the matter of reading comprehension, I wish to say that I won’t hesitate to reject all submissions to a given questions if none are good enough, pushing the prize money forward to another question or questions.

I’ve been itching to get started on revising my novel for a couple of weeks now, but there have been a lot of “housekeeping” tasks that required disposition first. Tomorrow, Friday – Hallelujah! – I get to begin. I am looking forward to it. I feel I know precisely what I want, what changes to make and in most cases, where to put them. It will be hard work, but I do love writing.

I make it a practice to avoid talking much about a work in progress, because I don’t want feedback, or even the thought of anybody looking over my shoulder as I work, because writing is, ultimately, just as private an activity as reading. As the old black grandma in Lorraine Hansberry’s classic 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun” (later made into a terrific film), says, speaking of her old, bedraggled houseplant, “It expresses me.” So with my novel. (Hansberry, perhaps the greatest black American writer who ever lived, tragically did not live long enough to see her 35^th birthday, dying in January, 1965.)

But will say two things about this revision:

1. It will not affect a large quantity of text.
2. It will nonetheless utterly transform the import of the book in the reader’s mind.

After I have completed the initial revision, which I hope to take no more than a month or so, I plan a Phase 2 of revision. The latter will primarily involve fleshing out major characters by inserting additional back story. I was death on back story when I wrote the novel, feeling that it slowed down the pace. I think I overdid it. Also, well-written back story can be just as compelling and entertaining as the main action. Canadian novelist Barbara Gowdy is a master of this.

Incidentally, I haven’t been entirely idle with respect to the revision. I have notes totalling 41 separate files that add up to 723 kilobytes. (The kilobytes are inflated some by research materials that I have found online and saved to my files; but there’s a hell of a lot of my own writing, near-ready to be plunked into place, including long dialogue sequences.)

Let me tell you a little about my writing routine (not that it matters a jot to anyone but me).

Most writers prefer writing in the morning. But don’t let anyone tell you you have to write in the morning. And, if you’re an aspiring writer, don’t let anyone tell you one single solitary thing that a writer should observe. Every writer must find out how to write for himself; there is a right way to write, and it is his right way to write, which he must discover for himself. (Please excuse me for the moment for my exclusion of the feminine pronoun. I will blog about such indefinite pronouns in future, I suspect.)

I’m not a morning person. When I was writing this book in the ’90s, I usually started to write about 1 or 2 in the afternoon, and quit when I started to tire. I started a writing session by reading what I call my “Go note” (because “Go” is the name of the file). This is a note I write for myself at the close of each writing session. Ostensibly, it was meant to help me remember, at the start of the next writing session, what issues had been in my mind as I wrapped up the previous session. Really, though, it was a good way to wind down at the end of a writing session; and also, an easy chore, reading it at the start of the next session, that helped me ease into the flow of work. (I wish I had a dollar for every time, while writing the Go note, I thought to myself, “What I wrote today was good enough; uh, good enough – wasn’t it?” Sure as Schlitz sells beer, the moment that little half-doubt crept into my head, within half an hour I would decide, “Yeah, it was good, but not good enough. I’ll have to rewrite it tomorrow [or Monday, if it was a Friday].” I felt that I maintained a terrifically high standard; also, that I knew the difference between good, and good enough.

Normally, while sitting at my desk working at my computer, I wear slippers (as I am doing now). When I worked on my book, and when I do the coming revision, it has to be shoes. I have a pair of “writing shoes.” They’re old lace-up Hushpuppies, very comfortable. But I noticed recently that they must have gotten wet, because there’s mould or something on them. I’ll try brushing it off, but if that doesn’t work I may have to look for another old pair of comfortable shoes that would do.

Normally, at all times of the day that the television isn’t not on (and that’s most times of the day – my TV’s been on the blink for three weeks now, and I barely miss it), I have music on, either a classical radio station or my CD player playing a mixture of classical, pop and jazz. A fifth-part of my brain is constantly heeding  what I’m hearing. When I write, the rhythms of the music interfere with the rhythms of what I’m writing. Rather than silence, I put on a tape that consists of 30 minutes of birdsong, 30 minutes of distant thunder, and 30 minutes of something else, possibly rustling leaves. That helps.

I take one break in mid-session. As I recall, I would allow myself about 20 minutes, and play a computer game that took the mind into an area of spatial thinking, such as Tetris. (I recently ordered a new Tetris game.)

My mental approach while working, it seemed to me, was most analogous to the psychology of a baseball pitcher on the mound. He has absolute belief in himself and his ability and talent (confidence is a must for competitive athletes of all stripes, and for writers); yet, he knows a lot of things can happen, and a lot of them are bad. He’s in what I’ve heard described as “a state of relaxed tension,” which seems a contradiction in terms but I think it’s very apposite.

At the end of a writing session when I felt that I had written well, but not well enough, I felt disappointed, and deflated, but not awful. At least I’d been in there giving it the best shot I had in me on that day; and there’d be a tomorrow. At the end of a day, and these were much rarer, when I felt I’d really pulled it off, I was exhilarated, elated: I would chew a Nicorette (I was off cigarettes at the time), play something like Credence Clearwater Revival’s cover of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” and dance a little jig all by myself in the middle of my living room. One of the greatest, happiest experiences of my life. Of course, it was all predicated on how much I expected readers to appreciate what I had written. Oh well. That may come in time. It should.

Then, there was writer’s block. Writer’s block does not consist of sitting in front of the computer screen or typewriter and reaching for ideas but not finding any. It consists of loafing on the couch, unable to muster the mental fortitude to sit down and have a go at the writing. This can be occasioned by depression, self-doubt, current problems with the part of the text you are working on. Writer’s block is sheer hell. You condemn yourself to hell. You are worthless. You’ll never make it. You are the Ultimate, Worst, Most Unforgiveable Failure in the human race – in the universe. The blackness of the agonies I’ve suffered, playing Mega Man II and watching the little guy descending into a deep black pit of hopelessness, may seem ridiculous but they were torture at the time. On those days, I would have been overwhelmed if the Future had whispered in my ear, “You’re going to finish the book.”

So the above, minus the writer’s block I hope, is the mode of life I expect to find myself in over the next four months or so – I expect Phase 1 of the revision to take perhaps a month, and Phase 2 perhaps two or three months.

+    +    +

Aging comes as a shock to the being – at least it did for me. My age (65) appals me. I feel as if I’ve been cheated; duped. It’s almost as if I’d made a deal and said, “Okay, I’ll live a crappy, loveless non-life, so long as I get to be young forever.” Somebody obviously didn’t live up to his end of the bargain. I can remember, when much younger, a number of times lying in bed at my apartment in Windsor, Ontario, and thinking: “Forty-three! Christ! How can that be? It’s not fair. I’m going to die! I can’t stand being forty-three!” Didn’t change things, though. I just went on to being forty-four, and so on. You just wait, it’ll hit you too. Maybe if you have a spouse/partner and family, and a reasonably happy or at least okay life, it won’t seem so bad. My rotten childhood, brought to me by the two Creatures from the Black Lagoon – my god-awful, uncaring, neglectful, cruel, nearly insane parents – set me up for no wife, no kids, no love, no success, no nuttin. Around age forty, I looked at myself and my life and thought, “If only, on my deathbed, I don’t have to look back on a life that was so wasted, so useless. If I could just write my book. I know there’s one in me. I know I can make it good. That would be something – some solace there.”

I honestly thought that just writing the book to my own satisfaction would suffice. It does not. It has to be published, to satisfy me. Writing a book that no one reads is like performing a symphony on the moon. It’s like the tree falling in the forest and not making a sound, because there are no ears to hear it.

As for aging: I always thought of 65 as the great cutoff, the point at which meaningful life ends and one is thrown into a cauldron full of dangerous reptiles called cancer, heart attack, stroke, decrepitude, dementia. I remember the Beatles singing “When I’m Sixty-Four” when I was younger than the Beatles were when Macartney wrote it ... when the idea of oneself becoming as ancient as 64 seemed wildly, madly impossible. Now Macartney is older than his song, and so am I. I can’t get over it.

So, as if to drive home the new realm of aging and decline that I find myself in, I am scheduled for a barium enema on Aug. 16. Oh joy. Whatever will be next? The purpose is to check for colon cancer. The reasons are the risk factors: my age, belly fat, smoking, and a family history of colon polyps, which are pre-cancerous and routinely removed during colonoscopies. A few weeks ago, for various reasons having to do with a diet I’ve been on (I’ve lost 30 pounds in the past five months and weigh 177 pounds on a five-foot-nine medium frame), because I felt I was dropping pounds so fast that my diet might be masking a serious underlying medical condition, as well as some bowel events that I won’t go into, I read up on polyps and colon cancer in the “Harvard Medical School Family Health Guide” and diagnosed myself with colon cancer, America’s second-biggest killer. I’m more optimistic now. (My first, perverse thought was, “Great, if I’ve got colon cancer, I’ll get onto my media contacts and they’ll put out an even better human-interest story on my novel and website, and I’ll get another zing of free publicity for the site.”)

Also speaking of aging, be advised that anyone who calls me a “senior citizen” or a “senior” will be shot at dawn. I’m old enough to remember when these disgusting, patronizing terms came into vogue. Alexander King, a well-known and very likeable talk-show regular forty-some years ago, spoke on the Tonight Show of the faddish new, cutely alliterative term, “senior citizen.” He said, “I’m 65 years old. I’m entitled to be called an old man.”

(The rapidity with which “senior citizen” became standard reminds me of the alacrity with which the equally, or more,  euphemistic “challenged,” as in “developmentally challenged,” came into general use. It took no more than two years. “Developmentally challenged” is a fake; it is also an insult, because its use implies that the correct term is something shameful. “Developmentally challenged” is a euphemism of “mentally disabled.” There is no shame in being mentally disabled. It is, perhaps, unfortunate. It is real. It does not inherently lessen the worth or dignity of any mentally disabled person: many of whom are fine and excellent, sweet-dispositioned human beings.)

I am old. There is nothing quaint, or cutesy, or venerable or anything about it. Spare me the sweet talk. Grant me the dignity of calling me “old” – it means I am subject to a host of sudden and agonizing diseases; it means my body is in decline, and my brain too, no doubt; it gives new fuel two my twin banes of depression and alcoholism; it means that I am going to die, and no amount of squirming will get me out of it. Don’t patronize me. Don’t euphemize me. I’m old. I’m mortal. I’m going to die. In Canada, God bless them, when you get to be 65 you start getting a pension called “Old Age Security.” How is that for a non-euphemism, an anti-euphemism? Doubtless some brilliant politician will come along and change it to “Seniors Security,” as they changed “unemployment  insurance” to “employment insurance.” I am old: as venerable as yesterday’s used coffee grounds.

See ya around. You should read what I have to say when I’m not feeling great – as I am, oddly enough.