Buzz
by John Wolf
Sorry, I was on another planet for the last couple of months, no really. Life forms out there aren't so bad. We all have our pluses and minuses, but for the most part, the aliens I met were civil. Here on the Blue Orb, not so much. Are people going nuts? Global warming, economic meltdown, El Nina (again!), the cola wars are blurred by too many variations on a theme—I’m confused. There are more new jobs in government than the private sector, these government types think laying-off teachers is the best way to pay bills. Only about five authors are being published by the Big Five in New York—what is going on? We are stagnating into carbon form blobs with no imaginations.
Ethics are driven by political spin. Truth is bartered. One man’s fact is another man’s lie. Sitting on Mars, I talked to an old blues player on the Valles Marineris Delta, and he told me to chill, there is a time of reckoning coming. You humans are just passing through puberty. You all just need to get laid.
Well, he’s probably right. Anyway, I can’t be bothered by all that. I’m trying to get a new book out. It’s in the final draft with worker bees going over it, combing out the bugs. Oops, no offense if you are a queen bee. This is going to be a sad one, full of plot twists and consequence for the protagonist. Struggle and redemption are the themes—oh, and who murdered two people in Las Vegas last summer. Then there’s the jewelry heist of museum quality gems that belonged to Louis XIV. “Benny Plays the Blues” is a tale about a New York sax player that gets into hot water in Vegas. It’s obvious to everyone but the reader that he is a murderer and thief. He is forced to run for cover only to run into more trouble. Did he really do it? Maybe his laid-back demeanor is fooling the reader. He is definitely headed for disaster. You can’t run from your future. Cool.
I’m still going to self-publish. Why not? I’m one step short of being my own publisher, which would really make me a self published man, but I can’t see the advantages for the fiction writer at this juncture. Some people think I’m one brick short of a full load, but I purge the thought. I’m acting like a publishing house. I had the cover done by a photographer with a wizard degree in Photoshop. I added a forward from a professional musician. And, I have an editor from the world of theater weeding out those pesky bent words, ill fated run-on sentences, and the occasional landmine, the misused word.
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Sorry, I don’t have a book review for you this month. The only books I’ve read in the last two months have all been technical books, trying to learn how to build a better website, the miracle that is Photoshop, video editing, or working on my chops playing the saxophone. What happened to writing? I can’t use the excuse of running out of ink, or my pencil broke. I’m a slave to the computer keyboard now, but that is changing soon. I’m going to try out the Dragon voice interpreter software that captures your voice directly into the written word. How lazy are writers getting, when typing has become too much to ask.
I get the impression many of you have been too distracted this summer to write-in with an article. Maybe your ink well went dry or your computer broke. You can always point to the economy and say, “I’m too busy looking for a job to write dribble for an eRagSheet.” But you can’t escape the guilty feeling of not writing, even meaningless stories of daily life or fantasies of your inner thoughts. Writers must write. Everything else is less important. After all, we are word junkies.
Okay, it’s all right to take the summer off and just relax, if you can with all the tornados, earthquakes, wars, and looming hurricanes. It has been an amazing summer of celebrity deaths, immoral politicians cheating on their wives, or Wall Street thieves being sent to prison. Where is the solace? When I close my eyes, the CNN logo blinks behind my eyelids. Relaxing is not a luxury that the writer can claim. We are like war correspondents. We have to keep on the move, looking for our next story. We earn a living by living out our fantasies in words. Or you could lapse into a pattern of whacking a little white ball around and around over smooth green fields, fooling yourself into thinking you’re having fun. Put the club back in the bag and start writing.
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John keeps the kennels clean at the Fox&Quill Hunting Club. |
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