A writer's life
the thing about writing...The Writing Life
Shortcuts for my books...
You can find all of my books, up to date, on my Amazon Author Page. Here's the thing.... If you're born with something you know you have to do, you either run with it or watch the rest of your life go to pieces. Writing is not work anyone chooses. It's hard in strange ways no one else will ever understand. You're almost always working alone, and with rare exceptions, the writing life isn't especially rewarding. But if you're born to write stories or live in a world of ideas that must be angled into words, take it from me, you can't be happy without it. You can't. But if your mind doesn't keep prompting you with ideas and pushing you in the direction of a keyboard or pen and paper, you'll be happier doing something else. Oh, yeah, plenty of people talk about wanting to be writers. That's mainly inspired by the part that doesn't involve sitting in front of a piece of paper or keyboard and writing something. Being a writer may sound interesting, but like long distance running with or without the high, doing the work is inspired or it's excruciating. Even so and with the number of readers and their attention spans dwindling daily, people like me still quit good paying jobs to write, spend hours in isolation and a flirt with poverty. That's because, for us, there's little more satisfying than a paragraph with perfect pitch, intensity and penetration. You're always gunning for it. So, then, you write. My range is fairly broad. I write novels (Hippie Books), Cat Books (Illustrated by Cat Artist Deborah Julian), Inspiration, art reviews, news features and smaller online articles and blogs. Above is my philosophy about writing and what's behind the work you'll see here and in the links and pages that follow. As for the rest of it – that is, what about writing as an art? The answers are simple. First, the only value that matters is the one that measures how well a message gets across to the reader. A lot of writers and people who teach writing don't notice that it has nothing to do with the writing and everything to do with the reading. Get readers interested or go away. Style is useless otherwise. I realize people spend time and money on writing courses, and as far as I'm concerned, they'd do more good throwing cash at panhandlers. Apart from effective grammar and spelling and some ideas about tools, like symbolism, it's pointless to teach anyone how to do what's already been done, how to stay between the lines and pass the quiz. Readers don't give a shit about that. Readers are hungry for impact. Readers want to be taken by you to an unfamiliar place and have the next best thing to a real experience or to understand something previously not clear. It's critically important to say something, as much as possible, original. If you can do that, you're a major writer. If you can't, at least innovate within the repetition. Generally, while I love good structure, my love is odd. I don't believe in classic timelines that go on for longer than necessary to keep readers in tow. The flow of a story should be more like a ribbon, one that's been stuffed in your pocket all day and pulled out in a bunch. A jump in space-time lets readers get into the intricacies and keeps them awake better than Red Bull. Reality doesn't respect time lines and neither do I. Finally, two dimensional writing sucks. A good page should be like a painting where the artist judiciously and gradually piles layer on layer, scraping some off and going on until the surface is a perfect representation of the universe in mind-boggling microcosm. In other words, it's complete in itself and useless without all the other bubbling stuff bunched up next to it. Like life itself. My writing hits several categories.
Novels, my hippie books, from the counterculture, are the anchor around which everything else vibrates. For income, they aren't near the top. For satisfaction, they are vaults of gold. Also in fiction, my cat books (created with illustrator and cat artist Deborah Julian) are fun to write. I channel a smart, adventurous feline, but I have to admit that the clever, funny illustrations of cats in the act of doing unexpected things are really what sells. I've seen enough readers flip through for the pictures before reading a word often enough to get that message. I've also published two nonfiction books about conscious awareness, the benefits of mediation and the source of inspiration. I write for several websites and on my own blogs. My main content can be found here. |
|