Jamie Todd Rubin's Blog, page 16
July 28, 2022
Beginning at the End
Just outside Carlingford, IrelandIf you noticed an absence here on the blog recently it is because I am just back from 12 days in Ireland with my family. It was a trip we’ve wanted to do for a long time. Most of our vacation are road trips here in the U.S. That made this our kids’ first overseas trip. It was my second time to Europe.
I’m still adjusting to being back. There is a five hour time difference between U.S. Eastern time and GMT, which is Ireland’s time zone. Our flight left Dublin at 4:25pm yesterday afternoon, and we got back to Washington D.C. around 7:30pm last night. I didn’t sleep on the 7-1/2 hour flight in order that I’d sleep through the night last night, which I did. I was a little later than usual this morning, and was out for my morning walk around 6 am. The humidity here felt particularly oppressive after 12 days in Ireland’s dry, mild air.
The trip is still something of a jumble in my mind. We were all over Ireland and packed our days full of interesting travel and sight-seeing. I have nearly 70 journal pages that I wrote on the trip, and that helps with the jumble in my mind right now. It also should come in handy for a little project I want to try. I enjoy good travel writing, and now and then, I’ve done a little here on the blog. Indeed, I wrote all about my last trip to Europe, more or less in realtime, fifteen years ago. But I’d like to try my hand at it again, in part as a way of decluttering my thoughts on the trip, and in part to see if I am any good at it. I think the journal entries and notes I took along the way will help with this.
Catching up on my journal one afternoon, with the help of my notes and a Guinness.Over the next few weeks, therefore, you can expect a lot of posts relating to our trip to Ireland. If this is not your cup of tea, well, there are more than 7,000 other posts you can read here, or plenty of other great blogs to read in the meantime. But I really wanted to give this a try. I figured I needed to begin at the end in order to explain my absence, and what I propose to do. You can expect the first of these posts on Sunday.
But, if you want to know how the trip was overall, I can saw without hesitation that it was amazing. We took a 10-day tour of Ireland (details on the tour to come), and padded our trip with a few days in Dublin before and after the tour. Our tour took us all around the country, beginning in Dublin, going into Northern Ireland including Belfast and Derry (or Londonderry, if you will), Sligo, Galway, Limerick, Foynes, Killarney, Blarney, and more. I fell in love with the Irish countryside. An our kids got to experience their first international trip and see what life was like in a country that had castles going back to 1100 A.D. and other structures that dates far earlir than that.
In any case, I hope that explains my absence here. I didn’t bring a laptop with me on the trip, and spent my early mornings filling my current Composition Book journal with handwritten notes and observations from our trip. More details on that coming beginning on Sunday.
Written on July 28, 2022.
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July 21, 2022
Sailing
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" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." width="900" height="505" src="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." alt="silhouette photography of boat on water during sunset" class="wp-image-22777" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1880w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 400w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 550w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 768w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1800w" sizes="(max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px" data-recalc-dims="1" />Photo by Johannes Plenio on Pexels.comI’ve gone sailing (on an actual sailboat) about the same number of times that I have played golf. Golf and sailing are similar in that they are both expensive hobbies. The difference for me is that I didn’t enjoy golf, but I love to sail.
The first time I went sailing was when I was 10 or 11 years old. A friend’s father had a sailboat and they took me sailing. (The first attempt was aborted when, before I left to go sailing, I got nailed in the head with a rock when my brother and I were tossing clumps of dirt and one another, and I ended up in the emergency room with 3 stitches in my skull.) I was living in Warwick, Rhode Island at the time and we went sailing somewhere off Narragansett.
Since then, my cousin in Maine has taken me sailing several times in the Penobscot Bay. It was on these sails that I learned the basics of actually sailing. I loved it. But it was a hobby far beyond my means.
These says, I sail vicariously through a sub-sub-genre of literature: books by people who sail alone. I read the first of these books in 2009, Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea by Steven Callahan. I think I’d seen him interviewed on a morning talk show and that is how I discovered the book.
A decade later, I read Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World on the recommendation of my sailing cousin. (He is always good for recommendations. He also recommended Cannibal Queen by Steven Coonts, a kind of cousin to the sub-genre, a memoir of Coonts visiting all lower 48 states in his biplane.) I loved Slocum’s book. It sets a high bar for this particular subgenre/
Recently, that bar awas met by another book. While an a long weekend vacation in West Virginia for the Fourth of July holiday, I read Christian Williams’ Philosophy of Sailing: Offshore In Search of the Universe. The book is a memoir of a solo sail from Los Angeles to Hawaii and back. Williams brought along a shelf-full of philosophy books to dip into along the way. He made me particularly happy by having nice things to say about Will Durant’s Story of Civilization.
Sailing has always appealed to me. When we lived in New England, we would occasionally drive from Warwick to Rockland County, New York to see my grandparents. It was a three hour drive along I-95. Once, in 1980, we were driving on I-95 close to sunset, heading west, about to pass through New Haven. On the radio, Christopher Cross’s “Sailing” was playing, and as we came into view of the Long Island Sound, the water, orange from the sunset, was filled with sailboats. To this day, that classic of yacht rock is still one of my favorite songs. When I hear it, I imagine I am sailing along around the world–or at least as far as Hawaii, where the trade winds help out with a little push.
Written on July 15, 2022.
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July 19, 2022
On Golf
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The lessons took place early on Saturday mornings at the driving range at what is now called the Woodley Lakes golf course, just across Victory Boulevard from Van Nuys airport. I can’t recall how many Saturdays the lessons lasted–six, I think. Each day I would show up and a golf pro would set me to hitting a bucket of golf balls, showing me how to properly grip the club, bend my knees, tuck in my elbow, keep my hips still and my head down.
In the 34 years that have elapsed since those lessons, I can count on one hand the number of times I played golf. Two of those times are particularly memorable.
The first was in the summer of 1999 and took place at the Twin Lakes Village golf course in New London, New Hampshire. I played 18 holes with my cousins in what was the most fun I’ve ever had playing golf. It was pouring rain. I mean buckets. We wore rain slickers. The course was closed, but my cousin scribbled out a check for the cost of three of us to play, and slid it under the locked door of the clubhouse. We had the course to ourselves. There was no need to rush. There was also no need to keep score. By the second hole the scorecard had all but disintegrated. We laughed and hollared and I had a blast.
The other memorable round came in late October 2005, just after my sister’s wedding. I played a round with my parents and my brother at the Camarillo Springs course in Camarillo, California. It was a memorable round because on the 8th hole, my Dad, a lifelong golfer, quit the game in a rather dramatic fashion. He walked off the course swearing he’d never play again. To show he was serious, he gave his clubs, bag and all, to my brother on the spot. My Mom, brother and I finished the round.
Gold is one of those games that I want to like. I love the idea of playing the course. But it is more complicated than it looks, and the culture baffles me. Plus, it seems expensive and time-consuming–which may be features if you really love it. I enjoy reading about golf now and then, but I am happy to leave it at that. Even so, if I do ever play, those lessons from 34 years ago will come in handy.
Years after those lessons, the Woodley Lakes golf course became a notable feature when I was learning to fly. Taking off south out of Van Nuys, my instructor would point out the course as one possible place to land in the event of an engine failure.
And my Dad eventually resumed playing golf, too. Today, he and my Mom live on a golf course.
Written on July 15, 2022.
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July 17, 2022
Reading A Place to Read by Michael Cohen
Great books, the best books, almost always sneak up on me out of obscurity. In 2020, the best book I read was James and Deborah Fallows’ Our Towns, which seemed to come out of nowhere to sweep me into the skies over the country. In 2021, it was Joe Posnanski’s The Baseball 100 that caught me by surprise. I read the former early in 2021, and it remained my favorite book of the year, despite dozens of book I read afterward. I came to Posnanski’s book late in 2021, and it beat out dozens of books that I’d read before it that year.
Midway through 2022, I have just finished reading A Place to Read by Michael Cohen. It is the 49th book I’ve read so far this year and it is also the best.
A Place to Read is a collection of essays by a retired professor of literature. Essay collections, I have been told again and again, are poison at the box office. And yet the essay has become my favorite form of writing–both as a writer and reader. Good essays are well-written, and yet feel natural. Think E. B. White. Cohen’s essays do more than that: that appeal to me on a personal level. He writes about thing that I enjoy. He writes about things I have written about. And he does a far better job than I could do.
The table of contents reads like an advertisement tailored specifically to me: “A Place to Read,” “Notebooks,” “A Fountain Pen of Good Repute,” “Flying Lessons,” “Selling My Library,” “On Not Being E.B. White.” Even when Cohen writes on subjects that are not in my personal wheelhouse, he writes with such charm and conviction that I not only enjoy the piece, but it makes me more interested in the subject than I thought I could be. Take, for instance, his essay on golf, “A Round with Friends.” Reading hat piece not only made me wish I enjoyed golf more, but afterward, I jotted the following in my idea file: “write post on my experience with golf.” Cohen is clever, too. HIs essay on golf is made up of 18 parts.
I didn’t want the book to end. I kept checking to see how much was left. And even as I finished the book, I wanted more. A good essayist is a rare artist and I collect them as one might gather treasure. Sitting down to write this essay, I lamented that Cohen hadn’t included more essays in his book.
I went online to check the publication date of A Place to Read (2014) and was surprised to find that Cohen had published a second essay collection in late 2020, this one titled, And Other Essays. Relief washed over me. For a little while, at least, I can continue reading Cohen’s essays.
It is an enviable power that a writer like Cohen has, one that makes me want to read more. It is even more enviable when you consider he is not writing thrillers or romance novel, but rather the humble, lovable essay.
Written on July 13, 2022.
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July 14, 2022
How Much Is Left?
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" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." width="867" height="1300" src="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." alt="crop person with book in sunlight" class="wp-image-22441" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 867w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 400w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 550w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 768w" sizes="(max-width: 867px) 100vw, 867px" data-recalc-dims="1" />Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.comThere is one question I ask myself to determine how much I am enjoying (or not enjoying) the book that I am reading: How much is left?
When sitting with a paper book it is an easy question to answer. One look at my position in the book tells me that I’ve just gotten started, or I’m halfway though, or I’m almost to the end. With hardcover book, pages move in different ways at different points in the book. At the beginning of a book, the pages want to flip to the right. At the end of a book, the pages want to flip to the left. Only the middle of the book do the pages stay put when I open the book on a table or on my lap.
With ebooks there is a percentage or page count that answers the question “how much is left?” But the most accurate of all is the audiobook, which tells me, to the second, how much longer it will take me to finish the book.
When I’m not enjoying a book, the question comes out in a kind of incredulous, annoyed tone: How much is left? Too much. This is when I am most likely to bail on a book, usually with little or no regret. There are too many good books to read to waste time on ones that are slogging.
For a really good book, on the other hand, I am so absorbed by what I am reading that I completely forget to ask the question. When I finally come up for air, the question comes out in a kind of panic: How much is left? Too often it is very little. The book is almost over, and the Audible app tells me with deadly precision that there is only 10 minutes and 15 seconds remaining. That’s not the answer I want with a good book. I want to see hundreds of pages, or dozens of hours still laid out ahead of me.
Today, for instance, I have been reading a wonderful collection of essays, A Place to Read, by Michael Cohen, a retired college professor. I’m not sure how I came to find the book, but I have have been charmed by it. His essays–which range over a wide variety of subjects–are delightful. As I arrived home from an afternoon walk, I happened to ask the question–how much is left?–and discovered, much to my dismay, there was just over an hour of book remaining. It means that I’ll finish the book on my morning walk tomorrow. That’s sad. This is the kind of book I wish would go on forever.
There is a trifecta of the reading experience, elusive, but something for which I yearn. I start to read a book and (1) it is amazing almost from the start; (2) it is very long, preferable over 800 pages; and (3) I recognize these two things early on and delight in knowing that I have an outstanding book to read, spread out in front of me, possibly for days.
I sometimes wonder if this is a common phenomenon among readers, but I hesitate to ask. I’m afraid someone will say, “Yeah, I ask myself ‘how much is left?’ every time I see one of these posts.”
Written on July 13, 2022.
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July 12, 2022
Back to the Beginning: Composition Notebooks and Microsoft Word
My favorite word processor of all time is Microsoft Word for DOS 5.5. This is the word processor I was using circa 1992 (30 years ago!) when I first began to write stories with the intention of submitting them for publication. I liked the simplicity of the interface: whitish font on blue background; neat, clear menus that were easy to navigate; simplicity of functions that I used most commonly (spell check, searching, etc.). I still have many of the original Word for DOS files that I saved back then. They not only include drafts of those first stories, but letters I wrote, class notes, as well as papers for various classes.
Since then, as readers of this blog know well, I’ve tried just about every word processing tool out there. I was a long-time user of Google Docs; I was a long-time user of Scrivener. Both of these are outstanding word processors, and each has their own particular speciality. Google Docs excels at collaboration, and I’ve used it more than once in working with an editor to prepare a story for publication. Scrivener is like word processor and project management tool combined, and I’ve probably written more of the stories and articles I’ve sold using that tool than any other.
I’ve tried other tool: Ulysses and IA Writer, for instance. And since January 2021, I’ve done the bulk of all my writing using Obsidian. Indeed, I’ve done just about everything in Obsidian, from writing, to notes, to lists. You name it.
But the thought of Microsoft Word for DOS’s simplicity–the way it simply got out of my way and allowed me to write when I wanted to write, and print when I wanted to print–has alway stuck with me. One of that old word processor’s best features was that it was naturally distraction-free, before that was the trendy concept that it has become. As I recently “rebooted1” my fiction writing, I was looking for something that would allow me to focus on my writing and not distract me with settings and features and bells and whistles. I wanted something that would stay out of my way, let me write, and when I was ready, let me print.
I’ve solved this problem in 2 ways:
I’m using composition notebooks for the first two drafts of everthing I write.I’ve returned to Microsoft Word for the third draft and beyond.Composition notebooks for composingI struggled for so long with writer’s block when it came to fiction writing that when I finally got back to writing, I wanted something completely different. I felt that I needed to slow down, and I felt that I needed to avoid distactions at all costs and harness whatever creative inspiration I had without the intercession of a keyboard, a CPU, and a screen. So I bought myself a dozen composition notebooks2, scribbled the word “Stories” on the cover a yellow composition book, and I began writing.
What a joy it is! Each day I write, I begin by scribbling the date in the margin of the place that I begin for that day. I alternate between blue and black ink each day, a tip I took from Neil Gaiman. It makes it easy to distinguish one day’s work from the rest. I write in cursive, not worrying about how much or how little I get in. I’ve estimated that a complete page contains about 270 words, but I tend to note how many pages I’ve written on a given day, as opposed to word counts–another break from the past.
I also make lots of notes as I go along, something that is note nearly as easy to do in a word processor or text editor, at least not in the way I prefer. I’ll scribble notes in the margins after completing a scene, giving myself instructions for how to improve it. Or I’ll go back to an earlier scene and add some notes to myself. Occasionally, I’ll think about the story structure or something conceptual that requires more notes. In these cases, I’ll simple insert them after whatever it is I have just written, but always do so in red ink to distinguish it from the narrative of the story itself.
A typical page from my composition notebook.When I complete a draft in the notebook, I read through it, and jot circled numbers (in red ink) in the margins which refer to longer assessments that I make on the pages that follow the story. With those notes completed, I can start on a second draft, also in the pages that follow. The first story I wrote this way I began on May 13, 2022. I finished the first draft 13 days later, on May 26. Over the next 6 days, the pages in my notebook are all red: my notes on the first draft of the story. Then, based on that first draft, on page 43 of my composition book, I jotted an outline of 14 scenes for the second draft of the story and I began that second draft on page 44 of the notebook on June 2, 2022.
Having this all together in the composition book is delightful. It is, in many ways, easier than using a word processor to achieve the same. I can easily flip back and forth between the pages, see my writing and my notes, and my corrections all at a glance.
And when I completed the second draft of the story (on June 22), and made my notes (June 23-26), I began writing the third draft in Microsoft Word.
Microsoft Word for drafting the manuscriptNot too long ago, I wrote about my process for managing my writing in Obsidian. In the first use case of that post, I talked about drafting stories in Obsidian–doing the actual writing. I demonstrated the templates that I use for first and second drafts, and how I tied these to the overall project I kept in Obsidian, all the while, using just plain text files. This works well, but after some trial and error with it, I decided it was far too much overhead. I was constantly distracted by the mechanisms that held everything together. Rather than writing, I was tinkering with templates and tweaking scripts that would take a markdown document and covert it to a neatly formatted manuscript using Pandoc. This–at least for me–is the fatal flaw of a tool like Obsidian for creative writing. There is too much ability to tinker.
This is one of the things I loved about Microsoft Word 5.5. for DOS. That tool no longer exists in any practical sense, so I have been using the latest version of Misrosoft Word for Office 365 for my drafts. I have a template for standard manuscript format, so I that I spend no time tweaking formatting. I open a new document, spread my composition notebook pages open before me, and begin typing.
When I have a completed draft, I don’t have to do anything special to print it (I do tend to print a hardcopy and mark it up with a red pen), nor do I have to jump through hoops to share the draft. Because, it is often the third draft of a story that I will share with trusted friends for an initial reading beyond my own. In Word, I can click a Share button, and the friends I share the draft with have access to the manuscript at once; they can add their own comments, correct things, etc.
Finally, when the manuscript is ready for submissions, I can email it off to whatever market I am sending it to. No special conversions involved.
Back to the beginningI see this latest round of my fiction writing as a restart for me, after a long drought. I wanted to take lessons from my earlier writing, as well as lessons from that period of writer’s block. The composition books have been a huge help to both my creative flow and productivity. And going back to Microsoft Word has removed the friction caused by many of the other tools that I have worked with over the years.
I am still using Obsidian for almost everything else, including tracking my writing projects, submissions, etc. But for the actual writing, notebooks and Word seem to be the ideal mix for me.
Written on July 12, 2022.
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I’m not particularly fond of that term, but it does a decent job of conveying my meaning here. ↩ I’ve also started using these notebooks for my journal, a change from the large Moleskine sketchbooks I’d been using, but that is a story for another day. ↩July 10, 2022
Writing and Writing
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" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." width="900" height="600" src="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." alt="handwriting on paper" class="wp-image-22743" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1880w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 400w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 550w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 768w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1800w" sizes="(max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px" data-recalc-dims="1" />Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.comForgive me readers, it has been ten days since my last blog post. Things seem to have gone off the rails a bit here, and I am now trying to get the trains–or posts in this case–to run on time again. What’s happened, I think, is that I have been writing and writing, but not writing posts.
Maybe it is a character flaw on my part, but when my fiction writing is going well, I don’t feel the same compulsion to write here on the blog. I have to force it, and when I have to force something, I have a tendency to skip it instead. Like I said, a character flaw. I suppose the well of creativity I draw from has its limits. I can use it for writing blog posts, or stories, but when I try using it for both, it diminishes each. I noted this to myself in my journal back on May 19. I’ve been aware of it for some time, I suppose.
Back in the day–say, 2013-15–I was writing and selling fiction and writing on the blog every day, and I have looked back on that time lately wondering how it was possible then, and not possible now. The answer, I think, comes in two parts: (1) was nearly ten years younger and had more energy (and fewer kids); and (2) I didn’t hold myself to as high standards as I do today when it comes to my writing. In other words, I didn’t mind drawing from the well for both fiction and blogging. I knew what I was doing wasn’t quite as good, but I did it anyway.
I love writing for this blog, but it has also always been fairly easy for me to do it. Finding stories to tell, finding the voices of the characters, all the pieces that eventually come together, that is much harder, and more elusive. When it comes, I don’t want to lose it. And that probably explains the lack of posts these last ten days.
Back on June 27, I mentioned that after three drafts, I set aside a story I was working on in order to give me some room to think about the problems with it, especially problems in the second half. Instead, I decided to start the first draft of another story. That is what I have been working on each morning. This is a much longer story, or so it seems at this point. Since that time, I’ve got 26 handwritten pages of the story and it seems like I am just getting started. I look forward to working on it each morning. It is the first thing I do after returning from my morning walk, during the quiet time that exists in the house before everyone wakes up and starts their day.
At the same time, I have been missing writing here, and I am working on making some adjustments to my routine to ensure that I can keep it up: three posts a week, as I had been trying to do before this most recent interruption. Lists often help in this regard and I’ve listed out a bunch of topics for posts that I’ve been wanting to write. Getting ahead of things also helps, so I am determined to get several of those posts written and scheduled today–after I finish my day’s work on this story later this morning.
Currently, I am only writing for about 30-60 minutes each morning. I don’t force things if I can help it. But I am looking for ways to build my stamina when it comes to my writing. I’ll be retiring from my day job in about 9 years and once retired, I’ll have a lot more time to write, which means I’ll need the ability to sustain my writing for longer periods of time. I look at this time as practice leading up to that, the way a marathon runner might start out running a mile each morning, and working their way up from there.
Right now, I’m no marathon runner, but I hope to at least be able to get my fiction writing done each day, and get a few new blog posts published each week. We’ll see how that goes.
Written on July 10, 2022.
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June 30, 2022
A Lack of Post, Post
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" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." width="900" height="600" src="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." alt="person touching black two bell alarm clock" class="wp-image-21889" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1880w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 400w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 550w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 768w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1800w" sizes="(max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px" data-recalc-dims="1" />Photo by Stas Knop on Pexels.comWell, I didn’t get a post out first thing this morning, as I usually do. I had planned to write something this morning after I finished today’s session on the new story. But that session went long, then I had to do my workout early because the camp schedule this week has us delivering three kids to three different places at exactly the same time. And now I am wolfing down a breakfast just before making camp drop-off runs. So today, I don’t have much. I hope you’ll give me a pass.
In the meantime, there’s lots to read here. More than 7,100 posts. If you are looking for a place to start, try my curated index to the blog.
See you back here on Sunday.
Written on June 30, 2022 (at 8:41am)
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June 28, 2022
The Next Writing Project
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" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." width="900" height="506" src="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." alt="rewrite edit text on a typewriter" class="wp-image-20305" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1880w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 400w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 550w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 768w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1800w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1840w" sizes="(max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px" data-recalc-dims="1" />Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.comAs I ease myself back into fiction writing, I am trying to make some changes and adapt the way I’ve done things in the past. A few examples that I have mentioned recently:
Write the first and second drafts longhand.Mark up those drafts and add my notes in longhand as wellWrite the third draft on the computer.I used to do everything on the computer. But I like the quiet of a pen on paper in those early drafts, when I’m still trying to figure things out.
Another thing I used to do is try to get through a story to the final draft in a relatively uninterrupted sweep. That is, once I started working on a story, I wouldn’t stop until I had the final draft. That sometimes resulted in final drafts that weren’t all that good because I rushed them, or didn’t have them entirely figured out, but I had the draft done, so the story went out for submission.
This time was different. I began writing the third draft of the story on June 15 and finished it a week later. Then I spent three days just reading what I wrote and made lots of notes. By the time I’d done that I felt that the story had problems. The first half was pretty good, but the second half still needed a lot of work. I sent the draft to my friend Michael for feedback. His feedback was perfectly aligned with my own. What do to?
In the past I would have tried to brute force my way through the next draft, but as I still am trying to figure things out, I didn’t think that would work. Instead, I have decided to stick the draft in a drawer for a while and allow it to percolate in the back of my mind until something comes up. Something usually does. In the meantime, I don’t want to lose momentum on this new writing phase, so this morning, I began (in that same notebook), the first draft a new story. This one is likley to be longer than the first, which means that by the time I finish the draft, I might just be ready to return to the first story and maybe know how to make it work.
Fiction writing has always been hard work for me. It may not seem difficult to sit down with a notebook and scribble away, but the physical act of writing is the easiest part. The difficult part, for me, is figuring out what the story is about, who’s telling the story, capturing the voice, hooking the reader and keeping them interested through the end, and then delivering an ending that is worthwhile. But it is fun work, too.
Written on June 27, 2022.
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June 26, 2022
Def Leppard Radio–And My Favorite Band
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" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." width="900" height="600" src="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." alt="people at concert" class="wp-image-22707" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1880w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 400w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 550w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 768w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1800w" sizes="(max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px" data-recalc-dims="1" />Photo by Vishnu R Nair on Pexels.comFavorites can be finicky things. As a kid I had this idea that “favorite” meant exclusive. There could be only one favorite friend, or TV show, or band. With age and wisdom I learned that favorite is a grouping. There can be more than one. All the better if there is more than one. Still, I never satisfies my kids when they ask me for my favorite food and I tell them that, like my favorite music, it depends on my mood.
Recently, I discovered that SiriusXM had a limited-time Def Leppard channel. Unusual for me, I feel like I have been listening to it constantly all week. I can usually spend 4-5 hours a day listening to audiobooks. This past week, however, all my listening has been on the Def Leppard channel. I think it is fair to say they are among my favorites.
Sometime in the first half of 1983 my brother and I got a copy of the Pyromania album. I suspect that I had heard of Def Leppard before that album, but that was our first real rock album and we played it over and over again. There isn’t a bad song on that album, the first of 3 albums that have fantastic energy. I remember seeing the video for “Photograph” when it came out on MTV. “Photograph” is one song I love to play really loud.
In the summer of 1987, Hysteria was released and that is probably my favroite Def Leppard album, and one of my all-time favorite albums, period. “Pour Some Sugar On Me” was all over the radio that summer. The summer of 1987 was my last “free” summer. I was 15 years old, and half a year later, I got a work permit and began working in a stationary store after school a few days a week, and on weekends. Beginning in the summer of 1988, I was working, and I’ve been working at one job or another ever since. So the album reminds me of those last carefree days before I started working.
My favorite song from that album is “Hysteria.” That songs reminds me of the good times I had with my high school friends–still among my best friends–on Friday and Saturday evenings. After I began working, and had some cash of my own, some of my first purchases were the cassettes of Def Leppard’s first two full-length albums: On Through the Night (1980) and Hgh ‘n’ Dry (1981). I remember listeing to the latter over and over again on the bus ride to school. The former, On Through the NIght, has my favorite Def Leppard song. More on that shortly.
I seem to recall that “Tear It Down” from the Adrenalize album was released long before the album came out. There was a five-year gap between Hysteria and Adrenalize thanks to some bad luck the band had: the death of Steve Clark partway through making the album. I was a sophemore in college when the album finally came out. This is a completely fun album, it seems to me, not nearly as serious as either Pyromania or Hysteria.
I’ve never been quite as fond of the albums after, say, Retro Active as I have the earlier ones. That said, there are some great gems among them. And one side-effect of listening to the Def Leppard channel on Sirius XM, I have had a chance to listen to their new album, Diamond Star Halos, and I liked it more than I expected to.
For me, Def Leppard’s music is good for just about anything. I frequently listen to it when I work out–it has great energy for cardio. It also makes good writing music. I don’t listen to music when writing first drafts, but will occasionally listen to music on subsequent drafts. Def Leppard is a go-to.
Oh, and my all-time favorite Def Leppard song? It is a deep cut that I have never once heard played on the radio, not even on the Def Leppard channel on SiriusXM. The song is “Overture,” the final track on On Through the Night.
Written on June 23, 2022.
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