Byron Edgington's Blog, page 14

Writing contests--Scam or Opportunity?

There are more writing contests out there than you can shake a pencil at. Just Google writing contest and be ready for an avalanche of 'opportunities' to send writing venues a little money for consideration of publication. Are they legit? A scam? A fine way to dispose of your disposable income? Yes, yes, and yes. Then there are a few that are indeed legitimate venues for writers to submit to, lit-mags and on-line offerings that may publish stuff we can legitimately put on a CV as 'published work.' Gemini on-line is one of these that's worth considering. Gemini isn't free. Last I checked they charged $3.00 per submission. And they won't publish hack work, so I'd say legit. Go to Duotrope for a long list of venues, some fee-based, some free, all categorized by genre, submission guidelines, deadline etc. Duotrope is also a fine way to track submissions and check back on them, an archive of writing samples. The site itself is free, though they welcome whatever donations they can garner to keep paying the bills. Poets & Writers also lists many contests, most fee-based, all legit. It's easy to get scammed in the writing game--agents who charge reading fees are a common example. But most contests and lit-mags looking for content are above suspicion, and a good way to test the water.

An Unintended Consequence of Climate Change

Yesterday I read a piece about how much more productive writers are in chilly, wet, Northern climates. The writer of the article cited Ireland as an example of this phenomenon. The Island known for its rainy, moistly-forbidding climate gave us the likes of Shaw, Yeats, Byrne, Joyce, Wilde, Swift and on and on. Besides Patricia Cornwell, Dave Barry and Thomas Harris, who ever heard of a noted writer from Florida? Plus, Barry was born in New York, and Harris in Tennessee. The point is, that chilly, foggy climes are conducive to writerly pursuits, places like Seattle, Maritime Canada (Annie Proulx) and the aforementioned Emerald Isle. So blah, blah, blog you say. So what? Here’s yet another reason we should all be concerned about climate change. Global warming may have the unintended consequence of reducing literary talent and the writing of classic literature. A paranoid rant? I hope that’s all it is, ’cause I call myself a writer but I’m sure as hell not moving to Iceland. Ohio is cold enough for me. Or at least it used to be.

The power of words

Today is the birthday of Alan Paton. Cry the Beloved Country was Paton's tribute to his beloved South Africa, a country he envisioned with a bright future, and filled with opportunity for all its citizens, black and white. The book's most famous passage contains both promise and foreboding, and is almost chilling in its subtle admonition: "Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear." These are words that foreshadow, many years before apartheid, what sinister use too much love of country can have. Words do matter. We writers understand this perhaps better than anyone. Beyond 'show don't tell,' an even more important message to would be writers is simple: tell the truth. We marvel today at the seemingly eternal nature of FaceBook postings, Tweets, Tumblr messages and the like. But people still read Beowulf, Chaucer, Dante and Hemingway, and will for a very long time. We read those writers because their words are powerful, and moving--and true. That power is in every writer's hands. So we need to use it well.

Boys will be... From Chapter 11 The Sky Behind Me...

Excerpted from Chapter 11 of The Sky Behind Me, a Memoir of Flying and Life. My flying colleagues and I had a pet in Vietnam. His name was Smokey. He was a dog. He was also a drunk.
    
         When we weren’t playing with fire, or flying, which activities were often the same, we drank. And, like boys the world over, we had a dog. Unlike most boys, we got ours drunk, almost every night. Smokey was a Vietnamese version of the Heinz 57 dog, several varieties, none of them dominant. Smokey the alcoholic pup was part beagle, part terrier, shnauzer, pit-bull, on and on. He was a little black dog with white-ish feet, and ears that stuck straight up, except when he’d been imbibing. I’m not sure where Smokey came from. He likely wandered on base looking for scraps of food. Ever the cynical GIs in an Oriental setting, we joked that the pup came in fear of his life, to escape a Mamasan’s wok. Regardless of where he came from, Smokey settled right into the company. We adopted him, and made him official pet of the Comancheros. And fit right in he did; Smokey loved his beer.
    Of an evening, after the flying was done and the war closed down for the day, we’d retire to the ‘O’ club. Soon the sound of snapping beer tabs filled the dim room, and suds flowed like water. Georgia Peach, Tony Lowe seemed to be in charge of Smokey’s entertainment, and vicariously of ours. Tony spilled PBR directly onto the bar, and the little pooch lapped it up. Little did I know at that age that dogs have the same affinity for booze as their best friends. Smokey drank, and lapped, and drank some more, with predictable results. It wasn’t long before Smokey’s ears sagged, and his beady little eyes crossed. Soon the little dog’s already too short legs would no longer reach the top of the bar, and he had to stoop to find it. So, his canine manners somewhat better than ours, he took one last slurp, his furry little knees buckled, and Smokey went nighty night, sweet dreams little pooch. Cheap drunk. Hair of the dog, one might say.  
    We waited for the intoxicant to work its magic on ‘ol Smokey. When it did, and his little peepers yawed out of trim and then shut down, we’d roar with laughter at the animal’s almost too perfect imitation of the likes of us. Despite his drinking problem Smokey was a great little dog. Tony had ideas of taking him back to Georgia when he, Tony, left Vietnam. Alas, it was not to be. Rest his beer-soaked soul, Smokey succumbed, (from cirrhosis of the liver?) at the tender age of three, which is twenty-one in dog years. Oblivious men that we were, the chilling similarity never occurred to any of us that Smokey was, in fact, our age. We buried Smokey on the flight line where, with every takeoff, we tipped our helmets to a real, hard-drinking pal.

Why we write memoirs

We write memoirs more for ourselves than others.
I learned to fly in a Hughes TH-55 like the one below. It's a little machine that in flight school, we called the Mattel Messerschmitt. Like a lot of things in life the Hughes was both simple and exotically complex. It had two seats, a six-cylinder engine, held twenty-five gallons of fuel and could fly for two hours. Simple as it looked the Hughes would kill you as soon as look at you. It was overpowered, twitchy as hell and completely unforgiving. In other words the perfect training helicopter. If you can fly the Hughes, you can fly anything. I’d never flown anything before that wasn’t made of balsa wood, and every one of those play airplanes crashed, so… But I did learn to fly the TH-55 helicopter, soloed in June 1969 and went on to fly Hueys in Vietnam. It’s all in the memoir, and it’s all in my mind from almost fifty years ago, the fragile details falling away little by little. I guess that’s why people write memoirs, more for ourselves than others, to preserve, however flimsy, those memories that erode like balsa wood as our lives teach us new and perhaps better things, as life goes from simple to exotic and we gain wisdom.

**Don't forget the .99 Cent sale Monday--TSBM E-book on Amazon/Kindle just .99 Cents for 24 hours.

The Big 99 Cent E-book Sale!

I've worked it out with my publisher and Amazon, and here's the deal. Monday January 14th--The Sky Behind Me, a Memoir of Flying and Life available for 24 hours for .99 Cents. This is the E-book for Kindle readers. Look for the 99 Cent price starting at 10 a.m. Monday and please let me know what you think. I need the three 'R's every author needs: Readers, Reviews and yes, ahem, Raves.
Save the date: 1/14/13--The Sky Behind Me E-book for 99 Cents. You can't buy a cup of hot water for that.
Thanks!

Nobels in Literature

What do struggling writers, which is most of us, have in common with the likes of Pearl S. Buck, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, Sinclair Lewis? Other than using the English language to try to make lightning strike not very much. Those listed authors all won a Nobel Prize for literature on January 8th. The Nobel folks don’t hand out those prizes like candy, of course, so it’s quite an honor to receive one for anything, but especially for literary merit. Why? Because there are a lot more writers out there than, say, physicists, or chemists or economists. And writing is, by and large, a self-taught, nose-to-the-grindstone affair. Writing is something which, depending on one’s viewpoint, can or cannot be taught–just learned. So earning a writing prize of any kind is pretty special. On this date in literary history we writers should step back, take a look at one of the classics–Farewell to Arms, The Good Earth, Light in August, Lolita (yes, gorgeous writing despite the topic) or perhaps a read through of O’Neill’s seminal work Long Day’s Journey into Night. A common thread found in the writing of those giants of literature is simplicity. Take Benjy in The Sound and the Fury. Benjy is retarded. Simple. He tells the story in such elegantly simple terms that, guess what, we all understand it. Frederick Henry walked away from the dead Catherine in the rain. Simple human emotions there. So maybe the Nobel committee looks for simplicity? Could be that simple. And that’s a bit encouraging.The K.I.S.S principle works for writing, too.

Air Med Accidents

In the last three weeks there have been two fatal Air Medical helicopter accidents. Both of these accident killed three people, though no patients. There’s been no official word on the cause of these tragic accidents released as yet, so any comment is pure speculation. But I can add insights into the operation and procedures involved in that business. I sat in the cockpit of an Air Medical helicopter for twenty years. I flew in one of the harshest environments in the country, the middle of Iowa, in all kinds of weather, day and night, hot and cold. In that time I flew 3,200 patient missions. My book, The Sky Behind Me, a Memoir of Flying and Life contains many insights into the system of Air Medical helicopters in this country. What happens when a launch request comes in to the dispatch office? What protocols must a pilot follow? What are the medical considerations involved in flying a patient, or not? What kind of weather precludes flying? TSBM addresses many of those issues, and contains some of the challenges and safety factors inherent in that mission.

Bailey Prize for 2012

Everybody loves winning prizes–even at Bingo, or Lotto, or those scratch-n-win games that reward us a dollar for every three dollars spent winning them. Yes, there’s a reason we don’t hear of Vegas casinos going bankrupt. But writing prizes are different. BTW--Lift Off is in the 2012 edition of The Chrysalis Reader offered by

Looking back--Looking ahead

In the news I read about two fatal Air Medical helicopter accidents in the past three weeks. One in Illinois, one in Northern Iowa, three fatalities in each one, though neither had a patient aboard. Reading those reports took me back to some of the chapters in The Sky Behind Me, a Memoir of Flying and Life . As an Air Med pilot for twenty years I ache to read about those crashes, and to think about what was happening in those cockpits in the last seconds before impact. My companion book is in the works. Titled ER in the Sky, the book deals with not only the history, operation, protocols and contingencies of those Air Medical–or what many people label ‘Life Flight’ helicopters. It also offers a comprehensive solution to the ongoing tragic problem of fatal accidents with which the Air Med industry has plagued since its inception in the late seventies. ER In the Sky will be available by mid 2013.