Mark Lee Taylor's Blog

The Travails of Being an Old Fart, Part 1

This being sick stuff really sucks. It’s robbing me of days I can never get back.I’m almost 58 years old, and this is the very first time I’ve missed more than a day or two of work for being sick. I missed some time for two hernia surgeries in the nineties, a whole summer for the birth of my daughter, and last summer I was out two months with a broken hand. But this is the first time I’ve been out for an extended time just for being plain sick.It’s a humbling experience.Welcome to the rest of your life, boy. You’re old now. Best get used to it. Getting old is an irreversible process, or so I’ve heard.I now know that I’ve had pneumonia for close to a month. I didn’t know then what the symptoms meant, but now I do. I was walking around with pneumonia. Then I got the flu, or perhaps it was just the pneumonia spiking on me, but either way I lost the ability to achieve verticality for a few days. When that passed, I went to the doctor, and that’s when I learned I had pneumonia.Now I’m on some pretty jumped-up antibiotics, and we won’t talk about what they’re doing my digestive system, but let’s just say it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.The coughing never stops. I’ve heard it could go on for weeks or even months, and that scares me. I need to be the exception to that rule. I can only communicate in single syllables, because if I make a mistake and utter two syllables, the second one starts me coughing again.Sometimes (usually), a particularly brutal fit of coughing causes my body to instinctively hurl a curse word into the air at its end. If I make a mistake and use a two-syllable curse word, it immediately propels me into another coughing jag.I learned quickly. I now confine myself to single-syllable curse words when I cough, and you know the one I’m talking about. Don’t judge me. It makes me feel better. There’s no one here to be offended, except the dogs, and to be honest, the dogs are used to it. However, sometimes I feel like all those little f-bombs are still here, floating around the house like little helium balloons trapped against the ceiling. Maybe every time I open the door to let the dogs out, a few f-bombs slip out into the world to entertain someone else. God maybe, although I doubt he’d be amused at my prolific profanity.I dare him to say something about it, though. If he does, I’ve got my comeback ready. “See here, Big Dude, YOU try pneumonia for a few days and see how YOU like it. Then we’ll talk.”

Andy Solomon Delivers with a Deft Hand

I started reading this book because my daughter was in one of his classes, and I wanted to know exactly who would be shaping her emerging talent. But I finished it because I loved it and I couldn’t quit.This is not the kind of story I would typically enjoy. It’s a book about life. Friendship, falling in love and falling out of it, betrayal, family, work. It’s about relationships, about the way they grow and the many ways they can unravel. In short, it’s about all the things that could happen, and I daresay have happened, to a lot of ordinary people like me and you. Ho-hum, right? Gimme something with explosions in it.But Solomon delivers the subject matter with such a deft hand that one cannot help but be drawn into the life of Mark Hollander, at times joyful, poignant, harrowing, and hilarious. One cannot help but soar with Mark as he falls in love, and suffer with him as his marriage disintegrates. As the various subplots unfold and resolve, one rides with them, but still gets caught up in Mark’s overarching goal of finding happiness for him and for his son. This book, which I never expected to be reading in the first place, almost got me in trouble at work a couple of times because I was reading it on my phone when I shouldn’t have been. I love a discovery like that.Know what? The writer in me says there’s nothing wrong with reading a bit of literary fiction every now and then. Keeps me straight, and I might pick up a trick or two, or at least learn all the ways I fall woefully short.Solomon’s grasp of dialogue, pacing, plot, and theme are beyond reproach. He varies his sentence structure so that the prose flows naturally and smoothly. He knows what to say and what to let the reader figure out. He knows exactly when to leave a hook, and when to give us a break with a bit of comic relief. Even the formatting and editing were done well. He has all this stuff down. Which might be expected, considering he teaches writing at a university, but it’s always nice to find out your expectations have been met or exceeded.I’m happy to report that in my opinion, my daughter is in very good hands indeed.

Magic men and dashboard speakers

I woke up this morning with “Magic Man” in my head. The song, not a dude. You get it? Anyway, I got to thinking, as I lay there trying unsuccessfully to go back to sleep (it was 4:30 on a Saturday morning, for God’s sake), about what a groundbreaking song that was, in several ways.I still remember the first time I heard it. It was a morning in May or June, 1976, late in my junior year at Bel Air High, and I was not quite the music junkie I am today, but I was well on the way. I walked out of the house that morning intending to drive to school in my old piece of crap Malibu with the rust-colored roof, but Mark Jones, who lived across the street from me, called out that he was riding to school in his brother David’s badass ‘Cuda, and asked if I’d like to tag along. That car was a couple thousand pounds of American Mopar muscle the likes of which have not been seen on the streets for some forty years now, and I hopped all over the chance to get dropped off at school in it. Talk about arriving in state.Anyway, on the way there David turned the radio up loud, and “Magic Man” came on. To say I was enthralled would be an understatement. I had no idea who it was, but I knew it was a chick that was rockin’ like I never knew chicks could rock.Later on, I found out it was a band called Heart, and there were two chicks in the band, sisters, and they looked unbelievably hot on the album cover and they were like an American version of Led Zeppelin without the all the y-chromosomes.Still later, I blew my first speaker on that song. It wasn’t a good speaker, I’ll grant you. I was in my piece of crap Malibu with the rust-colored roof, and “Magic Man” came on the radio, and of course, I cranked it up as far as it would go, oblivious to the fact that at that volume the sound quality was pure shit. See, we didn’t have actual stereo systems in cars those days, at least not stock. Cars came stock with a “radio,” and if you were lucky, it had both AM and FM bands, but usually you weren’t that lucky and you had to get an “FM converter” if you wanted to listen to WKTK or, later on, 98 Rock. For speakers, you got a single low-bid speaker in the middle of the dashboard that was apparently designed for listening to AM radio talk shows and collecting small pieces of dead bugs, and not necessarily in that order.FM converters and dashboard speakers. Can you believe it? In those days, cars also had "cigarette lighters" and "ash trays." My cigarette lighter was right next to the "radio." I never used it, or the ash tray. Hey, this is my morning rambling, and I'll digress if I want to.Anyway, in the middle of "Magic Man", my dashboard speaker made some funny farting noises like a flag in a heavy wind, and then it made sort of a helpless squeak, and then it went silent. It never spoke again. Which was actually a blessing, because I had to go out and get some actual stereo speakers to mount on the package shelf, and my sound experience went up exponentially.After that, I went out and got a "cassette deck," which made me so cool, I was like James Dean on steroids. I could listen to Heart or Montrose or Alice Cooper or whoever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Then somebody stole my cassette deck while my piece of crap Malibu with the rust-colored roof was parked at Bel Air High. So I went out and got another cassette deck, and this time I put it on a "slide mount" so I could remove it whenever I left the car behind.Slide mounts. More forgotten technology. Slide mounts, FM converters, dashboard speakers, cassette decks, cigarette lighters, and “Magic Man,” and somehow in my mind this all ties together.That’s what happens when you get up at 4:30 in the morning on a Saturday.

The Next Best Thing to Being There

I first readDeath’s Headwhen it came out in installments, with breaks of several months between the four releases, and I enjoyed it so much that I decided to read it again as a unit. If anything, it was better the second time around. I’ve read several of Mr. Broomall’s novels, and they’re all good, but this one takes the cake.Robert Broomall writes with an almost magical economy of phrasing. The words he chooses, the sentences he constructs, have a certain rhythm that is difficult to describe and hard to find … but you know when you find it that this author has the gift. And that’s what makes Death’s Head such an easy read, in spite of its gargantuan length. In the hands of a less capable writer, this could have been a disaster, but Mr. Broomall has crafted a story that flows so smoothly that it’s almost impossible to put down.Mr. Broomall has an instinctual grasp of plot, setting, and dialogue. His characters are varied, well-defined, and memorable. His starkly real 12th century world is populated by people lovable, nefarious, and in-between, and all of them are consistently rendered and possess their own voice so they are easily distinguished from one another. I connected with the protagonist, Roger, immediately. From the first page I was along for the ride, following Roger on his journey (both literal and figurative) as events propelled him from England to the Holy Land to the depths of his own soul.Death’s Head is not for the faint of heart. Not only is it long, but it’s gritty and violent and frequently gruesome. It pulls no punches when portraying war, disease, poverty, famine, and corruption in the 12th century. Painstakingly researched, the novel is so realistic and immersive that I often forgot I was reading. I was there.Mr. Broomall has taken a historical epic with a cast of thousands (literally) and deftly boiled it down to a novel that somehow balances great entertainment with historical authenticity. Be prepared to get sucked into the story, but watch out … you may actually learn something along the way.

Progress report

It's about time I let people in on what's been going on.   A Pebble Tossed: The leaner, meaner version of Pebble, about 75% of its original length, is ready to go. Just finished the proofreading a few days ago. I have a new cover, with bolder lettering over the same image, which I'll release when the revised edition comes out. Dealing with some formatting issues right now before I send the thing in to be printed and published on Kindle. I am toying with the idea of submitting it to some agents

And now for the good news

First off, what a cool cover! Simple, elegant, evocative, and very representative of the book.   Finn. Wow. What an incredible feat Jon Clinch pulled off, especially for a first-time novelist. I loved this book. It’s not often I run across prose as lovely and powerful as this.   Mark Twain’s works are sacred to me, yet in spite of the few surprises Clinch dealt, I took no offense at his playing in Twain’s venerable sandbox; in fact I found it quite enjoyable to ride along as he assembled the

If you can't say something nice about somebody ...

I'm about to publish two book reviews, a good one and a bad one. I'll start with the bad news.   I wrote this one a month or so ago, and have spent the time since then dithering about whether to publish it. I was conflicted about it, because I don't like to write negative reviews. I enjoy writing glowing reviews about books that I love, and I like to support fellow authors, especially self-published ones, who need it the most. But generally speaking, I won’t torch another author, even if I think

Words you should never use in your writing

Noticed this post the other day on Diana Urban's website. A very interesting article that includes some good rules of thumb. I don't subscribe to any of them as hard-and-fast rules, though. We as writers still have to use our own heads and know when it's time for an exception.   In addition, I would add a few other words to the list, starting with "suddenly" and "immediately," both of which still show up in my writing too often.    

Pebble Revision Round 1: Complete!

  I managed to cut Pebble down from 127,000 words to 117,00 without too much pain. I simply cut out the whole Kate/Brian subplot, which went nowhere anyway. I also chopped up the chapters, so that now instead of 22 long chapters, there are 79 short ones. That alone should make the book more exciting and engaging to read.   Now that the chainsaw work is done, it's time to go to Round 2, where the work will be a little more difficult, and hence might take me longer. I'll be taking out specific[image error]

Revising Pebble

For the first time in quite a while, I went back to reread some of A Pebble Tossed yesterday. You'll never guess what I learned.   I learned that I've gotten better since I wrote it!   This is both heartening and discouraging. Heartening, because it means that all the hard work I've been putting in to improve my craft is paying off. Discouraging, because it means I have a lot of work to do to get Pebble up to snuff.   I remember when I published Pebble, I thought it was the absolute best it