What Irony is

I sit looking out my window- at the leaves on the ground, the smoldering fire, the sun rising. The weather has turned cool and I revisited this forgotten blog. I found it truly ironic that I posted the Charles Bukowski No Excuses piece shortly before I abandoned the process myself in pursuit of other things. It has been 1,389 days since I have written anything. Perhaps this will be an awakening, or perhaps an interlude before returning to sleep. Time will tell.

1000 words today

Think of all the reasons to do something else. Think of all the things you could be doing right now. Think of how long you have been working at this. Think of how long you have been not working at this. Think of people before you who were not dissuaded and met with success. Think of those who climb into rockets and upon mountains, those who sail ships and fly airplanes, those who hike across jungles and deserts, those who cross rivers and oceans, all those who dare to do. Does this seem too big of a challenge?

‘Excuses’, Charles Bukowski

once again
I hear of somebody who is going to
settle down and
do their work,
painting or writing or whatever,
as soon as they get a better light
installed,
or as soon as they move to a new
city,
or as soon as they come back from the trip they
have been planning,
or as soon as …

it’s simple: they just don’t want
to do it,
or they can’t do it,
otherwise they’d feel a burning
itch from hell
they could not ignore
and “soon”
would turn quickly into
“now.”

T.S. Eliot

The Waste Land

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering	5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,	10
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,	15
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,	20
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,	25
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.	30
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;	35
They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,	40
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Öd’ und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,	45
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.	50
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.	55
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
Unreal City,	60
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.	65
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying “Stetson!
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!	70
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!	75
You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

WasteLand

Return to the Grail Menu of The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester

WASTE LAND

by

MADISON CAWEIN

Briar and fennel and chincapin,
   And rue and ragweed everywhere;
The field seemed sick as a soul with sin,
   Or dead of an old despair,
   Born of an ancient care.

The cricket's cry and the locust's whirr,
   And the note of a bird's distress,
With the rasping sound of the grasshopper,
   Clung to the loneliness
   Like burrs to a trailing dress.

So sad the field, so waste the ground,
   So curst with an old despair,
A woodchuck's burrow, a blind mole's mound,
   And a chipmunk's stony lair,
   Seemed more than it could bear.

So lonely, too, so more than sad,
   So droning-lone with bees--
I wondered what more could Nature add
   To the sum of its miseries . . .
   And then--I saw the trees.

Skeletons gaunt that gnarled the place,
   Twisted and torn they rose--
The tortured bones of a perished race
   Of monsters no mortal knows,
   They startled the mind's repose.

And a man stood there, as still as moss,
   A lichen form that stared;
With an old blind hound that, at a loss,
   Forever around him fared
   With a snarling fang half bared.

I looked at the man; I saw him plain;
   Like a dead weed, gray and wan,
Or a breath of dust.  I looked again--
   And man and dog were gone,
   Like wisps of the graying dawn. . . .

Were they a part of the grim death there--
   Ragweed, fennel, and rue?
Or forms of the mind, an old despair,
   That there into semblance grew
   Out of the grief I knew?

---

NOTE: In a letter to the editor printed in the Times Literary Supplement (8 Dec. 1995, p. 14), Robert Ian Scott suggests that "the many similarities between this poem" and T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" "can hardly be coincidental." Scott notes that Eliot "had reasons to be reading" the Jan. 1913 issue of Poetry in which Cawein's poem appeared because it contained Pound's article on the poets then in London (though Eliot himself is not referred to in the article).

Gifts for writers

I Google this every year to see what new ideas the internet comes up with. Usually it's a plethora of journals, inkwells, books about writing, and writing software. Occasionally someone will think outside the box and include a USB powered coffee mug warmer or a subscription to Writer's Digest or Glimmer Train.

This year I found Chuck Wendig's terribleminds blog with a list of 25 things for writers. The list is mainly more rambling from Chuck, including a shameless plug of his own merchandise. I disagree with most of it, particularly his expressed hatred for blank notebooks. I personally write in notebooks everyday, preferring it to the computer because there are no distractions in a notebook. Of course, there could be any number of mentions about self discipline here, but there's just too many things to do with a computer to ignore. Let's not forget also that it is called writing, not typing.

Did I mention I have no idea who Chuck Wendig is? He is a writer of some sort, and I looked his books up on Amazon.com. The reviews were favorable, but I'm not sure if it's my type of work. I like Chuck Palahniuk as much as anyone, and I daresay Mr. Wendig does also.

On Wendig's blog there was a reference to Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own". I looked that up as well and found it was a fictional essay book written by Woolf about writing and feminism. I have never read Virginia Woolf, but I watch "The Hours" everytime it's on, and I wrote a play about her in college that won the "Best Play" award in my creative writing class.

What I did like about terribleminds was the apparent honesty that Wendig writes with. I have a tendency to censor myself on the internet, and it leaves me a little uncomfortable that I don't write what I think I'm going to write. I suppose this is character development, and I have yet to find the spot I am comfortable with. I choose to avoid profanity as much as possible, aware that my kids know how to use a computer.

I am reading "The Poisonwood Bible". Good book so far.

Scrivener writing software

I bought a new laptop which has Windows 8 and decided to try out a new writing software. I googled around and found Scrivener for windows, which has a 30 day free trial. I was mainly influenced by the fact that the trial is 30 days of use, not 30 calendar days. I've downloaded trials in the past and forgot about them, only to open the files later and find that the trial period had expired.

The program is quite complicated to start with, but not unlearnable. Most of the features are set up to organize, format, and export a novel, screenplay, or short story. There are nonfiction categories as well, with a great toolbar that includes research and media file folders.

The program automatically saves every draft, which for me is not necessarily a benefit because i like to keep my original rough drafts and then save multiple rewrites so I can go back and reference each evolution of the story. I believe there is a way to turn it off, but I grew bored with the extremely lengthy tutorial and proceeded to test out the software.

This led to an 850 word beginning effort on a new story which is based on a nagging thought I've had for years: the worse writing advice ever given and writers who write about writers. Stephen King is a pretty regular offender at this, and often writers who try to write characters in other professions end up seeming clunky because they have no experience in the field they are trying to portray as real.

The program is pretty good so far, with a compilation feature that allows you to export everything to Word as a rich text file while retaining a working draft in the program. The cost to activate trial version is $40.00.


GlimmerTrain competition for new writers ends this month. Final draft efforts for a short story to send in this weekend.

What surreal is

It's seeing a deflated balloon caught in the surf and wondering if it can ever be a balloon again, and shedding tears at the concept. It's fishing at night while the moon and stars shine above you and the beach is empty and there are green waves crashing around you,

and you are alone. It's finding yourself in a situation that you don't understand, a situation that you did not choose, and feeling at home. It's looking at the world around you and for once not questioning how you fit in but understanding that you don't fit in and that's okay, because there are plenty of people who do. It's that moment when you realize that, in spite of the years you have spent thinking you are different and somehow untouched, that you are in fact exactly like that which you see and you are okay with it. It's staring into the tempest and letting the sand and the saltwater blow into your face and you don't flinch because this is nature and you are part of it. It's staring unblinking at the sun. Surreal is that moment when you see all around you and you understand it and you no longer feel the need to put yourself into the context of this thing, but accept instead that you are a background and that all of this will continue with or without you. Surreal is when you finally realize that your time here is fleeting and that you will make your mark or leave no mark at all and there is nothing you can do to change this. There are other worlds than this and you were born unto this one and you have the gift of deciding how it will turn out, if you can only see what is in front of you and distinguish between what is real and what is surreal.

Tropical storm Debby brings Fifty Shades of Gray

After much hype, I finally took the time to visit Amazon.com and check out the reviews on the Fifty Shades trilogy. I captured the current standings below, as of today’s date. I haven’t actually read the books, but I did read the excerpts and found the writing was not entirely as bad as the negative reviews portray. However, I was only able to read six or seven pages, and the reviewer’s complaints seem to be mostly based upon the repetitive nature of E.L. James’s writing.

The really surprising thing I discovered is that this whole series began as fanfiction of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series. I do own a copy of the first Twilight book, but have never read it. I was inspired to purchase the book by an interview I saw on Oprah Winfrey’s show, but soon after the purchase I watched the movie and found the book too similar to read. I was a little disturbed by the obsessive relationship of Bella and Edward, and his continuous statements of how he couldn’t be with Bella yet he wouldn’t leave her alone. Not a healthy relationship, but I digress……

In studying the reviews listed below ( I did not read them all) it would seem that the first book in the series has a significantly larger input then the two sequels. The ratio of 1 star vs 5 star is 2/3rds as many bad as good, while the sequels have a roughly 1/7th as many negative reviews as positive. The in-between reviews are roughly the same proportion for each book. Nearly ten thousand people purchased the books and found the need to write a review of it, and I read many reviews of the third book that were negative, yet the person writing had read all three books. Expect the movie to do well, as did the Twilight series, and accept the fact that not all writing is for everyone, but there is a reason thousands of Harlequin books were written. I’m just not sure what it is.




Fifty Shades of Gray

7,145 Reviews

5 star:
(3,078)
4 star:
(729)
3 star:
(525)
2 star:
(627)
1 star:
(2,186)






Fifty Shades Darker


1,110 Reviews

5 star:
(739)
4 star:
(127)
3 star:
(85)
2 star:
(64)
1 star:
(95)








Fifty Shades Freed

1,041 Reviews

5 star:
(701)
4 star:
(95)
3 star:
(83)
2 star:
(54)
1 star:
(108






And just for comparison purposes……

Twilight: Book One

5,398 Reviews

5 star:
(3,397)
4 star:
(571)
3 star:
(414)
2 star:
(308)
1 star:
(708)

A weekend away from writing

Yes, I took the weekend off and spent the time planting my garden. I have some pumpkins growing which were started from the seeds of last year's jack o' lantern. Hopefully this will save me the arduous task of dropping $30.00 at the local pumpkin vendor this year. I also planted zucchini, corn, hot and sweet peppers, radishes, and onion sets. Still have a lot more to plant next weekend but curses! my roto-tiller broke and I have to affront repairs. The growing season here in Florida starts anytime it wants to, and it can get extremely hot at any point. I learned from visiting a website put out by Florida State University that the germination and flowering of plants is determined by soil temperature, not length of growing time. This explains why last year I had bean plants that had two or three leaves on them and started blooming. I planted late, and they got rather warm. Hopefully this year I am on time, but I'm two weeks later than when I wanted to start. Pictures coming...

Contest Season is upon us

2012 starts off with some good competitions available. GlimmerTrain has the Fiction Open, with a prize of $2500.00. The contest occurs four times a year , with the first in March. 

Writer's Digest has the 81st Annual Writing Competition 

 GRAND PRIZE:  $3,000 cash, a trip to the Writer’s Digest Conference in New York City, and

individual attention from 4 editors or agents.

I have three stories I am going to submit to each one,  hopefully I can lock down some prize money and get a couple by-lines for my resume. Not that I'm looking for a job, mind you. In fact, I don't even have a resume. What I do have is a box full of notebooks and manuscripts from a decade of writing that someday will go to my local community college where students will travel from all over the country to peruse through my archived scribblings. 

In the meantime, I have added a video of the ending of Factotum which contains Matt Dilon narrating these lines from Bukowski's poem "Roll the Dice". I have put the text here in case the Youtube video gets taken down, as is prone to happen.

“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”

I became a Bukowski fan in 2005 after reading "Ham on Rye." "Factotum" and "Post Office" were good as well. They are listed on my "Books I've Read" page with links to purchase them through Amazon.com if so desired.

What writing is

My Uncle Vinton was one of the most influential persons in my teenage years. He taught me to play guitar and drink whiskey without shuddering. He was a strange fellow- he once typed his own copy of Huckleberry Finn on a manual typewriter, copying from the original book. What made this strange was he actually had the book- why type a copy? Among his many obscure talents he was a guitar player, a sketch artist, and a woodcarver.

My grandfather had cut down a rogue cedar tree and Vinton claimed the trunk for his own. He cut it up into small chunks which he carved into pieces for a chess set. The carvings were very intricate- the bishop was a demon with wings, and I remember the detail of the face was such that you could see the eyebrows and the lines on the face of this small figure barely four inches tall. It was crouched down on one knee with its chin resting on one fist like the thinker, and the wings wrapped around its shoulders. I marveled at the detail and asked him "how can you carve this out of a chunk of wood?". He answered with the age old advice of " you just cut away everything that doesn't look like the bishop." Easy enough to say if you have the talent.

I have tried to apply the same principle to my writing,  I have tried to write stories that cut away everything that I am not trying to convey. I have tried, through each story written, to capture human nature in such away that no one who reads the story will doubt its validity. Granted, quality of writing will always be subjective, but some writers have achieved talent which can not collectively be denied. This, then, has been my goal: to write a story that may not be accepted by everyone who reads it as good writing, but accepted by a majority of people as such. To cut away everything that is doesn't look like the bishop.

First post of 2012

I saw this at GlimmerTrain. I found it interesting enough to repost. Also, google website is up and running.
https://sites.google.com/site/wscottbowlin/




I have an idea that some men are born out of their
due place. Accident has cast them amid strangers in
their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known
from childhood or the populous streets in which they
have played, remain but a place of passage. They may
spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred
and remain aloof among the only scenes they have
ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that
sends men far and wide in the search for something
permanent, to which they may attach themselves.
Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the
wanderer back to lands which his ancestors
left in the dim beginnings of history.
Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which
he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here
is the home he sought, and he will settle
amid scenes that he has never seen before,
among men he has never known, as though
they were familiar to him from his birth.
Here at last he finds rest.
—from The Moon and Sixpence
by W. Somerset Maugham, 1919

Poets & Writer's Magazine

     I read an essay in the Mar/April issue of Poet's & Writer's Magazine in the "Why We Write" section that described the loss of a relative. In the essay, author Lise Saffran chronicles the declining health of her grandmother and how Saffran visited her regularly, taking along her laptop to continue working during these visits. The article is very moving, and I recommend anyone who gets a chance should read it.
     At the end of the article there was a little footnote suggesting that this is an open-submission column. The intent is to write about why you continue to write " despite rejection, lack of recognition, or other challenges." Of course I wondered, at that point, why do I write? Could I get past the abstracts ( a common answer is "because I have too") and actually define what drives me to write?
      I immediately thought of a time a few years ago when I was on vacation with my family. My parents had followed us to Fredericksburg, Virginia, just outside of Washington D.C. We were staying in a hotel that had a large open atrium with an indoor pool. Every morning the hotel served hot breakfast, and I would get up before everyone else and go down to the atrium to write. One morning my father came down and joined me. He asked what I was writing, and I muttered my way through a generic explanation and closed the notebook. I told him that I was trying to write so well that if it was raining in my story, that the reader would here the rain hitting the roof and feel the temperature drop as the moisture filled the air. He nodded, and said that would be good.
     Later that year I began reading Hemingway, starting with "A Moveable Feast". I was surprised to see that Hemingway himself had stated the same thing: he wanted to write so well that what he had written became real to the person who read it, and as such, became part of their memories as if it had really happened to them.
     Of course everyone who writes should want to write well, but is that the defining reason why I write? I've often declared that what I am trying to do with a story is write something that is true to anyone who reads it. I want to capture the texture of life and emotion into a story so completely that it's better than watching a movie. But this is just a goal of writing, not a motivation to do so. Perhaps, for now, I'm still stuck with "because I can't not write."   

Workshops page

Just added a page about workshops, etc. First on the list was Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, which, according to their website, is "one of America's most valuable literary institutions." Check out those rates- I don't know for sure what you get out of the experience, but I would love to hear from anyone who has ever attended a Bread Loaf conference. If you prefer not to post a comment, send an email. Meanwhile, I am going to google search other blogs that might pertain to the Bread Loaf conference. I'll add a new entry to that page frequently.

Writing fiction

Writing fiction is truly one of the hardest things to do. You struggle along with words and sentences trying to capture an idea, a sound, a texture, convey emotion. You do this without the aid of pictures, and this seems unfair because a picture is worth a thousand words, they say, but words only get singular value. A thousand words could take an hour to compose or a week, and even then the quality of those words is subjective. If you are serious about it you want to write about everything. If you are good at it you produce a picture that a painter works his whole life searching for. Then it is worth doing.