Reading and Writing

I didn’t start out as a reader. As a kid, I was more interested in being outdoors riding my bike, walking in the woods, playing with friends, those sorts of things. Now that I think about it, I believe there was a time when I was something of an extrovert. I believe what changed me, introverted me, was all the moving we did as a family. If you go back and read the first entry in this blog, you’ll learn about my life in Chicago, where I was born. I wasn’t there long before we moved to a suburb outside of Chicago and from there to Peoria and then to East Peoria and then back to Peoria where we stayed until I graduated from high school. At that point the whole family moved to the Colorado mountains. I soon moved out of my parent’s home and headed down the mountain to Denver where I stayed for a few years. I then moved back up into the mountains where I met the woman who has been my wife for the last 37 years. Her and I lived in the mountains for several years and then we moved to Hollywood, California, stayed there a few years and then we moved a few miles east to where we live now. With all the moving around, I was never in one place long enough to develop any of those life-long friendships that I envy in people like my wife. I was always the new kid in town. I guess that took its toll on my willingness to get out and meet new people and make new friends. I didn’t figure it was worth the effort since I wouldn’t be around long enough to get to know them very well or establish much of a relationship. By the time I got to Peoria for the second time, I discovered the companionship and comfort that can sometimes be found in a good book. Like Matilda, in the Roald Dahl book by that name, I learned that I wasn’t alone. There were others like me in the world. And so I read. I read a lot. I read through a number of Charles Dickens books; I read Steinbeck; I read lots and lots of classics. I still own some of those books, and though the pages are yellowed and brittle, I still occasionally re-read them. My sophomore year in high school was the year I took up playing guitar. I didn’t do nearly as much reading after that because I also had a girlfriend. She and I dated off and on until I left Peoria. I probably would have married her if I had stayed there; and we probably would have made each other miserable and led lives of quiet despair or something of the sort. As it is, we both have been happily married to other people for many, many years and I’m sure we are much better off because of it. I’ve lost track of her now, but I recall fondly the times when we were good with each other. She’s the one who got me started on writing. I wrote pages and pages of really bad blank verse poems to and about her. I wrote songs for her and sang them to her. When I left Peoria and moved to Colorado, I started reading again. I had to. It was the only thing that kept me sane. I missed her. I would call her and talk to her for hours. The family was on a party line at that time, so I had to call her from a pay phone in town. We lived up the canyon a couple of miles, so I had to drive into town. I would buy a roll of quarters and call her from a pay phone in the parking lot of a gas station. It was often very cold in that phone both and we would run out of things to say, but I hung on that phone as long as she would let me. The operator would interrupt us for time to time and ask for more money which I gladly fed into the coin slots. It was better than nothing, but not very much better. I felt very sorry for myself and very alone. Reading helped with that. And music. I would stack up a whole pile of vinyl records, plug in my headphones, open a book and drown my sorrows in the music and the stories. It helped. Absence only “makes the heart grow fonder” for a short time and then you grow apart. Your lives diverge. You are forced by the time stream to move on along with your life. The pain of the separation slowly fades, not away, but fades enough to be bearable. It’s never completely gone, though, that pain, not even most of a lifetime later. There is that tiny little lingering regret of something lost that could have been. The stories and the music helped make that more bearable. The reading and the music stayed with me after that, no matter what else I did. With a book and my guitar, I could survive. I stopped writing bad poetry and started writing bad songs. Not really bad ones, but very mediocre ones. The people I played them for were too polite to tell me how bad they were, but I knew. I played them anyway. I spend a lot of time alone and sometimes the books weren’t enough. I craved some human companionship, but I really had no idea how to go about finding someone to talk to or play with or whatever people do with each other. I could play the guitar and sing, though, so I did that. If I had a guitar in front of me, it wasn’t so scary to be around people. We could talk about music. I could play them a song. Sometimes they even liked the song. I played other peoples songs, too, Dylan, folk singers, pop music that I liked. I could do that. I can still do that. I kept reading. I discovered science fiction. I’ve read quite a lot of that over the years. I have five or six hundred sci-fi books in my library right now. It’s good. I read so much of it that I decided to try my had at writing some. I wrote a few short stories that I thought were fairly good. They weren’t, but I was learning how to tell a story. If you read enough stories, you can, perhaps, learn the technique of telling one yourself. That’s what I’ve been told. About that same time, I discovered country music. It wasn’t very different from the folk music of my teen years and I liked the stories it told. I leaned to play and sing it. And so I was reading and collecting science fiction books and playing country music. An unlikely combination you might think, but somehow it fit together for me. It was all about stories and the telling of them in ways that people could understand. Other things in life got in the way. There were things that needed to be done, earning a living, that sort of stuff, and I stopped writing. I never stopped reading though. And I never stopped creating. And then, a couple of years ago, I got really fed up with working for other people, being badly managed, being uncreatively employed. I decided I would work for myself, or at least do work that I enjoyed. I would go back to writing. I took to heart the advice that many writers give to people like me. Write about what you know they told me. Okay, I thought, I can do that. “What do I know about?” I asked myself. “Well, cats,” I replied. And so I wrote a short story about a cat. I uploaded it to Amazon Kindle. A few people bought it. That was encouraging, so I wrote a few more and uploaded those to Kindle, too. I began to sell a few here and there rather regularly. This was good. I could write stories, publish them myself and sell them online. Perfect. Maybe I can make a living as a writer and never have to learn sales and marketing. One of my internet friends and I collaborated on a book, “The Tenth Life.” And then we collaborated with another artist to create a cover for the book. We had it printed in paperback. It was beautiful. Not very many people bought it. That’s because not very many people even knew it existed. And that led me back to what I am the worst at – sales and marketing. We gave away lots of copies and got some excellent reviews, but we still didn’t sell very many books. We converted it to an e-book and uploaded it to Kindle. Like my short stories, a few people, now and then, buy copies, but not very many. Certainly not enough for me to make a living at it. Still, I had written and published a book. I decided that if I could write one book then I could write another one. I wrote the next one by myself. It took a while, but when I finished it, I was quite pleased with the result. I created my own cover art for it from photos that I had taken. I self-published it through an Amazon company called Create Space. It is called “Zombies, Cats and Heroes.” It turned out very well, I think. Of course, now I am back to the problem of sales and marketing, and I am still not at all good at either, so making money from the book is going to be difficult. Again, I gave away lots of copes and got some very nice reviews, but not very many people know about this one either. There are a lot of books out there and mine are like drops of water in the ocean, they add something to the total volume but are essentially invisible in the sea of other books. I haven’t given up, though. I have written two books. How many people have done that? Several people have, of course, but not a great many. I have that much going for me, now. I know I can write a good book. I’m working on third one, and there is a sequel scheduled for the first one. Michael and I will write that one in April. He and I have never met in person, only over the internet, but we’ve already written one good book. There is no reason why we can’t write another one. So, if you were wondering what I’ve been up to for the last couple of years since I last posted on this blog. Now you know. I’m doing some other interesting things as well, but those I’ll tell you about in the next post.