Progress Report on my new novel. Monday March 23. 2020.

Monday, March 23. 2020.

Here is the great thing about being a novelist, or thinking you’re one --

You create and inhabit your own world, so that when the real world crashes, burns, and smolders, it’s not such a big deal. I am now building and inhabiting a new world full of my own characters, and so what’s going on with disease and war, poverty and homelessness, seems like a report from our colony on Mars -- interesting, but not terribly relevant to my current circumstances. I hope that doesn’t sound too cold hearted, but a novelist cannot serve two masters. At least, not THIS novelist.

And of course I can always assuage my conscience with my daily cooking. I made a dashing beef stew in the slow cooker yesterday, which pleased me immensely. But I was peeved no end by a woman here in the building who likes to gush over what a saint I am for cooking meals for others. She gets on my nerves. She offered to make a big pan of corn bread for Sunday dinner. I told her no thanks I like doing it all myself, but she started to get teary eyed and said it would help her work through her depression, so I said sure go ahead we eat at noon. She never made the darn corn bread and never told me she hadn’t done it.

Now I’ll stop myself right there, because I realize this is a digression -- and I want to save my digressions for the novel itself. One of my favorite books of all time is Laurence Sterne’s ‘Tristram Shandy.’ And that’s nothing BUT digressions. I’ve been reining in my digressions with my recent poetry and flash fiction, but with a big fat meandering novel I can really let loose and wander about to my heart’s content. I’m a regular Thomas Wolfe.  

 But you can soon decide for yourself it you like that style of story telling, because I finished another thousand plus words yesterday, bringing the first chapter nearly to a close. All I have left is a little bit of character exposition to establish the mood and indicate the path of future events to build reader interest. So you should have the first chapter tonight. You lucky devils!

One stumbling block that has already occurred is that one of the ancillary characters is threatening to take over the entire story. We can’t have that! So even though he’s a fascinating old cuss (I wonder who he’s based on?) I have downsized both his dialogue and relevance to the story. In fact, I’m steeling myself to kill him off about halfway through the novel -- hopefully by then the protagonist will have developed and matured enough to not need a gang of seedy characters capering around him to build and keep reader engagement in his story.

And let me reiterate -- there will be absolutely NO characters whatsoever in my novel with the name of Marilyn. Period. End of story. 

Walk Together

 Can two walk together, except they be agreed?
Amos 3:3

Do not be a step ahead, or be a step behind;

but walk in tandem with the Lord and all those so aligned.

Isolated though we are by a modern virus,

we can walk together still, if we are desirous.

If our hearts go hand in hand with helping all our neighbors,

God will bless us as a group for our righteous labors.

Progress Report on my new novel. Sunday, March 22, 2020.

Yesterday I managed to whip up just over a thousand words to start my new novel. I named the protagonist and began introducing the reader to his thoughts and his associates.

It’s an amazing feeling to begin a vast new enterprise like a novel. It bucks you up no end, gives you that frisky Tolstoy-like feeling that makes you want to put pink ribbons in your hair. I imagine Tolstoy did that quite often at the end of a long day of steady writing. His novels, of course, run well over six hundred pages, more than two-hundred-thousand words. Me, I don’t aspire to that kind of bulk, not this time around. I’m looking at around fifty-thousand words. Which, at my present rate of production, a thousand words per day, should put me over the finish line in about two or three months. I don’t believe in writer’s block. I also don’t believe much in plot lines and character development, as will become apparent as you are privileged to begin reading my magnum opus.

Oh, by the way -- from now on, when you refer to me to other people, please do so as “the novelist,” not as “the circus clown” or “lazy old bum.”

And for those of you who responded to my initial email by asking if my new novel would be about Marilyn -- no, it will not. And pick your minds out of the gutter.

After I finished my thousand words yesterday I got out a dog-eared notepad I’d been using to prop my bedroom door open and began recording ideas and making notes for future episodes. In my excitement and creative ferment I didn’t bother with coherency, so this is what my notes looked like:

Use babs

Mudbirds and have a Puddle Bat somewhere

Remember to go back to the statue of the angel sneezing -- make it a plot point.

Just keep reading and stop speculating

Daydreams never buttered any toast

Give snork a bunch of wives

Don’t give away the bumpsies till the end

Breakfast not dinner is what’s for dinner

Make the pineapple tree stop, who can do that?

Make a game of the horse eating, maybe a sledgehammer or rhino.

The story is an inverted pyramid starting with one person and blobbing frot mishmaw gpoel . . . . 

(my cursive has never been very good at the best of times; I’m afraid it degenerated badly after this entry, so I can’t make heads nor tails of anything else I wrote yesterday.)

And thus are you privy to the genesis of my new novel. What an honor for you!

Of course, I imagine some of you are saying to yourselves “Why doesn’t the poor knucklehead just write the novel already? We don’t need all these trifles! It’s a waste of time.”

To which I must reply -- indeed you DO need these trifles, as do I. Having written several novels in the past, I now conclude that process is as important as product. Report the process in detail, and the novel will practically write itself.

In fact, I just now figured out what ‘frot mishmaw gpoel’ means . . . so I gotta go to work on it.

Tune in again tomorrow for more literary illumination.

***********************

An email response from a professor at BYU:

I just figured out who you remind me of, at least in your literary product: James Joyce, especially in Finnegans Wake.

Or to do it more in his style:

littery product, Jimmy JoyceJoyce - especialement in Finnegans Wake I just figuratively outed hoo, hoo you hoo remind me of the most at lees tin yer

And the email response from a friend in Hawaii:

No Marilyn.  Hmmm.

I like those stories because the subjects seem more human and real, though humorously strange.  Maybe your fiction will be the same.

Postcard to my President. Sunday March 22, 2020.

The foolishness of God

Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
1 Corinthians 1:25

A fool sees only other fools,

like fish see only other schools;

thus harebrained pride usurps the place

of sacred converse face to face.

A weak man fears the light of day,

because it shows the harder way

for him to find great majesty --

he'd rather shun eternity.

Absurd the word of God may seem

to those afraid to hope and dream;

but Christ is not a weakling dunce.

He'll come in glory all at once!

Be of good courage.

Be strong and of a good courage, fear not, nor be afraid of them: for the Lord thy God, he it is that doth go with thee; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.
Deuteronomy 31:6

With trouble all around us,

God will never sound retreat.

Though institutions crumble,

all His promises are sweet.

He never fails in doing

all His sacred will proposes;

and we will grow true courage

as our trust in Him reposes.

Fear is not an option

when we serve our mighty Lord;

His word is like the lightning

and a double sided sword.

Those who stand beside him

in this world of dismal peril,

will find his promise of relief

is full, while doubt is sterile.

Only trust in Jesus Christ

as Lord of all creation,

and you will never waiver

in your joy and celebration!

and then the mayonnaise ran out

And then the mayonnaise ran out. It wasn't until I was in my late fifties that I actually learned how to spell 'mayonnaise' correctly, and now it was gone. Gone from my pantry, gone from the grocery shelves, gone from my life. Gone from the planet.

I never found out who made this vast executive decision, who had the authority and the audacity to simply snap their fingers and stop the production of mayonnaise forever. I shudder to think what else that person might have done with their terrifying power.
Ban the color pink?
Pave the streets with paper clips?
Make chives the national anthem?
Force baseball players to train football players during the off season?

It's enough to make a man feel sleepy right after a heavy dinner.

When I realized there would never be a bottle of mayonnaise sitting on my pantry shelf again, smug and reassuring as lares and penates, I went a little crazy. I broke into a lumber yard at night to sleep naked on a pile of sawdust. I ground sea shells into a paste to brush my teeth with. And I grew tomatoes in a "No Tomatoes" zone. For that last one I was hauled before a judge and told to leave the township pronto if I valued my pelt.

So I began my wanderings among the Stick People. They live on the margins of society, often depicted by imaginative children as nothing but thin black lines and wobbly circles with smiley faces. But in reality they are a fascinating segment of society that have been neglected and abused for far too long. They make all our bottle caps, having lost their cork farms to the besom of modern technology. Just a hundred years ago they were happy and bucolic  agriculturalists living independently on their cork farms, tending the tender little cork shoots and nourishing them into the sturdy stoppers that kept all our bottled beverages safe and sound. But today they are aimless migrants, settling down like a flock of starlings for a few days or weeks to produce bottle caps, and then taking off again with a giant 'swoosh' when the neighbors complain and bang pots and pans together at them.

I traveled with them, trading my steeplejack skills for room and board, mourning out my days. Then I heard the news, a faint whisper on the breeze that came from nowhere and everywhere:  There was mayonnaise to be had again, in certain obscure places down near the Equator. To be had, that is, for those willing to pay the price.

So I rubbed elbows with the Stick People and headed to the Equator. But the price, when I got there, was steep indeed. I lost a finger in Bogota. My left eye in Singapore. All my hair in Nairobi. And my heart in Fortaleza. She was the daughter of a campesino, fiery and defiant, willing to cross any line, abandon any scruple, in order to escape the crushing poverty of the chicle mines. 

She told me of a sleepy village where salad dressing was to be found -- and, she implied with a toss of her crinkly curls, where there's salad dressing there's bound to be mayonnaise. I believed her, so we boarded the China Clipper for a haircut before leaving, hitching a ride with a wallaby drover over the unswept plains of Andalusia to a small jerkwater village that had remained uncorrupted by modern technology and free from capricious government mandates. And there we found it -- the very last jar of Hellman's. 

But before I could prepare my first ham on rye I was struck down by beri-beri. I lay senseless for a week, with Fernanda, my inamorata, constantly by my side, fanning me with a pineapple.  When I finally came to my senses I learned that Fernanda had thrown the jar of Hellman's onto the flames as an offering to the jungle gods for my recovery. Superstitious brat.

I had cut some shady deals while tracking down that jar of Hellman's, and now they came back to bite the hand that fed them. The birdseed cartel demanded their ostrich back. And when I was slow giving them the bird, they got all tectonic on me. And that's when Fernanda really proved her worth.
She danced for them until they cut my head off. 

Postcard to my President

These are handmade and original cardstock postcards I mail to the President, c/o the White House, each week day.
It is my goal to mail one each day to the President of the United States for the rest of my life.
Enjoy.

When the time is right, we will strike!

Walking down a deserted street, where the grass was beginning to sprout, I saw a man in the distance, beckoning to me.
I didn't recognize him, so I took my time ambling his way. He wore a tan trench coat and his black hair was mussed up something terrible. The closer I got to him, the less I liked anything about him. He finally grew impatient at my slow pace and headed towards me, but when he did that I turned around and walked away from him.

"Wait!!" he yelled at me. "Don't go! I have something important to tell you!" 

"You can tell me from right there, bub" I said, a good thirty feet away from him.

"Can I come up and whisper it in your ear?" he asked.

"Nope. Stay where you are, or I'll bash you with my coal shovel."
I had taken to carrying a heavy cast iron coal shovel with me whenever I went out for a stroll. Just in case something like this occurred. I waved the coal shovel around my head in a menacing manner.

"Oh" he whined, " this shouldn't be said in public. Not yet. Not now."

"Go ahead" I said calmly. "Spit it out."

"Fudge!" he said. "Guess I'll just have to do it."
He hunched his shoulders together and cupped his hands around his mouth.
"When the time comes, we will strike!" he hissed at me. Then he ran away from me, zig-zagging back and forth across the street like a mad man -- but he was in no danger of being struck by a car, since there were none on the roads anymore.

There was a cop down on the corner who had watched the two of us. Now he came up to me. He came right up to me, the dumb flatfoot. I decided not to assault him with my coal shovel, though I was sorely tempted. 

"What did that guy say?" he asked me, keeping an eye on my shovel. I could tell he wanted to write me a ticket or take me to jail for carrying it, but hadn't quite figured out what the charge would be.

"He said 'when the time comes, we will strike'" I told him flatly.

"What did he mean by that?" the cop asked me in a neutral voice.

"No idea" I replied, matching his tone. "Never saw the guy before in my life, and I don't keep track of the time anymore." 
I showed the cop my right and left wrists to prove I didn't carry a watch anymore. 

The cop's eyes glowed with an unhealthy excitement. Placing his rough red hand on my shoulder, he whispered hoarsely: "He's right, you know. When the time is right, we will strike!"

Then the cop walked away -- too quickly for me to raise my shovel and bean him, which I wanted badly to do after he so blatantly violated my private space.

I took off my violated jacket and tossed it in a nearby trash can. It started to rain. I was getting a chill, so I walked into a nearby drug store, where the glaring neon lights advertised TBH oil at half price. I found a cheap plastic poncho and took it to the guy in the white coat behind the thick plexiglass shield at the cash register. He had a large red button on the lapel of his lab coat, which read
 I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING I SHOULDN'T. 

I couldn't stop myself. To his query did I find everything, I archly replied: "When the time comes, we will strike!"

He nodded his head, rang up my purchase, wrapped it in a banana leaf, and leaned into the plexiglass until his nose looked like it was made of Silly Putty.

"The new password is 'Chittagong has fallen' he whispered to me. "And ditch the shovel, dum-dum; you want the cops to catch on to you?"

"How much will you give me for it?" I asked him promptly. Because, you see, this was a new age in which money happened in many strange new ways.

"I'll give you a thousand dollars, hard cash, right here and now" he said, pulling open the cash register drawer as he spoke.

When I was back on the rainy deserted street, with my poncho on and a thousand smackers in my pocket, I decided it was time to strike.

So I went home and made waffles, then lay down on the floor for a nap. But when I woke up, the strike was over. We won. But taxes became much higher.

Photo Essay: Return to Fresh Market

Last Thursday I went over to my local supermarket, Fresh Market, to pick up a few items. But by then the Panic had set in and the lines literally reached out the sliding doors, so I shrugged my shoulders and back home, sans toothpaste, bread, and eggs. 
I haven't been back there in four days; I kept hearing it was complete bedlam and everything was out of stock. This evening I decided to venture forth, and take my camera with me. At least tonight here were no long lines. Here is the result: