In Today’s Journal
* My Quote of the Day
* A Flash Autobiography, Part 2
* Right Now, Today
* Of Interest
My Quote of the Day
“There is a certain dignity in owning one’s afflictions and abiding them in silence. To proclaim suffering is to lessen the benefit.”
A Flash Autobiography, Part 2
The Transition into Writing and TNDJ
After I met Dean Wesley Smith sometime between 1995 and 2004, the conference gigs continued.
I was still writing poetry and song lyrics and essays, and I was also teaching as an adjunct instructor in three different programs at the Roswell campus of ENMU.
I taught grunt English, English Literature, and Creative Writing for the college, plus GED prep for the Adult Ed department, plus English as a Second Language and The New Citizens’ Project for the government under the auspices of ENMU.
And I began teaching private seminars most often about language and punctuation to various local and regional critique groups and writers’ groups.
Early during those ENMU teaching gigs is when I wrote a six-page handout titled “The Rules as They Should Read.”
I used it in my college, GED, and ESL English classes in place of the expensive and overly expansive HarBrace (AKA Harcourt-Brace Jovanovich) College Handbook, which many of my students couldn’t afford. (The dean was annoyed, but the students were almost giddy.)
In one short chapter of that handout, I culled the 19 pages of comma rules in HarBrace down to five simple rules. Two of those rules mirror each other, yet following those five rules will garner an A in comma use every time.
I soon expanded that handout into my first nonfiction book: Punctuation for Writers.
The original version of PFW was published by the now-defunct Central Ave Press in Albuquerque, who a year or so later also published my second nonfiction book, Writing Realistic Dialogue and Flash Fiction.
A little later, in 1996 or thereabouts, the publisher featured WRD&FF at the Book Expo of America in New York where it placed 4th in the Education category of the BEA Awards.
(Years later, after I’d put a few million words of fiction on the page, I combined some of what was in those two books along with a great deal more in Writing Better Fiction.)
Central Ave Press later also published my poetry collection Beyond the Masks and put it up for a few national awards, including the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Awards. (A poetry collection from Maya Angelou won that year.)
When I wasn’t satisfying my wanderlust by traveling and teaching, I was still seeking solitude, hidden away in a room of our house writing songs and poetry plus essays and articles for The Writer, Writers Digest, Byline Magazine, and other mags. By then I was also copyediting for other writers.
I also started a “little literary” magazine during that time: The Roswell Literary Review. Later I would add The Raintown Review (all poetry) and The Raintown Review: Essay Edition. (A few TNDJ subscribers have been around long enough to have been published in one or more of those magazines.)
In 1998 my Lessons for a Barren Population became the first-ever book-length poetry collection to be published as an ebook. The publisher was Hardshell Word Factory. Hardshell also nominated it for a prize at the then-massive Frankfurt (Germany) Book Fair.
In late 1998 we moved from Roswell to Pittsboro, Indiana to live on my father-in-law’s farm. The fields were rented out to actual farmers, but I spent a lot of ‘me’ time in the few acres of woods beyond one corner of the farm.
During that time I also taught writing (of all things) at The Indiana Business College in Indianapolis and spoke to local and regional writers’ groups, etc. Later (my wife reminded me) I even taught English at the now-defunct Professional Careers Institute (PCI) in Indianapolis where she was teaching medical assistant courses.
I was also still editing for other writers and traveling to speak at conferences and/or simultaneously publishing those three “little literary” magazines. I believe they’re all defunct now, but The Raintown Review (poetry) was still being published by someone else until fairly recently.
Then in 2007 we moved again, this time from Indiana to Mustang Corners, Arizona, north of Huachuca City. The calls from conference organizers were beginning to abate, but I still traveled regionally, teaching private writing seminars in Tucson, Phoenix, and in small cities and towns in southeast Arizona.
From then through 2010, when we moved to our current home in St. David, both the waning conference gigs and the private seminars continued.
In early 2014 I rediscovered Dean Wesley Smith through his website, and I parlayed my wanderlust into ‘traveling’ with my characters in short stories and then in novels.
Plus I still took the occasional road trip either to visit relatives in southeast New Mexico. Or to go camping and slather philosophy across the landscape with my buddy Dan Baldwin in the Lower Gila Box Wilderness northeast of Lordsburg NM.
I often took my laptop along and wrote fiction during those trips. Yes, even while camping. (See the photo in the upper left corner of the Journal website.)
But once I found Dean’s blog and began applying what I learned from him in short stories and later in novels and novellas, I also started writing the original version of TNJD pretty much every day. And that brings me back to the present.
So I’ve always had a strong urge to wander, but I’ve also always harbored that overwhelming desire for solitude. For the past several years I sack out at around 8 p.m. and get up to go to the Hovel usually anywhere from 2 to 4 a.m.
A little over a week ago, I realized that odd combination—wanderlust and the desire for solitude—is what led me to be a fiction writer.
The wanderlust fed my well, and the solitude enabled me to drain it bits at a time in poems, song lyrics, essays, fiction, and nonfiction.
None of this is a complaint. And it isn’t my place to say whether any of this is how or why I became who I am. That would exceed my training.
But it seems to validate my belief that who I am now is who I’ve always been. Or as I wrote earlier, pretty much everything has been writing or writing related.
Right Now, Today
Relax and just breathe.
No matter the circumstances of your beginning, if you simply live your authentic life and be who you are, everything else will unfold as it should, though maybe not as you planned it. (Just as your characters’ lives unfold as they should when you trust them and follow their lead.)
So what gave you the writing bug? Or what maintained it? You don’t have to answer publicly, but your answer to those questions might serve as the basis for a memoir or an autobiography (as the above post and the one before it probably will for me).
Asking and answering those questions for yourself can also enhance your self-awareness and your understanding of the person in the mirror.
Up next, some stuff about writing (or delivering live) nonfiction that can both instruct and entertain.
Talk with you again then.
Of Interest
Half-Price Classes This one includes the half-price code.
A Day in the Life of a Six-Figure Indie Author Not vetted.
Quantum Mechanics Explained (and More)
The ancient reason there are 60 minutes in an hour