Whiskey and Writing

 I think its funny how quickly time goes by. Six months ago I was trying to determine a lot more than I was now.  I finished school, but I guess I’m going to do more. Then I’ve been trying to figure out how I’m going to work out the details on a couple of books I want to do. It takes time, and that’s the problem. Time goes by too fast, and when you have other things that demand it, it gets tough to do what you want. It seems like you just have to keep pushing until whatever it is you’re doing is done. It’s not so much how quickly time goes by, just that you’re something with it. 

 I’m doing more these days, or at least trying to.  I’m trying to finish up some classes, and I started some rewrites on a couple of novels.  It’s been fun, because I’m trying to have more fun.  Instead of trying to write the perfect thing, I’m trying to enjoy what I’m doing. There’s too much noise, and there’s something to realizing that while maybe you don’t have a perfect plan, your characters do.  There’s something to sort of “shifting the blame” onto your characters instead of keeping it to yourself. A lot of writing is supposed to be therapeutic, or something for you to wrestle some things out.  You can’t do that if everything is “perfect.”  Sometimes the grit, and the fight, and the imperfections are what make it perfect. 

 As I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed that some of the people we thought were heroes or role models lose something. They change, or don’t live up to the standards either we had, or they had for themselves.  I was again recently reminded of someone I really respected at one time, who decided to sort of cowardly take a stance that wasn’t either cold or hot, just sort of lukewarm.  Certainly I’m not perfect, and I don’t claim to be a hero, but I did make me think about heroes more.  We need to seriously consider the people we imitate, and look up to, and not just accept them as wonderful because they’re famous, or have made a name for themselves.

Even if you’re doing something you love, you need to get away from it sometimes.  I’ve been trying to a couple of books, and I do enjoy it, but sometimes I get stuck.  I’m too busy trying to find the perfect sentence, and after a while you learn you can’t always force things to happen.  You need something to ventilate frustrations, or at least forget about them for awhile.  I try to do that with puzzles, and reading, something that’ll keep my attention.  That’s really the key, is finding something to do you care about or you won’t care long enough to do it.  “Get a way” for awhile.  Even that means pouring a drink and sitting in the backyard.  It’ll be peaceful for a time, give you a sense of happiness, and then you can finish that project you’re working on. 

 You have to create a culture for a book. Part of that is because you’re trying to convey a certain message.  That can sound silly, but it depends on a lot of things.  A book has specific language because the writer chosen specific words to make you think of something in particular.  You can say the sky is blue.  Or you can say the sky is certain shade. And maybe that shade of blue reminds you of something, and so on.  Books are great because there’s an intent behind them. There’s a message or lack of message in something.  If you do anything, even if its not writing there’s a message you want to tell people.  You could smoke a cigar on the porch looking at the sunset and that could be your culture. We act like we have to make things complicated for them to be significant and it doesn’t have to be the way.  Anything can have a message, or a meaning if it matters to us.  We have a little culture within a culture, or if you like we have a little meaning in our meaning. 

 I think most people enjoy music.  It sets a mood, it reminds us of things, we have favorite genres, and favorite songs.  These days we can listen to music whenever we want because we can put it on our phones.    We went from playing it on albums to tapes, to CDs, to downloads. I made a playlist for a crime novel I’m working on, and I’ve even got to the point of making playlists for certain sections and places of the story.  They mostly are filled with decades old jazz artists like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, and others.  That’s when jazz was jazz.  It got into your soul, and you knew music was good.  It seems to me that older music had a heart that it doesn’t know.  People make a quick single to try and get famous and rich, and it sounds like something that’ll give you a seizure.  Music is supposed to be good not so much synthesized crap.  At any rate, I made some great playlists to try and get a certain mood, sort of like what they do with m