Whiskey and Writing

 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 t...

 Its been about a year since I managed to publish my first novel. I’ve been trying to work on a couple others, but one is taking a long time, and frankly I didn’t have much to go on.  I’ve been trying to research, and think about some of my own experiences to come up with something, and I think I finally got something good. Really good in fact.  It’s going to be another mystery type story, but I can’t say much now or its going to ruin the whole surprise. I’m finally excited again. 

I suppose we think about things when we have time to kill, when we have nothing better to do, or decide to reminisce.  Some people think about the past because of regret, or they want to remember easier times.  That’s part of the charm of it.  Times seem easier, people were less crazy, and you had less to worry about.  I think about the past a lot.  Not necessarily my own.  And that’s probably why we study things like history, or watch old movies.  Things seemed easier.  They seemed better in some regards.  I don’t think I listen to music made after 1990 at this point.  I don’t watch these new shows and movies that people go crazy for her, some of it is because I don’t care or it doesn’t seem interesting to me, but some of it is because there were better stories, and better actors.  They relied more of intuition, and less on technology. That’s not to say living now is all bad.   We need to look back at some of the great feats o...