Whiskey and Writing

 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 ...

 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...

 We live in an era of mud.  We have a lot of things going on in the world, people are older, and maybe not necessarily wiser.  I would think some people would’ve had their eyes opened to things especially after the last ten years or so.  Celebrities and politicians were certainly quick to come up with some kind of line that made them sound enlightened.  The truth though is that people aren’t as smart as they think.  People spend all this time trying to be relevant to others instead of being relevant to themselves.  We’re in a mad panic to be a celebrity or think somebody will drop a million dollars on us for posting on Tik Tok.  Life doesn’t work like that.  People think TED Talks matter, or that Bono is the great philosopher of our time.  Normal people don’t watch TED Talks, and I doubt everyone listens to U2 anyhow.  Instead of trying to be trendy try being realistic.  We can’t even use the word “authentic” anymore because it...