Devil's Night
Happy Halloween or Devil's Night as they call it in Detroit. They burn riot, burn, and loot on Devil's Night in Detroit. No pussy trick or treating for them. Have a safe one...
Posts
Artist's Descent
Artist William Utermohlen chronicles his descent into the dementia of Alzheimers by self portraits painted over the span of nearly forty years as reported in a recent NYT article. Utermohlen's self portraits, displayed in a multimedia slideshow , are a moving, striking, and saddening evolution of an artist's perception of himself during his slow slide into the depths of this disease. Mr. Utermohlen, now 73, no longer paints and now lives in a nursing home. This post was inspired by a post by Austin Kleon .
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Chandler
It's hard. It's fucking hard. To write, to create, well written fiction. My idols did it and until recently I didn't know how hard it was for them too. I thought they all sat down and wrote brilliant words that ended up in thier novels. How niave I was. They revised. They massaged. They sculpted the words, sentences, and paragraghs. Epiphany. Revision, I am learning is the key to good writing. Revision, revision, revision. It sucks - but there, I believe, is where the gold lies. The road is tough and the gate is narrow but with revision I hope to plough through it. I look to the great ones for guidence, inspiration, and a roadmap. I've been told before the ones I admires time has come and gone. I disagree. Good writing is good writing and it is ageless. So - ask not for whom the bell tolls...
Learning to Write or Searching for Aristotle?
Ok, I thought this would be easier. I've written for most of my life. Not a novel, but I've written just the same. It seems like I'm just learning to walk. I tried short stories as my labratory with some limited success. It just didn't get me there. I am struggling with plot. I want to tell a good story that is character driven but in the end I want a good story. I've tried to outline several times and it leads me no where. I'm working on Aristotle's three act structure with plot points at the end of act I & II. I guess I am missing a critical element or component. The only thing I have figured out is the more I write the better I get. Go figure.
A fiction scene: Grief
Breath came heavy and labored after an eleven-hour drive south under stress and grief Detective Harry Beam was unfamiliar with. He witnessed and investigated all manners of death from the heinous to the benign. Never had he suffered the loss of a parent until yesterday. His mother died the day before. He was notified yesterday. It stung. It hurt. It seemed unbearable. Heart attack. They said. Advanced lung cancer but the heart attack killed her. No real surprise, the lung cancer. She smoked three packs of cigarettes a day for the last fifty-five years. She was a poster child for lung cancer, suffering debilitating coughing fits that would last for increasing durations. He sat quietly in front of the decaying house of his youth, visited just months before. He lit a cigarette. Now, only one person still lives in this home - his father. The front yard had been cleaned up and the trees, trees that Harry and his mother had planted together in his early teens were trimmed and neat but the ho...