Category: Writing

  • Ideas for 2022

    I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. Mainly because, they always fail.

    I, on the other hand, try out new ideas to see if they stick.

    As you can see, two totally different things.

    This first thing I will try out is not drinking. Not total sobriety, but taking a break. It comes down to two things; health and finances. On the health front; I am twenty pounds overweight. I have the middle age man belly, which isn’t really surprising, as I am middle aged. The alcohol isn’t helping with the gut, and I think it’s adding to my depression as well. I don’t feel as positive of a person as I used to be. I don’t think I have a problem with drinking, but I feel like if I don’t start making steps to take my health seriously, that I could have a problem. The other thing is financial. Not that the wife and I are spending a huge amount of money on alcohol, but looking at our year-end review, we spent, on average, $100 a month. I think we can say that we know of a better ways to use that money.

    The next thing is that I will, oh god, start going to a gym for 30 minutes at a time. You might have heard that I am about twenty pounds overweight. Though I would like to say that it was all alcohol and sugary drink’s fault, it’s also inactivity’s fault. Yes, we were hiking most weekends this summer and fall, but one day every two weeks just isn’t enough. (We will pick up hiking again in the Spring.) It’s also the mental health benefits that comes with exercise that I am missing. In the past year, I have been harder on myself than usual. I know everyone has that nagging self-sabotage voice in their head, but most people work through it. For me, this past year, it has been harder and tougher for me to forgive myself, or even have the energy to follow through on a project. That’s not who I am. I was the guy who followed through and got shit done.

    And the last thing is that I have to admit that I didn’t meet my writing goals for the last four month, and in essence, for the year. I did okay, but I didn’t make the goal. I wanted to have three short stories completed by the end of the year. I got two finished, and I think they are in good enough shape to submit, but I wanted to have three. Now, I know full well there is nothing stopping me from submitting the two, but, you know, I didn’t complete what I set out to do. I have maintained the blog, though my viewers have dropped by half. So, instead of four people viewing daily, I now only have two. (And I think I know who those two people are. Hey, guys.) Maybe I do need to spend the $100 and get away from the free WordPress site, or might just need to come to terms with the fact that a random blog about one guys thoughts isn’t that dynamic anymore. It’s not 1997 when confessional blogs were all the rage. Anyway, the blog still brings me a level of joy and feeling of accomplishment daily, so I think this will keep going. The other writing? I need to get back to the grindstone. I need to put in the work.

    And I need to read more!

  • First Day of Winter

    I couldn’t sleep last night, or I guess, more accurately, this morning. It was about 4:30am when I looked at my phone to see what time it was, and I wanted to try to get back to sleep. I tried. I rolled over to a different position, but it didn’t help. It was too hot in bed, I couldn’t get comfortable, and my beard was very itchy. By 5:30, I had to admit that I was awake and that I wouldn’t get back to sleep. I didn’t want to wake anyone, so I went to the office, and sat down with my journal.

    I could hear classical music coming from my daughter’s room, as she listens to that now, to help her fall asleep. The music plays all night, and there is something very innocent and endearing about it. That the kid is starting her own music education.

    I took out the journal and just started writing about the day; what I need to do, and hopefully, what I can accomplish. I also started writing about the next project that I want to work on, and how to use short stories, and story sketches together to tell a complete narrative of family dealing with mental issues.

    And I continue to write about writing. Writing about something that I would like to write about. How will I write about it? What style will I use? Will I try to craft 10 stories that each have an individual style to them? Is that possible?

    Then it dawns on me as the dawn is dawning; that this is the first day of Winter, and the shortest day with the longest night. It begins again, the growing of the day, the receding of the darkness. All things must pass, and the daylight is good at arriving at the right time, right?

    Sometimes things happen at the right time for the right reason.

  • Short Story Review: “Lu, Reshaping” by Madeleine Thien

    (The short story, “Lu, Reshaping” by Madeline Thien appeared in the December 20th, 2021 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Over the past year, I have been asking myself, why do I like short stories so much? I would rather read a short story collection than a novel. I think it is a very challenging form of storytelling that fails more than it succeeds. For a writer to make a reader care about a story in a thousand or so words is impressive. To make a reader identify with a character is the same space of words, well, that’s impressive.

    “Lu, Reshaping” by Madeline Thien is a story about a character going through a midlife crisis, and I am not being flippant with that description. As a white male entering the early stages of midlife, these stories have a certain appeal to me. (In fact, I would dare argue that there is a whole unidentified genre in literature of novels about white men going through a midlife crisis, which normally involve affairs, children and/or a spouse who no longer understands, and ends with a death.) I feel like Thien took all of those midlife crisis tropes, and with her character Lu, feed them in and created a different but also familiar result.

    I don’t want to give anything away with how the plot unfolds, because of the language that Thien uses to describe situations, and also Lu’s use of phrases from Cantonese that are translated into English. I loved the words that were crafted for this story, and how they transferred the feeling of loneliness, of life passing you by, and questioning the decisions one has made, and that search for happiness, however fleeting, but also being adult enough to know that momentary pleasure should be let go, and not thought about again.

    Lu is not like me. She is a woman, immigrant from Hong Kong, English is not her first language, she is a mother, working a corporate job in, what I think is, Vancouver, and in a marriage that is not fulfilling. But, I could understand where she was coming from, what she was feeling, and how she viewed life. I was especially taken by a sentence in the last paragraph:

    One day, you were an immigrant, loaded down with inexplicable shame; the next you were middle-aged, a mother, and all the risks you’d taken – to live freely, to not be subdued – also made you feel ashamed, as if you’d done nothing but kick tangerines around.

    I understood where Lu was in her life. How ramifications from past decisions can shape how we evolve to the next version of ourselves, even though some emotions never ever leave us, no matter how much we change. All of that is a few words.

  • Short Story Review: “A Shooting in Rathreedane” by Colin Barrett

    (The short story, “A Shooting in Rathreedane: by Colin Barrett appeared in the December 13th, 2021 issue of The New Yorker.)

    This was a good, old school, short story. “A Shooting in Rathreedane” by Colin Barrett even starts off with a good title. A shooting is dramatic; what happens?

    Not making lite of the story, but to sum up – The local police are called when a shooting happens on a remote farm in the Irish countryside. The police and an ambulance arrive at the farm, and then there is the fall out of all of these actions.

    Yet, what really happens is this story is seeing characters unfold. Our protagonist is Sargent Jackie Noonan, a forty-five-year-old police woman, and I liked how Barrett kept dropping these little nuggets of her personality as the story developed. The way she drank her coffee, took notes, talked to other officers. And though the story clearly was meant to stick with her, the other characters who came along were all given depth, and actions that fit accordingly to their characters. I also appreciated that the solving of the shooting wasn’t the point of this story. That the shooting was the starting off point to watch how these characters interacted and dealt with the situation. The story also did a very good job of avoiding cliché traps, that I think lesser writers would have fallen for. The caveat to that statement was I found the run in with the local teenagers predictable, but that is a minor critique.

    And when I said old school before, this story reminded me of the short fiction that was assigned to read in high school, like in a Sherwood Anderson ilk. Not that Anderson ever wrote like this, and I can also say that Anderson is the wrong author to compare Barrett to. (Go with me on this…) It’s the feeling that both authors created characters in rural places that were compelling, and you wanted to know what they are going to do tomorrow because you felt you knew them. As “A Shooting in Rathreedane” concluded, I wanted to know, what is tomorrow going to be like for Sgt. Noonan?

  • I Wrote a Blog Today

    Not very inspired.

    I have been trying to think of a subject to write about, and I just couldn’t come up with something that would inspire me. Often, I can come up with an idea while walking the kid to school, but not this morning. We were running late, and had to rush, so we didn’t really get a chance to have one of those cute father/daughter conversations.

    I thought that while doing laundry something would strike me, but not really. I just folded laundry and watched First Take.

    I planned for dinner, which will be a sheet-pan meal from the NYTimes Cooking Page. I’m going to add a side of rice, and make a butter lemon sauce to round out the whole thing.

    The only thing of note, when it comes to the blog, is that some people came by today and read my short story review of “Detective Dog” by Gish Jen. In fact, more people read it today than when I originally posted it. I wonder if it was Gish Jen?

    I think this post is falling into the category of “keeping up the quota.” I made the rule that I need to post one blog a day, Monday through Friday. So, no matter what, I have to put something up. Clearly, this isn’t one that will make the book.

    Oh, did I mention that one day all of these blog will be published in a book. Well, not all of them. Just a select few, like a greatest hits. But then, several years later, a book will be published that will contain all of the blogs, and that will be more like a collector’s edition, unabridged version. Now, thinking about it, yes, I guess this blog will eventually be published, so I guess, this one does make the book.

    If you made it this far I the blog, then I congratulate you. That shows a level of dedication to a very half-baked concept that I am making up on the fly, to justify my existence, and to also give myself a feeling of accomplishment.

    I’ll do better tomorrow.