Summertime Gone

Summer is collapsing into a final few days of heat and the State Fair. Schools are welcoming the unwilling back to stuffy halls and soon, autumn cometh. I hate heat. Anything over 72 degrees is horror to me. So I get up on those hazy, muggy, lung collapsing Indiana mornings, thank God for Mr. Carrier, and head to my computer. Meanwhile, outside, the birds fly and eat my thistle. I watch from behind the glass and write and illustrate and drink iced coffee from Starbucks. It is good to know a barista.

Autumn. Classes resume at IUPUI. They changed the online sign up appearance so you have to kind of look for it, but Intro to Creative Writing is there. Now though, you click on Language, Arts and Culture. When that opens, you click on Culture. There it is. I don't know who is teaching it but I am sure it is someone of quality. Looks like a good size class is forming so if you plan on attending, you may wish to get on board soon.

My writing is on schedule kinda. The sample chapters for a YA horror novel were submitted on time. It was close, but I did beat the deadline. The five hour difference between Indy and London impacted my schedule to be sure but the manuscript did arrive. Confirmation received. Now we move to the Waiting Room. I feel good.

I am about to wrap up the YA on the Holocaust survivor. Not as confident on this one. I am discovering that writing about history vs creating fiction are two different worlds. I am not sure I am able to co-exist in both. Still, I will try and finish three chapters and test the market.
Lots of work went into it and it was exciting. Even if I can't sell it, I learned a lot.

The childrens' picture book drawings are due by December 15. Sketches are under way. Then I will await word on whether I hit the mark. If so, I plan on bending over...the drawing board for about two months straight.

By January I hope to re-start the novel I have been destined to write. Destined you say? Yup. I enrolled in college planning for nothing. No major appealed to me. I decided Political Science might be a good one and off I went and to my complete surprise, did fairly well. I then signed up for a required course. English 101 or whatever it was called. The adjunct professor was quite encouraging to someone who had only read four books of his own choosing in his life and escaped high school English through the mercy of the Brother teaching it. My last paper was about my experiences at Notre Dame. Not as a student but as an employee. Although it was but two or three pages in length, she wrote a couple of things (in green ink) which I remember to this day. (I have the paper to prove it.) The first was a favorable review of my story. The second was to tell me that I wrote very well. She continued. You can't punctuate worth a damn but that is what editors are for. She concluded. If you haven't considered an English major, you should.

Me? An English major. Get thee out of town. But lo and behold, a few years later I was indeed an English major. I was hoping for Colonel but the best I could do was Major...not that there's anything wrong with that.

Before I attended college, I told the story about working at ND again and again. Mostly in short snippets. The response was always positive. Laughter. Encouragement to write it down (at that time I figured based on my past experience with the written word, it would never come to that.) And one guy said if I ever did write it down, it would be a best seller. Again, at that time, I never dreamed it would become a written tale.

After graduation, I tried a few times to write that story. I started. It stunk. I put it away. I resurrected it. I re-started. It stunk. I put it away.

My brother wrote me a note a few days back following an exchange of emails. You need to write that story, he said. You're funny.

Come January, I will drag that thirty year old story out one more time and see if I can get it down on paper. I can't afford to whiff on this one. This is my Holy Grail. Time is running out. Success or failure, the quest must be completed.