Readers and writers blog

I’ve had the pleasure this past week of reading all 45 of our blogroll colleagues at my leisure (if that word made a rhyming echo with ‘pleasure,’ you may be too fancy for this blog) — and received some creatively vivid poetry from one of them, the always-original P.L. Frederick.

Besides that, I started and finished a home improvement project — as planned and on time. Now there’s an oddity. Two of them, really.

Frederick, who has contributed four works to our poetry section, is a graphic artist, writer, poet and mistress-of-all-trades who lives in the Boston area. Three of her poems — ‘Humming Field,’ ‘Parade’ and ‘Downward Dog’ — are drawn from nature, all luxuriant with an undertone of humor. The fourth poem, ‘Reel,’ struck me as a succinct statement of our human condition and need.

A woman of many shades, Frederick publishes one of our favorite weblogs, Small & Big, a site that I can describe only as, well, again, original. I guess I knew that when I first ran across her blog and saw the photo accompanying her profile. It’s perfect. A different perspective and slightly out of kilter.

Thank you for all of that, P.L.

I have time to savor these things now that I’ve cut back our blogging schedule from two to one entry per week. Among other things, it’s made me someone other than the guy the cats (and my wife, Bonnie) see sitting in old T-shirts and sweatpants at this computer a lot of the time.

Now I’m also the guy who does home carpentry. So in the past week, I installed a door at the top of the stairway to the second floor of our house. It’s not a vertical door but more like a horizontal hatch, a big one that swings up and out of the way when we want the stairway open.

We are people of simple means, so the second floor of our house is mostly open crawl space with a single bedroom at the far end of it. My wife’s two sons are both well-grown and living elsewhere, so they use the bedroom only when visiting. And there are no water pipes on that floor, so it can tolerate being cold for long periods.

This hatch, by the way, isn’t just an 8-by-3-foot piece of ⁵/₈-inch plywood. Oh no, it is hinged above new molding that matches the rest of our ceilings and is painted white to look like ceiling when it’s in the down position.

The project cost about $180 (a plywood panel is really expensive when it doesn’t fit in your car and has to be delivered), but we estimate it will save us about 150 gallons of heating oil this winter. At the current price, that’s about 600 bucks.

And since the top step will now be the stairway’s warmest, I know where our cats will be this winter. Scratching at the hatch.

This week’s new offerings in Works:

• Poetry of P.L. Frederick — ‘Humming Field,’ ‘Parade,’ ‘Downward Dog’ and ‘Reel.’

• Chapters 28 and 29 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring:

Chapter 28: In the first few weeks after her abortion, Brian’s sister Rachel is prone to wild mood swings that take a toll on Tess and Brian as they try to watch over her. But as a family Christmas gathering approaches, Rachel settles down and on several occasions actually seems cheerful.

Chapter 29: After a pleasant Christmas gathering, Tess gives way to some deeper thoughts she’s been having about Rachel’s laid-back moods. Drugs. Rachel confirms it and offers another revelation — she’s stolen some of Tess’ jewelry, including a custom-made engagement ring from her now-ex-husband, to pay for the drugs.

• Chapters Four and Five of Ann M. Pino’s novel Steal Tomorrow:

Chapter Four: Cassie and her fellow members of the Regents, a survival gang of children and teenagers in a world left without adults by a pandemic virus, learn that someone is grabbing children from the streets and taking them away in vans. Several gangs are considering an alliance to find out who’s behind the kidnappings.

Chapter Five: Cassie spends an early morning in the Regents’ clinic, sharing her knowledge of plants to help produce herbal medicines, then spends the afternoon leading a group trying to start a garden. She receives a bag of seed potatoes from a forager named Galahad, a young man in whom she is developing more than a horticultural interest.

– Sid Leavitt

What a difference a day makes — the day, Thursday, that I didn’t have to post a blog entry for the first time in two years.

Cutting back our posting schedule from twice- to once-weekly freed up a lot of time — my mathematically keen mind makes it about 3½ days — and, friends, I used it.

• I played so much guitar this week that, as I told a blogging colleague, the fingertips on my left hand have become thimbles. It’s an odd thing about calluses and guitar strings. When you first start playing, the strings leave painful dents in your fingertips (especially steel strings, which is why I play a classical guitar with nylon strings). Then the tips of your fingers toughen up and form calluses, sometimes so thick that you lose sensitivity. But then, mysteriously, they seem to soften back a little and you can feel again.

One of the best guitarists I know — the guy plays hours on end — has surgeon-soft fingertips. I think it’s got something to do with technique, the ease with which he plays. In my case, the calluses are back. And headed nowhere.

• I’ve been experimenting with some new sound equipment. My wife, Bonnie, and I spent a few hundred bucks on a small amplifier and a studio microphone that picks up both our voices and our guitars for our weekly singalongs with our friends at a local senior citizen residence.

We used the new gear last Sunday, and guess what? For the first time in years, I think, some folks in the back row actually heard us.

• I caught up on my blogroll reading. I hate to admit it to my colleagues on our blogroll, but there have been times when I got not days but weeks behind in reading those 45 sites.

So, welcome back, Robert Lashley, previously known as The literary thug and now the brother who has to write. Congratulations, Bernita, on weaving lyrical prose about the Ides of August so beautifully into a discussion of weapons used to dispatch vampires, zombies and the like. Best wishes to Don Croner out there in northern Mongolia at a festival at the Amarbayasgalant Monastery. Not to mention a great interview with one of our featured novelists, R.J. Keller, on another site to which she contributes her expertise, the Movie-Fanatic.

• I got a chance to watch several Yankees games in their entirety. Not that I haven’t done that a lot in the past, but now it’s without guilt that I should be working here. Unfortunately, this year, the Yankees suck. And to R.J. in Maine, sorry, but the Red Sox aren’t doing so hot, either. Of course, they are close on the wild card slot for the playoffs. Who would’ve thought — Tampa Bay in first?

This week’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapters Two and Three of Ann M. Pino’s novel Steal Tomorrow:

Chapter Two: Cassie and her friend Leila, surburban teens who have survived a pandemic virus that has killed the world’s adults, go into the city with two members of a gang they hope to join for food and protection. On the way, Cassie has to shoot one of a group of dirty children confronting them at a roadblock.

Chapter Three: Cassie, now a member of the Regents, has impressed leaders of the gang with her survival skills and is recruited for a foray to a library to find books on plants that could add to the gang’s food supplies. Leila, still on probation with the Regents, is given menial cleaning duties.

• Chapters 26 and 27 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring:

Chapter 26: Tess takes a long drive to Portland with Brian’s sister, Rachel, pregnant from her drug-dealer boyfriend and now heading to a clinic for an abortion. The women try to agree that it’s not a baby but a fetus. But even Tess, who never wanted children, is haunted by the procedure.

Chapter 27: Rachel has agreed to stay with Brian and Tess to try to straighten out her life. But then there’s still the drug-dealer boyfriend, a sadist named Tim who may kill Rachel if he finds out about the abortion. So Tess hatches a plan to kill Tim instead, a plan so carefully worked out that no one would ever know.

– Sid Leavitt

Today we begin serializing Steal Tomorrow, a new novel by Ann M. Pino showing that young people can be just as resourceful, complex, courageous — and, yes, fallible and dangerous — as older adults.

Also today, we highlight a short story by one of our blogroll colleagues, Tim Hulings, that we hope will be the first of more to come.

The main character of Steal Tomorrow is Cassie Thompson, described by one of the other characters as “Cassie, like Cassandra? The one who knew the Trojans were going to die?” Well, her parents have died, along with most of the world’s older adults, from a pandemic virus.

In the publishing world, the novel might be described as YA/crossover for a young adult book with references and themes that would be appreciated by older readers. But really, Steal Tomorrow is the story of how humans get on in a post-apocalyptic world, whatever their age.

Lord knows, many of the older adults in Nevil Shute’s On the Beach turned out to be a reckless bunch, and some of those in Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! (which became the movie Soylent Green) were downright diabolical. In fact, there were some pretty evil characters in a book still in the fiction pages of R&W Blog — Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing.

For Cassie and her friends, just surviving to adulthood is a challenge as her city is beset by food shortages, sanitation problems and gang violence.

Pino, a writer of flash, serial and novel-length fiction, lives in Houston where she is a university administrator, a marathoner, a onetime triathlete and an all-round health and fitness enthusiast. She writes two fiction weblogs, Writings and Steal Tomorrow, the latter of which is now also serializing the novel. The complete book is available at Southwestern Books and Art and at Lulu at $13.50 for paperback, $4 for download edition, and at Amazon in Kindle format at $3.20.

She lives with her husband, a cat and a hyperactive rabbit, all of whom, she says, fail to appreciate her skill at baking banana bread. Well, we appreciate her novel, and we hope you like it, too.

And speaking of things we like, we commend to you a short story that Tim Hulings posted on the weblog he shares with his wife, Tim & Nancy’s Adventures, one of our blogroll listings. The Hulings are Virginia gentlefolk who took a couple of years off from their Shenandoah Valley horse farm to work as Peace Corps volunteers in Romania.

The short story, ‘Parcul Centru,’ is drawn from that experience. The setting is a Romanian park and involves a proper British gentleman who likes to go there to read and a small stray dog with bright eyes and an easy manner who goes there for old food containers and other debris.

While we’re at it, we also should commend a blog entry Tim wrote about one of his favorite equines — ‘The Horse That Never Learned to Love Carrots.’ The man has a knack for writing about animals.

He tells us by email that he’s putting the finishing touches on a manuscript of short stories that he’s planning to self-publish. If the first two samples are any indication, the book is going to be a good one.

And now . . .

Today’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapter One of Ann M. Pino’s novel Steal Tomorrow. Cassie and her friend Leila, wandering their ransacked neighborhoods in search of food, get an invitation to join a group of other young people living in a luxury hotel, a move that could end their most immediate troubles.

• Chapter 25 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Finally, a Thanksgiving that Tess can enjoy now that her mother has gone to Europe, probably never to return. Even Brian’s sister Rachel is in a good mood, despite what the next day will bring.

• A short story sample, ‘Parcul Centru,’ from Tim Hulings. See also this blog entry, ‘The Horse That Never Learned to Love Carrots.’

– Sid Leavitt

To make more time for other personal matters, I’ve decided to trim back our twice-weekly blogging schedule, eliminating Thursday posts in favor of Sundays only.

We’ll still post as many new offerings in Works. Instead of one new chapter of serialized book per blog entry, we’ll now post two new chapters on Sundays. And keep you posted on whatever literary matters come our way.

Over the past two years, Sunday has proved to be our best readership day. Thursday readership also has been OK, but the difficulty of posting twice a week instead of once is that a week doesn’t easily divide into two. So, in order to get two equal periods per week, each of 3½ days, I’ve been posting just after midnight Thursday and just after noon Sunday. That Thursday post has been a bear.

Another difficulty is that while 3½ days is plenty of time to write a post, much of the rest of that period is spent thinking about what to write about, not to mention reading our colleagues on our blogroll, formatting whatever new book chapters we are serializing and, as is my wont, generally lollygagging around.

So what has happened is that when the rest of my life gets in the way, I get way behind on my blogroll reading, formatting and thinking — and spending more time at this computer than I would like.

I retired four years ago from a desk job, and for the past two years, I seem to have developed another one.

Walking has long been my preferred form of exercise, not just for the physical benefits but also for the time it gives me to think, to reflect on life in general and mine in particular. But even though a treadmill sits in the same room with this computer, I don’t spend enough time on it — or walking outdoors.

Finally, playing guitar at Woodstock earlier this month has made me realize I’m not playing as much as I would like any more. During the first two years of my retirement, I was playing more than our present schedule of once a week at a senior citizen residence near our home. Sometimes with Bonnie and her parents, sometimes alone, I used to visit other senior homes in our area to lead singalongs or maybe just to play the guitar or the piano in the background.

I’d like to get off my butt and do more of that. So I’ll see you next Sunday.

– Sid Leavitt

I’ve been browsing our spam — damn, we get a lot of it, so much that I suspect it may have disabled our comment system, probably by choking it to death. We’ve had a number of complaints from readers who’ve emailed me that they tried to post comments but were unable to get through.

Ah well, if that happens, just send the comment to my email address — it’s printed several times in the lefthand column of this main page — and we’ll transfer it to the ‘comments’ section. On the other hand, if you don’t want to comment, that’s fine, too.

The reason I’ve been browsing spam — well, frankly, I’ve also been sitting here playing scales and chord progressions up and down the fingerboard of my guitar. I guess that Woodstock thing got me interested again in actually practicing the guitar every day, not just playing it once a week at our singalongs at the local senior citizen home.

So, dum, dum, dum, dum, scales from G to B from the sixth to the first string, then dum, dum . . . etc., C to F^# from the fifth to the first string, including I, IV and V chords, then I, I^dim, V⁷ and I descending runs, for each of the scales. I find it relaxing, which tells you something about me.

Now, that spam. Some of it’s pretty funny. One that purported to be from the Culinary Institute of America managed to spell the second word in the title as ‘Instatute.’ One from the ‘IRS’ seeking confidential information promised me a tax refund but dropped the first ‘h’ out of the word ‘whether’ and advised me what to do “if u don’t receive your refund.” One from ‘PayPal’ told me to resubmit my private codes — but told me in French.

And then there’s the Russian spam — ICQ номера, спам сервисы, e-mail спам и многое другое. . . Sorry, PrivateShop, I don’t need any instant messaging, spam services, email spam or any of the many other services you offer. But how the hell do they know I speak Russian? That was 40 years ago, courtesy of the Army Language School.

Well, anyway, the reason I have time to squander on all this stuff is that I finally got caught up — again — reading all the sites on our blogroll, all 44** of them. This time, because of personal commitments, I was nearly two weeks behind.

Karen McQuestion, author of one of those sites, McQuestionable Musings, was talking the other day about how hard it is to blog regularly. I told her in a comment that I found writing some of our blog entries more like work than fun.

Of course, I’d get them done more easily if I didn’t spend so much time reading our blogroll. But that is fun.

I want to know what mess June has gotten into at work at Bye Bye, Pie. And just where Don Croner has gotten himself to in Mongolia. And just what Jim is thinking in his perfect world. And what Bernita is writing in the world of magic realism. And what Franklin is knitting.

By the way, one of the sites on our inactive list, vox clamantis, has an exchange of letters presented by its indefatigable author, Michael Moore (no, not the filmmaker, the peripatetic philosopher), that challenges the 19th century news coverage of the notorious Montana vigilantes.

See, you wouldn’t know that if I wasn’t wasting so much time.

And now . . .

Today’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapter 24 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess discovers Brian’s sister, Rachel, is now pregnant by her drug dealer boyfriend, who beat her when she mentioned an abortion. Tess agrees to help her get an abortion and not to tell Brian, fearing he will throw his life away by killing the boyfriend.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

*You know, I hate those blogs where the author admits having nothing new to say but then goes ahead and says it. I call them ‘dear diary’ blogs. This entry seems like one of them. I apologize.

**The number has been reduced by one — Robert Lashley’s The literary thug, now missing for more than a month. Robert, if you read this, please let us know if you go back up.

***The image above is a Flower Diary, complete with lock, key and sparkle accents, for girls 5 to 10. It’s available from Imaginabox.com.

This is a day of mixed feelings. It is a sad day — sad because we post the final chapter of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. And yet the day has its up side, too — a new chapter of Jeri Cafesin’s novel Disconnected.

I knew since we started serializing Ginny Good in April that I would hate to see the last installment. Sure, I finished reading the book long ago, but posting two chapters a week — and writing blurbs about them — gave me a chance to review and enjoy them again.

I’ve always had a special feeling about the book because Jones and I are about the same age and temperament, and I was living in California, courtesy of the Army, during some of the years Jones writes about.

Of course, the book will remain on R&W Blog, so that’s a good thing. But if you’re like me, you hate to finish a good book. And Jones has written a good one. Thank you, G.

Well, buoying our spirits is Cafesin’s latest chapter of Disconnected, an e-book-in-progress about a young woman in conflict that has a vivid, almost cinematic narrative style. Cafesin, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, also sets her novel in California, but in the star-struck Los Angeles area.

I got caught up in the book from an opening scene that introduced the protagonist holding a gun to her head.

Actually, we’re getting more than a new chapter. Cafesin also has made revisions to the introductory and subsequent four chapters, and those have been incorporated into our text here.

That’s the wonderful thing about e-books. You don’t have to go collecting all the ones in print in order to make changes. They can be made on a website at the speed of electricity.

Posting e-books does require a little extra time here at R&W Blog because we usually have to reformat submitted text into our page styles. But we do it gladly.

As we told Cafesin, she’s the one really doing all the work. Once our little formatting is done, we just sit back and enjoy the fruits of her efforts.

And let’s not forget another author whose work we’re serializing — the talented R.J. Keller and her novel, Waiting for Spring. Like Jones’ book, Keller’s is a finished work that she has allowed us to post in chapters.

And so, this seems like an appropriate time to present:

Today’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapter 35: I-5 of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard, back in the present in Oregon, says his goodbyes to Ginny, Elliot, Melanie and others from his chapters — and to us.

• Chapter Five of Jeri Cafesin’s novel Disconnected. After an exhausting Thanksgiving with her family, Rachel reconnects with Lee for an evening at a posh Malibu restaurant where she learns more about him than their mutual interest in marijuana. But she resists her attraction to him and continues to dismiss him as nothing more than a ‘charming distraction.’

• Chapter 23 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess learns from her father that he and her mother are divorcing after nearly 38 years, then finds out from her mother that she’s already sold their house. Tess warns her mother that she’d better split the proceeds with Dad — or else.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

So how did you like the Beatles video? Didn’t watch it? You’d better. I spent hours on the Internet trying to learn how to embed videos within blog text. I succeeded here only by writing a hellacious pile of html code at the beginning of this entry, probably half of it wrong and the other half redundant — enough to make a real computer programmer gag.

Oh, man, I’ve just had an experience that every acoustic guitarist dreams of — playing Woodstock.

Okay, it was just a little farm festival Wednesday night in a small park off the main street in town. And, okay, my wife, Bonnie, and I were just the backup music to a group of readers. And, okay, some of the crowd weren’t paying attention as they milled through the concession booths and chatted among themselves. And, yes, there was some confusion.

But it was Woodstock. And the hippies were there.

Oh yeah, one more irony or two: The famous 1969 ‘Woodstock’ concert wasn’t held in Woodstock but in Bethel more than 40 miles and another county away. And the 25th anniversary ‘Woodstock’ concert in 1994, although closer to Woodstock, was held in the next town, Saugerties.

But it was still Woodstock. Where the hippies live. Well, some of them do. And a lot of yuppies, too. Not to mention lots of musicians, really good ones, which makes playing in Woodstock for a couple of out-of-town amateurs like Bonnie and me a little daunting.

But we did it, and pretty well at that. The program, about 25 minutes long, was a reading based on interviews and reminiscences of elderly Woodstockers who were tied not to music and the arts but to the earth — principally, farmers and loggers. Doing the reading were its author, Jo Schwartz, who with husband Arthur runs a local publishing company, and poet Phillip Levine and storyteller Jill Olesker.

Bonnie and I were supposed to play quietly beneath their voices, but the solar battery running the microphone ran out of power just as we started, so the readers raised their voices to near-shouting, and we began hitting our guitars pretty hard.

Our musical selections were keyed into the readers’ script, but since the readers had moved closer to the audience to be heard, they and the script were nearly out of our earshot, so we winged it.

We played numbers like “This Land Is Your Land,” “Wildwood Flower” and a song by a local musician, Jay Ungar, called “Ashokan Farewell,” a theme you may remember from the Ken Burns Civil War series.

Bonnie did rhythm guitar and vocal harmonies, and I played lead guitar for the melodies. Now, playing a melody on a guitar can be simple: You can just do one note at a time. But to do it right, you really should play the melody notes at the top of the chords as they change through the song so that you can add appropriate harmony notes to fill in the melody line. Some guitarists do this without thinking. Me, I have to concentrate like hell.

I hardly noticed the people wandering back, forth and sometimes through the small performance area. I blew a few notes, but Bonnie, bless her, stayed right with me with her chords.

Despite the confusion, I wasn’t nervous. I don’t think Bonnie was, either. Playing at senior citizen residences for the past decade has taken most of the performance nerves out of us. We’ve been run into by wheelchairs, screamed at, thrown up on — one wonderful resident named Dorothy, no longer with us, liked to grab Bonnie’s cheek and tell her, “You’re a cutie.” All while we were singing and playing, and we hardly missed a note.

So while we weren’t opening for Jimi Hendrix in ‘69 or The Band in ‘94, it was my Woodstock experience. And although my own 60s are nearly over chronologically, the decade of the ’60s will always be with me — and with you as well, I hope.

To paraphrase Tom Joad in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, the ’60s “will be all around . . . everywhere . . . wherever you can look.” Wherever people worry about the environment, grieve over racism, reject materialism, prefer flowers and peace to guns and war, the ’60s will still be around. And for me, Woodstock is their symbol.

Today’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapter 34: Colma of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Ginny and Elliot are now dead. Gerard, although now settled with Melanie, fantasizes about them in new bodies like Tinkerbells and imagines himself leaping off a cliff and gliding to them.

• Chapter 22 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. It’s October and Tess is putting away summer clothes and unpacking sweaters when she comes upon old pictures that bring reminiscences of how she and her ex-husband, Jason, fell in love.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is an outside window sticker on sale at the website purplemoon.com. The sticker, called ‘woodstock nation,’ is 5 inches in diameter and sells for $3.50.

Ah, the poets. They’re sharing their muses with us again, and today, a Sunday, seems like an appropriate day to bring them out. So welcome to Joel Phipps and Nancy Allan.

Allan, who was one of the first contributors to both our poetry and nonfiction sections, is a retired news editor and reporter for the former Greenfield Observer in Wisconsin. She continues to write for a quarterly paper in Greenfield as well as publishing fiction, poetry and a number of articles.

Her latest contribution to our poetry section is a two-stanza poem called ‘Don’t Ask Me,’ a cheeky piece about a bridal party seen from a bridesmaid’s perspective. Other poems on her page include ‘Kite Tale,’ a short piece about watching your cares fly away, and ‘That’s Cats,’ a tale of two felines named Mistletoe and Rambo Joe.

Allan also is to be found in our nonfiction section in an essay called ‘Hats, Anyone,’ a look back at a different era in women’s headwear.

Phipps is a poet and songwriter of Irish-Scottish heritage who lives on a small farm in southwestern Ohio where he occasionally can be seen wearing a kilt. He admits to a strong desire to return to his ancestral lands near Edinburgh, Scotland. When not writing, he plays rhythm electric guitar, draws, paints, listens to music and manages a website of his songs and poetry, Keys To The Future: A Poetic Extravaganza.

He has submitted three poems, all about love — ‘Amore Consumato,’ a paean to a love “as lovely as the butterfly even when her colourful wings are not apart”; ‘You Cast A Spell Over Me,’ a confession to a love that has beguiled a heart “too hopeless and forlorn,” and ‘Appreciation,’ an ode of gratitude to a “heart and all its graces from the rhythm of the rhyme beyond the spans of time.”

Phipps and Allan are different kinds of poet, but so are the muses — some more inclined to the poetry of heroism, others to love and eroticism, still others to lyricism and the sacred.

So welcome to them all.

Today’s new offerings in Works:

• Two new poetry pages — Poetry of Joel Phipps and Poetry of Nancy Allan.

• Chapter 21 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess and Brian exchange confessions about previous lovers and, after the difficult emotions are vented, lie on the grass on a cool, clear night and look into the stars.

• Chapter 33: Scenic Hills of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Death visits Gerard. First, he finds out a month or so after the fact that Elliot has committed suicide. Then, in an offhanded comment from a business acquaintance, he discovers Ginny has died the same day from an alcohol and drug overdose. Then he goes to the bedside of his father, who is dying of cancer.

– Sid Leavitt