Nearly 30 years ago, I attended a weekend fair in the Sierra foothills above Marysville, Calif., where I met a palm reader and, out of curiosity, agreed to let him read my palms. He told me I had rough experiences, which was true. He also said I had no goals in life. I disagreed, but he was insistent.
“Enjoy the trip,” he said.
I have been on a journey since then.
I had lofty ambitions in the newspaper field but did not achieve them. However, as I stated in my previous blog, I have had a wealth of experiences—one friend described them as being “crazy adventures”—that inspired me to write a novel. I’m setting it in a fictional town in the California desert in 2011 when the newspaper industry was still reeling from the Great Recession. I have tentatively titled it Cut Loose.
I am on chapter five and have written more than 14,000 words. A Google search shows the average novel ranges from 50,000 to 70,000 words, so I have a long way to go. I try to write as many as 500 words a day, but on some days I have written nothing.
If I were to heed the palm reader, I would not try writing the novel. I have serious grounds for being discouraged. I shared a prize with another student during my senior year in high school for a contest sponsored by a pen women’s group. I recall my short story was loosely based on the Zodiac Killer.
However, I have little to show since then. I wrote a short story in 1993 that I shared with a group of writers that met to read and critique manuscripts. The others in the group were polite but harsh in their criticism. My submission, they said, had no plot or purpose. They were correct. The rules of the group forbid the writers whose manuscripts were read from responding to any feedback. I abandoned the story.
More than four years later, I began writing a weekly column for a small daily in Kingman, Ariz. Most of my columns were uninspired, but on occasion I got creative. I even won a statewide award for feature columns. Independent of that award-winning column on two men with the same unusual name, I wrote a satirical saga about a group of animal rights activists called the Vegan Pagans who stole a wood bull from atop a steakhouse and held it hostage. They demanded that the restaurant begin serving vegetarian dishes. “Cattle are not chattel,” they told a reporter.
One of my colleagues thought I was writing a factual account because the story sounded real. So, in the second installment I included a caveat saying the story was a fictional account about a culture war taking place in a western state. I received interesting reactions. A former colleague in an email joked that he thought I was under the influence of mescaline. However, my literary ambitions were dashed. My editor told me he did not think fiction was appropriate for a newspaper column, so I ended the tale in the fifth episode with the Vegan Pagans outsmarting the local sheriff.
Another inspiration for fiction came a decade later. A dubious weekly assignment from a small-town Arizona editor inspired me to write a column-length series of short stories, using a nom de plume. An editor at an alternative newspaper eventually ran one of the stories about five years ago. The story, Realty Check, is about a reporter assigned to write a weekly feature on a real estate open house. His first assignment took him to a nudist country club with a golf course pond stocked with piranha to discourage skinny-dipping. An ambulance arrived at the golf course to take care of a naked man hit by a stray golf ball. “He was not wearing protection,” the real estate agent said.
Finishing Cut Loose won’t be easy. I have a long trip ahead. Sometimes, I can’t sleep at night while I’m thinking about it. I hear the Beatles’ song Paperback Writer in my head and hum it:
“Dear Sir or Madam will you read my book?/It took me years to write will you take a look?”
But barring unforeseen circumstances—a fatal car crash, a terminal illness or being abducted by space aliens wearing MAGA caps—I’ll get it done—and sooner. Meanwhile, I am having fun, and I hope you do as well.
Note to readers: I have created pdfs of the five-part Vegan Pagans saga and Realty Check and will email them to anyone who wants to read them.
I'd read them..😁
Still willing to edit! Your use of commas is still questionable.........