Let's Just Say I Write

At some point, I guess I'll consider myself as a writer. I have been doing that for a good portion of my adult life--dating back to my days in the journalism department at Southwest Texas State University (still hurts my jaws to say Texas State). Back then, I wrote pieces for the campus newspaper and magazine.

I taught high school students how to write for their newspaper and yearbook in my journalism classes. During that time, I wrote articles for the school district's newspaper and began to try my skills at freelance writing about the subject that I knew best--blues music with an emphasis on the role of the harmonica. I've pumped out oodles of articles and music reviews over the years and I'm pretty sure that I made a grand total of $50. The blues sure could give a writer the blues. I do have have dozens upon dozens of CDs that publications considered to be my pay. Pretty positive that I really liked only about a dozen of those and haven't listened to the rest since I wrote about them.

I still never called myself a writer. Others have introduced me as such, but it hasn't been a term to which I labeled myself.

Now that I no longer have the high school teacher identity to fall back upon, lets just say that I write. If that makes me a writer, then that's okay with me. If I needed to have made oodles of money at the craft to be considered a writer in some people's mind, let's just say that I'm working at that. You might say that I've spent a good portion of my life writing in spite of the pay. Could say the same thing about my teaching career also, though.

Having written and revised my novel, which by the way is now entitled River Bottom Blues, I've been slogging through the process of trying to find an agent with the query-go-'round. Write to them and pitch the story with maybe a few pages thrown in and sit back and wait for the rejections to pile up with automated responses, such as--"Thanks, but sorry that it is not right for me", "Lovely ideas, but it doesn't fit what we want" and so on and so forth.

I've been studying up on the process of networking within the industry. Seems that maintaining a blog or a website is almost mandatory for writers and most of the blogs are aimed at writing and writers and the industry. This blog here doesn't fit that mold, but what the heck. Also, have you ever sat around on a clear night and just wondered how many billions of stars are beaming down? Well, my research indicates that there are just about that many NEW writers working at getting something published.

You know what, though? It doesn't really matter if my work gets published, because I wrote it and I like it. So, ask me what I do now and I'll tell you--I write. Call me what you want. Anyway--

The Devil's Instrument

The blog's been somewhat neglected since my last post a week ago, so I thought that I may as well come clean and admit something that I've been reluctant to do publicly. I finished writing a novel. I have been picking at it since somewhere around September. When people have asked, "Well, what do you do all day now that you're retired?" I normally say, "I don't know, but it takes all day and I still don't finish" and leave it at that and it has been the truth. As I told a friend,"If you tell people that you are writing a book, they look at you as if you told them that you were trying out for the Houston Astros." Same look.

I've gone about the process with an hour here and an hour there, but normally only three or four days a week, so it has taken a bit of time. The story took on a life of its own at some point and I picked up a bit more steam as I smelled the conclusion approaching. It is a hand written manuscript, so I tackled the task of typing the beast during this past week--which is quite the chore for me, because I hate typing almost as much as I hate painting on a house. Also, revising as I type slows the process down considerably. I hate proofreading and revising, also. What I'm saying is that I've spent a LOT of time sitting at this keyboard this past week and when the blog has called me, I haven't been able to rally the energy to tap one more consonant once I hit save for the day. I've estimated that I have 67,000 words written and that I've typed 9,700 of them. This is going to take just a little bit of my time.

To answer the curious: yes, the post title is my chosen working title for the book. I may change it. There are a slew of books out there with Devil printed on the cover. And, yes, the blues harp figures into the plot (Surprise!), along with various characters associated with the music. It most likely fits into mystery/crime genre. I actually enjoyed writing the story and it more or less flowed out, but I had been thinking about it for a long time and always told myself that I would write it down when I retired. I figured that I had no excuses not to get her done. Getting it published is another entirely different chore that I'll tackle once I quit torturing my keyboard. If it that never happens, then writing it had plenty of rewards.

Even though I should be typing on the manuscript instead of on this post, letting the cat out of the bag provided me with a bit of a distraction and a break from revising. Now I've got to go back and proofread this post and see if it needs revision, put on my Astros cap, and get back to the manuscript. I'll be back. Anyway--