New Layout & Stuff

This is my first non-commercial blog posting.  Let's face it, blogging and tweeting and whatever other social-media verb you can think of is not really an activity that the mid 40s crowd is very good at.

In college I remember when I had something to sell (and old bike or a used textbook) I'd write out a For Sale sign on a piece of copy paper with a bunch of little tear-off phone number tabs at the bottom.  I'd go to the library and, for a buck or two, photocopy enough to hang up all over campus.  

So, craigslisting and facebooking to me is like electronic ignition was to my dad.  He never trusted a car that didn't have a rotor and spark plugs. Born at the start of the last depression (1929), he was raised in the electro-mechanical age.  Heck the first Apollo rocket had less computing power than an iPhone.  They may as well have been navigating with an astrolabe and a pocket-full of breadcrumbs.

I originally sat down to look up a way to publish or get some interest in the novel I've started.  After a year of fits & starts, I'm about 75 pages into it.  No, that's a lie, closer to 50 (but in a real small font).

Here I sit now, writing with Hemingway's bravado & false machismo in one ear and the nasal sound track voice of Carrie from Sex-in-the-City in the other.   One says the work is all that matters to sound true and clean.  The other multi-tasks, worries about rent, shoes and vodka.  Truth: they both worried about vodka.  

I imagine that if there was a Real-Writers of Paris camera crew sitting in the St. Germain cafés, we'd have learned a lot more of Ernest's tortured writing process than the brief bit he left in A Movable Feast.  I don't really care too much about Carrie's manufactured urban ennui.  

Anyway, check back from time to time...I have no schedule or time--table to keep to with this project.  I will write as time and medication permits.