Tag: writing

52, or 2 x 2 x 13

John Winkelman

Me at 52

As of this morning, I have been out in the world for 52 years and a few hours. Actually I’m probably still asleep as this posts, as I usually schedule these things for the early hours of the morning, and this year my birthday falls on a Saturday. Of course I’m usually awake at 5:00, seven days a week thanks to the the two furry orange maniacs which have entered my life in the past year.

Poe and Pepper have been a constant source of attention and affection and stress relief in the COVID times. Zyra and I probably owe no small part of the health of our relationship to our cats, who have provided such entertainment while we endured the quarantine which is finally lifting.

Here at the beginning of June, most of the restrictions here in Michigan are lifted, and the remaining ones will likely be removed on July 1. One year and four months which changed the world in ways we will still be discovering a decade from now.

I have attempted in the past to write birthday posts, but being as close to my life as I am, it is difficult to form the necessary distance in order to write about it from the outside. The passage of time helps, but that means that I can only write about those events which have occurred between the bounding horizons of the moderately recent past, where subject slowly becomes object, and the event horizon of memory where I can no longer be sure the things I remember are the the things which happened, or things I invented to fill in the gaps. I am 52 years old. That’s a lot of lived experience, during much of which I wasn’t paying attention.

I have been with the same employer now for seven years. Ten, if you count my time at Cynergy before my current employer bought us, lock stock and barrel. Ten of my 22 years as a web developer. That is by far the longest I have been with a single employer. I have to say, as a middle-aged techie, stability is a Good Thing.

When I turned 51 I was nearing the middle of a crazy project which had me working second and third shift for two months, then a long and late first shift for two months. During springtime I was able to attend the martial arts class maybe twice. When we switched to first shift, which roughly coincided with the class moving to Wilcox Park after almost three months of meeting on Zoom, I felt my age. It has been a running theme among my tai chi classmates that, as we age, other people in our cohort seem so much older than we are. As I discovered, two months without regular sleep and regular exercise are all that stand between Us and Them.

With a more regular schedule I found more time to read and write and edit, and in October of 2020 one of my short stories was accepted for publication at Coffin Bell. The story was published in January 2021. This was a big deal for me, made even bigger by the fact that this was my first unsolicited piece of prose to be published. I have other publication credits, but they were solicited for specific publication. “Occupied Space” was the first to be rescued after being sent out into the wild.

I started my 51st year with profound sleep deprivation, an unemployed and injured girlfriend, extreme social anxiety, and a small orange cat. Here at the start of my 52nd year I am experiencing mild sleep deprivation, my girlfriend is busy starting her own company, I am vaccinated and therefore feel comfortable out in the world, and we have two small orange cats.

Oh: and in the past year Donald Trump, the conservative white supremacist sex predator, failed to be re-elected, like he has failed at everything else in his life except being a sexual predator and a white supremacist. I laugh out loud every time I pass a “Trump/Pence 2020” sign on my way to visit my parents. And since there is a lot of rural Michigan between here and there, I see a lot of those signs.

So 51 started low and improved steadily. If 52 continues the same trajectory the next year should be amazing.

IWSG, June 2021

John Winkelman

Welcome to the monthly Insecure Writer’s Support Group post. This month’s question is the following:

For how long do you shelve your first draft, before reading it and re-drafting? Is this dependent on your writing experience and the number of stories/books under your belt?

This is a complicated question to answer. A quick look through my archive shows that I have well over a hundred poems, three dozen short stories, partial or complete drafts of five novels, and a score or more of creative nonfiction pieces, essays, and research projects, all awaiting my attention. These works range in age from a couple of days to over three decades.

How long I shelve a draft depends entirely on the time I have available to revisit previous work and the level of energy I have when I have the time. Time and emotional energy do not often coincide, so a first draft which I complete at a furious pace may sit on my drive untouched and gathering virtual dust for years.

To date, I have published one short story and three poems. I completed the final draft of the short story three years after I wrote the first draft. The poems were about two years old when I sent them out into the wild. I sent each piece out to at least half a dozen magazines before they were accepted, and in some cases I subjected the piece to another round of edits after a rejection.

I don’t think writing experience plays into the amount of time a piece stays on the shelf. I have been writing off and on for thirty years, and I therefore have some pieces which have been gathering dust for thirty years. And I am not the same person I was when I wrote some of those older pieces. And the world is not the same as it was when I wrote stories and poems in response to specific events and ripples in the zeitgeist. A politically charged poem which was objectively good but very of-the-moment may never see the light of day again, unless events repeat themselves, or at least rhyme closely enough that the poem is meaningful again.

Currently I am editing a short story which started its life as a chapter from a literary fiction book I wrote during NaNoWriMo 2018. Three or four other chapters in that book could work as standalone short stories. And I still intend to complete and revise the book, so the work I do on the short stories derived therefrom will in turn benefit the completed text somewhere down the road.

I consider a backlog of shelved work to be a sign of a healthy writing habit. If an old piece is not worth revisiting, it can be considered a storehouse of ideas and memories which can be pulled out and remixed to create something new. But it is important to reread your old work from time to time. Doing so can put you mind in a place similar to where it was when you first created the work. It can remind you of what was going on in your life when you wrote the piece. And when you reread you can see how much you have progressed as a writer from the day you first put those words on paper. You can be your own inspiration.

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A Week Off

John Winkelman

Books acquired in the week of May 23, 2021

I was on vacation for the past week which, thanks to COVID, meant I did largely what I do while working, except without the working part. I did take a good long walk on Monday, from my house near downtown Grand Rapids, all the way around Reed’s Lake and back home, with stops at Argos Book Shop and Common Ground Coffee House.

It was a good week for reading material here at the Library of Winkelman Abbey.

First on the list is the latest issue of Poetry Magazine, which is soothing balm on the brain after a hard day of writing code.

Next is Robert Kelly’s A Strange Market, published by Black Sparrow Press, which I picked up at Argos at the end of my long walk. I love the old Black Sparrow books, back when they were an independent publisher rather than an imprint. The rough covers are part of the appeal and the aesthetic.

Next is Obits. by Tess Liem, which I also picked up at Argos. I had never heard of Liem, but a quick and random read of a couple of the poems herein convinced me that this would be a good impulse purchase.

Next is Maze by J.M. McDermott, from my subscription to the catalog of Apex Book Company.

Next is Mohamed Kheir’s Slipping, translated by Robin Moger, from my subscription to Two Lines Press.

And finally volumes 1 and 2 of The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism. I picked up volume 3 when Zyra and I visited City Lights Books back in summer 2018 and, since I can’t abide incomplete sets, completing the collection seemed like a good birthday present for myself.

In reading news, I finished Arkady Martines’s A Memory Called Empire and it was wonderful! I don’t remember the last book I read which had such deep and subtle political intrigue. I appreciated Martine’s use of the narrow lens of the single viewpoint character (albeit with some branches due to a very specific technology central to the plot). This kept the sense that the machinations and machinery of empire are vast and a single person can only see a small fraction or a single facet of the whole. I will need to reconsider some of my own writing in light of the experience I gained in reading this books.

I also finished Darran Anderson’s absolutely magnificent creative nonfiction book Imaginary Cities. Anderson explores ideas and the mythology of cities, and how they live in our stories, dreams and imagination, rather than the hard numeric facts. This means that Neil Gaiman will be cited next to Le Corbusier, and the stories related by Marco Polo and Samuel Taylor Coleridge will be given equal weight to the news feeds of current and historical events. Every page of this book contains passages good for multiple writing prompts, and as with Martine’s book above, but for quite different reasons, I feel I need to revisit some of my own writing based on the influences herein.

With those two books complete, I am now reading The Cybernetic Hypothesis, written by the collective Tiqqun and published by Semiotext(e). And for fiction I just started The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow. I am not far enough into either to form an opinion, but I have read enough to be intrigued and to keep going.

In writing news, not much is happening. I am slowly transcribing the thirty poems I wrote in April, and much to my surprise some of them have promise. I will probably be working on this task for the next few week as I return to work and summer distracts me with the option of being outside and away from a computer. I also started editing a literary fiction short story I wrote a couple of years ago, as part of NaNoWriMo. I think I will have it in shape to send out before the end of summer, assuming my energy level and attention span return to what they were before I received my COVID vaccinations.

One day, having the time and mental capacity to write regularly will be such a regular part of my life that it will not be worth mentioning. But today is not that day.

Down Time

John Winkelman

Books for the week of May 16, 2021

After almost six months without a meaningful break, I am taking a week off of work. My vacation will run from Monday May 24 through Memorial Day. Ten days off. I haven’t had time off like this since, um, this past July. Sure, I had time off during the winter holidays, but that isn’t really down time as such.

Two books arrived at the Library of Winkelman Abbey this week.

On the left is the Situationist International Anthology, edited and translated by Ken Knabb of the Bureau of Public Secrets. I first became aware of this book back when I worked at the bookstore, in the early nineties. I’m pretty sure one of the clerks ordered it, and I think it stayed in the break room for a long time, eventually ending up on the remainder shelves and possibly “liberated” by someone some years later. Recently I was reading something online, as one does, and the Situationist International was mentioned, and that brought back the memories of the Anthology.

On the right is Worlds of Light and Darkness, an anthology of the best of Dreamforge and Space & Time magazines. A combined anthology is an interesting concept, and seems a good way to introduce readers of the one magazine to the writers in the other. Perhaps other small journals could take note of this book and produce their own collaborative collections.

In reading news, I am still slowly making my way through Imaginary Cities and A Memory Called Empire. I am enjoying both immensely, but life stresses this past month have taken the energy right out of me, and there are days where I can’t read more than a page or two without either falling asleep or losing my focus. I am in dire need of a reset, and I hope that the upcoming week off, in which I plan to walk a lot, visit the woods and dunes and beaches of West Michigan, and spend quality time with my girlfriend, will give me the space I need to recover.

In writing news, it is much the same as for reading. No mental energy to apply to anything except getting through the day. Again, I have high hopes but no plans for the next ten days. I could set goals, but if I didn’t meet those goals I would only feel, on my first day back to work, that I had wasted my vacation.

So I will write as I feel inspired to write, and not force myself to meet arbitrary goals and deadlines. I do that enough at work.

IWSG, May 2021

John Winkelman

Welcome to the monthly Insecure Writer’s Support Group post. This month’s question is the following:

Has any of your readers ever responded to your writing in a way that you didn’t expect? If so, did it surprise you?

That is a good question! I haven’t published much – a few poems, a couple of short stories – and the readers have not responded one way or another. In fact, I have been published so seldom that when it does happen – and this assumes that there was a reader somewhere in the process – the fact that I got a response at all is a surprise.

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One Third of the Year, Gone So Soon

John Winkelman

Ivy flower

On Friday, the last day of April, I received my second COVID-19 vaccine shot (Pfizer). I felt fine until Saturday afternoon after kung fu class, at which time my energy level crashed and I developed a fever and I crawled into bed and slept for several hours. As of now things appear to be back to normal.

This was another week in which no new books arrived. April in general was an extremely slow month for the Library at Winkelman Abbey, with only five new volumes added to the shelves. It isn’t often that my reading outpaces my acquisitions.

In reading news, for the last week of April I finished Anders Dunkers’ collection of interviews Rediscovering Earth, which I must revisit soon with pen in hand so I can highlight all of the wonderful ideas and copy down all of the books cited therein.

I also finished  David Meltzer’s No Eyes: Lester Young, a book-length jazz poem or collection of jazz poems in tribute to saxophonist Lester Young. This was published by Black Sparrow Press, back when Black Sparrow was independent, rather than an imprint of a larger publisher, and when their books were immediately recognizable by their rough covers and muted color palettes.

In writing news, I finished out April having written a poem a day, every day for the entire month. It felt really, really good to have my head in that space again. I will try to keep up the pace, while also balancing the writing with editing, transcribing, and writing some new prose as well. The calls for submission never stop, and the deadlines approach.

And with that, I will leave you with the groovy tunes of Lester Young and Buddy Rich.

Brighter Days in Many Ways

John Winkelman

Books for the Week of April 18, 2021

As of this week the quality of life in my neighborhood has improved immensely. A terrible neighbor, who had made it his mission to deliberately be as obnoxious as possible to the people around him, has finally moved away. While, like Rush Limbaugh, the tragedy is not his absence but rather his existence, I do have to thank him for giving me an immense number of writing prompts over the past eight years. I used to have a running joke that I could never write literary fiction because around 3,000 words in, Cthulhu would show up. In this case, when writing about this odious jackass, he was so awful that the Great Old One never appeared. One day I will publish these stories, which are more transcriptions of events, and other than slightly changing some names I won’t need to alter any of the events in order to make them an entertaining read.

All of which is to say, I am looking forward to the next several months of peace and quiet with cautious optimism.

Three new volumes arrived this week. On the left is Red Nation Rising, from a Kickstarter campaign run by PM Press. The writers describe it as the first book to explore the dynamics of violence of bordertowns, which they define as the encroachment of white/European settlers into indigenous lands. This is a definition of a border/town which I have never seen before, and it rings true. What settlers call a border, the indigenous populations would call an encroaching wave of apocalypse.

In the middle is the Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction issue of Uncanny Magazine, originally published in 2018. Uncanny has published a manifesto wherein they describe their rationale for the naming of this and the other volumes in the _____ Destroy series. It is quite a good read, and eye-opening for anyone who is not familiar with the changing world of genre fiction. And it is a nice poke in the eye for anyone who doesn’t like the fact that the world of genre fiction is becoming more open and exclusive.

On the right is the latest issue of Poetry Magazine, which is a beautiful way to round out the last full week of National Poetry Month.

In reading news I am still working through a big pile of poetry books and journals, and it is wonderful! I will post the list on May 1. I am also still working through Rediscovering Earth, and quite liking it, though I have not had much free time to read this past week.

In writing news I am still keeping up the pace of at least a poem a day for the month of April. It feels good. Poetry is a muscle which grows stronger with regular exercise.

On Friday I will receive my second COVID shot. I look forward to being able to interact with other humans again. A little.

It’s Warm, It’s Cold, It’s Warm, It’s Cold

John Winkelman

We are now well into April, and the normally turbulent weather of this time of year is being exacerbated by a healthy dose of global warming which makes the highs and lows more frequent and more extreme. At present we have no expectation that this trend will reverse itself in the lifetime of any human currently living. Come to that, we have no expectation for things to change in the lifetime of any animal at all currently living, with the possible exception of extremophile critters somewhere around a deep-sea thermal vent in the Pacific Ocean.

No new reading material arrived at the Library of Winkelman Abbey this week. I expect the rest of April will be slow for the acquisitions department.

In reading news, I just finished Ibram X. Kendi‘s How to Be an Antiracist, and it blew my mind open in ways I did not expect. It wasn’t the subject, which was was very much in line with The New Jim Crow, Caste and Carceral Capitalism. Rather, it was the way Kendi drew the distinction between “not-” and “anti-“. For me (straight, white, middle-aged dude), this made me extremely uncomfortable in a positive way, as it pointed out a large blind spot in my interactions with the world. It’s not enough to simply not contribute to the problem. One must actively work to fix the problem, or by virtue of the inertia of the zeitgeist of the world, the problem persists. Any way of living that is not explicitly anti- is implicitly pro-. In matters of oppression and equity, there is no middle ground.

As April is National Poetry Month, I have been working my way through my back issues of Poetry Magazine, instead of the (surprisingly small) number of my poetry books which I have not read. The variety of poetry in Poetry is keeping my mind in the writing space, and I have managed to write a poem a day so far for every day of the month. I won’t copy them out of my journal or type them up until May, most likely, and then we will see if I have managed to put any of the many words I know together in some kind of meaningful order.

Here in the third week of Spring the world is turning green and some of the nights are warm enough to keep the windows open. The fresh air and smell of earth and grass and rain, and the soft sounds of the city at night make for a more restful sleep than I have know in months, and though I am not getting any more sleep than at any point in the past year, it is of better quality and therefore when I wake up I don’t resent being out of bed.

IWSG, April 2021

John Winkelman

Welcome to the monthly Insecure Writer’s Support Group post. This month’s question is the following:

Are you a risk-taker when writing? Do you try something radically different in style/POV/etc. or add controversial topics to your work?

I don’t know if I am a risk taker, as such. I like to play around with forms and styles. I have written stories in first and third person, past and present tense. Some styles work for certain stories; others do not. In the past I have written fantasy, science fiction, horror, westerns, and literary fiction. Again, some worked better than others. In particular, I went through a phase of writing literary short stories where around 2,000 words in Cthulhu would show up, despite my best efforts to keep the story from heading in that direction.

For me, memoir involves more risk because in order to be effective it must dig into places which I am not always willing to uncover. For example, a few years ago, for NaNoWriMo I set out to write a series of short stories, and as a warm-up exercise I wrote a short piece about the toxic people in my life. That short piece turned into 18,000 words, all written on November 1. I was an angry, bitter emotional wreck for days after. On a positive note, I was far enough ahead in my word count that I could take a couple of days off of writing in order to recover from the experience.

I don’t touch much on controversial topics, other than possibly equity, empathy and compassion, which are controversial topics in a society where sadism seems to be the national pastime.

So I suppose the risk-taking lies in trying something new which may or may not work. Either way, I have broadened my horizons and (hopefully) improved my craft.

Thank you for reading this answer, and thank you (and hello!) to the members of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group who find their way to my humble blog.

Insecure Writer's Support Group BadgeThe Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

IWSG, March 2021

John Winkelman

I have recently joined the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, which I discovered through the excellent blog of author Jean Davis.

And as a newly active member of the group, this is my first IWSG monthly first-Wednesday question:

Everyone has a favorite genre or genres to write. But what about your reading preferences? Do you read widely or only within the genre(s) you create stories for? What motivates your reading choice?

That is a very good question. Two things motivate my reading choices: a diversity of reading, and that one book I just gotta read right now. And there are secondary concerns, such as books which have been sitting around forever, and when my mind is in a particular space in which it will only be satisfied by e.g. poetry or Russian literature. Or Russian poetry.

I take as my guiding star Karen Lord‘s advice to “read well”. Find the books which are good examples of the kind of book I would like to write and, well, read them!

That doesn’t mean everything I read is practice for something I hope to write. I am motivated more than anything by curiosity. In my library I have scores of anthologies covering a great many subjects and styles of writing. My day job is mentally demanding and I am happy to indulge in purely escapist reading as time and opportunity allow. For example, last summer I did a deep dive into the Forgotten Realms novels and read the first twenty or so Drizzt Do’Urden novels by R.A. Salvatore.

Then again this past October I participated in the Sealey Challenge and read 31 books of poetry in 31 days. And a couple of weeks ago, after almost three decades of attempting it and failing, I finally read the entirety of The Brothers Karamazov.

So what motivates my reading? Ultimately I think I read whatever it feels important that I read next. And that could be anything.

And on a tangent, this wide and varied reading habit helps me through bouts of writing block and imposter syndrome. Usually if I am reading something which is too close to what I am writing I start to compare the one with the other, and therefore reading something outside of that channel is a good way to reset myself, mentally and emotionally, so I can get return to the writing practice with a clear mind.

What motivates your reading? Let me know in the comments!

 

Insecure Writer's Support Group BadgeThe Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.