Fun City

So, it occurs to me that if I don’t want to vacation in my book’s world, why would anyone want to read about it?

I have to stop looking at it like a Google maps satellite view and switch, instead, to street view.

I have to revisit Greece in my mind.  That sense of how the land invokes the gods.  If I don’t see my world that clearly, it’s still not ready to hold stories. 

Ess Tee Eff You

9-18-18

The coffee is a little strong today.

If I were anything but a writer, that would be that; the coffee’s strong and I just move on.  But, as one can imply from context – and the existence of this text – I am a writer so I can’t just leave it there.  I have to wax poetic on why the coffee being too strong bothers me.

Perhaps an inordinate amount of my conscious time is spent in the past, particularly street cafes of Rome or Paris or Venice.  Ignoring the tried-and-true habits of the locals, I order my cappuccino after 11 am and marvel how much stronger its flavor is than the “robust” coffee of my hometown convenience store’s offering.  Real coffee has a delightful bitterness and I, as a “cultural chameleon” (Rick Steves’ words) enjoy the local delights easily when I am here.  At home, they’re not calling to me.  Yet here I am in this coffeehouse, trying once more to enjoy a good strong coffee, and it tastes *too* strong.  It bothers me this time, for some reason.

Part of the bitterness is the tides of life that have conspired to keep me from traveling so far anytime in the foreseeable future.  Part of that daydreaming I do is the freedom to move between this, the “rat race”, and the pseudo-exotica of Europe.  Not like a rich traveler, in the most modern of chain hotels and the fanciest dinner halls, buying countless unnecessary baubles and taking photographs of my bare feet in front of cartoonishly blue shores.  That’s cool for some, but it’s not the travel I want.

What I want, however, is a back burner concern – what I *need* to get to that place is at hand.  I fell (or rather, jumped headfirst) into the debt trap that cripples most average folk in this country.  Debt is reserved for the insignificant, who toil under unsatisfying professions and reap meager benefits to help finance the wealthy and the sociopathic.  Sucks, right?  Anyway, pondering what it takes to extract oneself from this pattern requires a worthy endgame.  My endgame is to have the option to visit this magical, mystical land of AnywhereElseville when I desire.  Nothing more.

What can a peasant like myself do toward this end?  A quick survey of my skills paints a damned miserable picture.  Oh, there’s some encouragement coming in from various directions.  Pep talks never did much for me, as most (though I appreciate their good intentions) are fairly generic in nature, akin to “you’re in my thoughts and prayers”.  They’re like a cry of “freedom” which is, supposedly by its nature, self-evident and requires no further explanation.  When someone tells me “You can do it!” I always reply (at least internally) that “yeah, I knew that.  But HOW?”  Positive affirmations, without meaningful context, are like the pennies of a dragon’s treasury.  They fill up space, but aren’t worth much.

I know I can do it.  But how?

I’ve had conversations that consisted of my asking questions about technique, where the repeated response is some rewording of “just do it.”  “You just have to sit down and do it.”  “Just…”. Just.  Just.  *Just* means that it is self-evident and I need merely to Ess Tee Eff You and watch as the magic flows.  Hate to break it to you, but this occurs to me as well.

I get quality advice about the process from people who do quality work – in the particular outlet that I choose.  Visual artists tell stories, but in a different method.  I would take the advice of those who make compelling stories.  The two talents don’t always come together, and I do not do fan-fiction (just not an area of interest).  Audio artists speak a whole other language, but their process is perhaps more akin to fiction writing than the visual artist.  And music has the same “slow burn” effect – you can’t take it all in quickly.  You have to let it build.  (Except, say, Mona Lisa who is a fairly simple painting that people continue to witness in awe centuries later). Just as one must hear the whole song for the whole picture, a book or story has to be taken in its full form to convey its whole message. So I feel that much more compelled to craft the narrative in such a way that a person reaching the end doesn’t regret the time they wasted.

Before the visual artists throw their angry words and hashtags at me, I am not saying that visual arts are somehow inferior or easier.  It is a meticulous process as well. In most cases, the work is taken in in a very immediate sense.  People often know very quickly if they like something they see.  There’s a very visceral effect that either inspires further study or a dismayed turn away.  Music, to some degree, has that same effect, but it often takes longer to decide if one likes it or not.  Movies are a mix of visuals and writing, and poor visuals can rob the effect of decent writing, just as poor writing can sabotage visuals.  My point, I suppose, is that the months or years I may put in to a story may hit all the wrong notes for a reader, but as the cliche goes… one (shouldn’t) judge it by the cover.  They have to invest a good deal of time to decide their opinion, and I have to appreciate that and work to ensure they don’t lose too many hours on a bad story.

The point to this ramble is that I want quality advice when I’m stuck, not a pep talk.  I know things will be okay.  I want to know *how* to speed that process along.  And people who know you best can offer this advice if they’re interested more in being legitimately helpful vs. offering a mere pick-me-up.

Actually, the coffee is pretty good.  As I vent, I float back to those coffee bars and reclaim my chameleonic nature, at least in spirit, while I plot my return to those well-worn streets.  Advice or not.

"ghosts." must die!

Currently, all five published books are available in some form on amazon.com ... it's a start.

While I have a general idea for "ghosts." I don't have a real solid concept for it.  There's no need for another guide to the towns themselves.  I would just be parroting information from other, better books.

I also do not have a great deal of photographs from my earliest trips, or journals of the visits, but rather general stories of the visits.  I have far more photography and therefore, far more story from the most recent excursions to these places.

And still, this is not a necessary book either... like the two travel books I've put out there, one is not going to pick it up if it just doesn't appeal to an interest one already has.  The ghost town book would be something for about 3 people I know, and would collect e-dust otherwise.  These things are a lot of work, and it is admittedly disappointing that my own excitement about them rarely translates to excitement for the reader base.  Vanity projects are often misleading like that for the author.  It's no fault of the readership.

In the case of ghost towns, the image of them vs. the reality often does not match up in the minds of the reader.  Some of them are just vague piles of rubble, devoid of any of the character that their written history might suggest.  Hell Street in Canyon Diablo, AZ, is largely a pile of rotten wood, rusty flattened cans, and crumbled/collapsed foundations quickly being picked clean by souvenir hunters and washed away by the sun and rain.  Ask someone who's read the stories, and you can try to imagine "Bill Duckin" and his fatal mistake one Sunday morning facing down a robber.  Or B.S. Mary with birdshot in her ample behind, delivered by the blazing barrels of a shotgun wielded by Clabberfoot Annie.  Or Keno Harry cut down by a bullet for the deed to his poker flat.  Or, twenty five years later, in the abandoned, forgotten graveyard south of the tracks, how a bunch of drunken cowboys dug up John Shaw's body, stiff in rigor mortis, and gave him the whiskey shot he paid for a couple nights before and didn't get - because he decided in the spur of the moment to rob the saloon instead, and lost in a gunfight with the sheriff over the affair at Canyon Diablo.  None of this is evident in the broken down ruins.  They're disappearing, and fast.

All of this information is told elsewhere, and in better words.  So, do I just approach it as a photo book?  I don't think so, for a couple reasons.

1) My photography is really not good enough to stand on its own this way.

2) Pictures of ruins without context?  Pretty things to see, yet meaningless.

So, for me to do this at all, I need to have both stories and pictures to tie to them.  Some of the townsites I have visited don't have compelling stories (at least none I have found to date) - such as Cerbat; Mineral Park (aside from the Midnight Raid bit); Harrisburg; Carrara; Walker; etc.  Interesting ruins, in their ways, without unusual stories to tell.  I have nice pictures of many of them, and that's all.  And historic picture use is generally out, as a profitless enterprise like this can't afford the use fees likely in such reproduction.


I think the ghost town book is a no-go, as the work involved vs. the returns is not promising, and the product itself will not be a unique addition to the collection of literature already available from more interesting writers and photographers.  If I come up with a viable concept, I may revisit the idea in the future.

Scrawl, volume 1

Scrawl

By Joseph Grumbo

Short story collection from 1995-2002, slightly edited, lovingly typeset, with no high-fructose corn syrup.

Definitely not for the kids or the prudes.

Look for it soon on amazon.com

Books available...

While the ever-in-progress novel does command some of my attention, I have also completed some other projects recently, and have others in the beginning stages as well.

1) Another Temporary Export - this book utilizes my 2011-2012 article series from "The Noise", detailing my March 2011 trip to Italy and Greece.  In the book, I make a few minor edits and add some new pics.

2) Last of the Angst - a "reprint" of an unpublished book of free-verse poetry I bubbled out between 1999-2000.  Upon a reread, I find, while I have moved beyond many of the themes within, they still resound as universal human themes and ideologies in some cases, pure neuroses in others.

3) The Stew - a second volume of these free-verse poems and babblings from the same timeframe as Last of the Angst.

I currently have two other books in the works:

4) Untitled 2013 trip journal - this is in the same vein as #1 (Another Temporary Export), detailing my trip to Europe in 2013.  It was never written up as an article series, but will likely follow the same pattern as the first book (and hopefully be as interesting!)

5) ghosts. - this book details my start into the odd pursuit of dead towns, my friends who joined me along the way, and some sights that disappeared into memory since I last witnessed them.


Anyone who wishes to purchase these books will be able to find them on Amazon.com in their physical form, on blurb.com in either hard copy or PDF, and at least one of them on the Apple iBook store in ebook form.

I appreciate all who have helped me to spread the word on these, and hope to crank out more interesting stuff in the future.  Keep an eye out here for any news on current/new projects.

New approach and old bullshit

The old project, which to date hasn't burgeoned as hoped (or at all, really), has been shelved in a sense.  Some players remain, while the game plan is up for complete redefinition.

Everyone is "very busy" -- i.e. surfing Facebook for self-empowerment memes and recipes for chocolate no-bakes and plugging their own half-baked projects for ever-valuable "likes".  A communal non-community, it doesn't encourage conversation with all, sporting instead an algorithm that separates people into small cliques like a global high-school.  A remote server's arithmetic processor decides whose input you'll see, and who will see you.  Never mind the fact that it is set up to discourage real discourse, instead formatting itself in a way that encourages small "sound bites".  The mobile interface, which is by far the main interface for most, does not make it easy to witness those topics/media that others post which may take the reader away from the Facebook newsfeed, so most quality content - what little there really is - always goes unnoticed.  Facebook is like baby food for the brain, easily consumed and flavorless.  Great nourishment for the infant, but sorely lacking in adult-level nutrition.

There are many well-meaning folks who use it for a bulletin board to spread useful information, but these articles almost always get ignored in favor of click-bait "EPIC AWESOME ULTIMATE TAKEDOWN OF..." blah blah blah.  Or middle-aged women trying to rediscover their self-worth after ending a long-term relationship, via you-are-worth-it memes and i-don't-need-no-man-or-whatever memes.  Or men posting up gun or beer pics and American flags and other supposedly manly things.  Or aging intellectuals talking about how "simple" the world used to be.  Or the fuck-you-I-won't-do-whatcha-tell-me crowd.  Or the facebook-sucks crowd (this writer included).  Or the forty-somethings who endlessly note how "crazy" they are on the weekends, which means two weak mixed drinks and a lot of bad karaoke.

Typing more than twenty words is done with the sole expectation that no one will read it, not really.  We're very busy eating, facebooking, netflixing, working multiple shitty service-industry jobs, sleeping off our bad blood sugar.  Passive-aggressively sniping at the reality we created (did I hit the bullseye?)  We turn our blind eyes to the rich folk raping our lands to line their overfilled pockets, posting up memes that verbalize our horror so we can imagine ourselves involved in a solution.  We mock each other for our political differences, justify our violent solutions, defend old and tired ideas because we've grown up with them unquestioningly.

We tie our notions of religion to identity and fail to speak through kindness, instead panicking and lashing out at anyone who holds a different view.  If we don't lash out with hateful words, we lash out with condescending ones.  We forget what it means to be a channel of peace, opting instead to be a victim (of our inflexible, untenable ideologies).  We use our concepts of a universal Source to condemn one another, or for some, the conviction that there is no creative source to mock those who envision one.

I'm just trying to create a fantasy world and some characters to walk through it.  To fiendishly use them as a conduit for my old ideas or questions or concerns.  But maybe I don't fear much of anything.  Maybe I know what my big, umbrella answer is to all of man's problems -- look at them from the moon.  Can't see a single one?  And just imagine how much farther the universe stretches.  From that perspective, man is very insignificant.  The earth will not be destroyed by man's carelessness; man will only alter nature to a point where human life is unsustainable.  And nature will move on from their in its own way, well rid of a problem.

So, with all this to consider, what story does one tell?  And, in my experience, how do I get one to read it anyway?  Enthusiasm for new material vs. Having to actually read the material, that's the usual (majority, not total) response.  So it can't be for them.  But do I need it for me?

A little at a time

My brain is (not) like a sieve.  Yet the story somehow makes its way out a little bit at a time.  At this rate I can't make a living as a writer. Unless I become JD Salinger 2.0... Did he make a living by it?  As things look it's either break the levee or win the lottery.  Either way, what fun!