Onward

Onward.

The final word of Gospel, my literary-suspense manuscript due out this year, about lost love, a Faustian pact, and coming to terms with those things which most truly author our lives. A hopeful note, against a chorus of considerable darkness and despair. At once a beginning, and an end.

Like so many things, for so many people, in so many ways. Every year. Any year. And once more now, another upon us.

I'm not here to lecture. Highs and lows this last year, like everyone. Dad passed in June, though, and that was a loss. Of the sort that no turn of the calendar can magically allay. And that's ok, really. We must go on, if not move on. Some things endure, and rightly so. 

In All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy writes, Between the wish and the thing, the world lies waiting. 'Tis the season for resolutions, but whatever your aspirations, I hope for each of you the wish becomes the thing and that 2023 is a blessed year.

Speaking of McCarthy, he finally published again, a long-awaited delight for me. The Passenger, and a coda to that work, Stella Maris. Well into the former, and it's brilliant, per usual. The greatest nod I may give an author is when they inspire me not only to keep reading, but to write, and write well, and no one does so for me quite like Cormac. So, resolutions? Fine. Write every day. Something. Read too. And I implore all scribes do likewise. The opposite road is paved with beguiling excuses. Let's take the road less traveled. Erik Larson once reminded me that what most distinguishes a professional from an amateur is completion. I'll raise a glass to that.

I reckon if I must conjure up another resolution it would be to be more "other" focused. Can be counter-intuitive for a writer, as we must be our own best promoters, but in the end, we are of course more than our vocations or hobbies or our trades. In the end we must decide what shall author our lives. While he was on one hand a larger-than-life personality, Dad made a life out of focusing on others. Giving, teaching, inspiring. In his memory, I'll give it my best.

The key, of course, is enduring change. Making things a habit, not just a resolution that fades into the rearview mirror with each passing day. In the last year--and throughout our lives--we've all had some good luck and surely some bad. Perhaps even catastrophic. And while I shall never minimize those hardships confronted by so many, I do endeavor to maintain perspective, and another McCarthy quote sometimes helps me along the way. You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. No Country for Old Men.

And shoot, I'm traversing that old men country myself, truth be told. Get AARP stuff in the mail, at any rate. Beats the alternative, pray tell.

Alas, I've prattled on, as is my wont. Hopefully can channel some of it into some good literary production. Wishing a very happy, healthy, and productive new year to all, whatever that looks like for each of you. If you're anything like me, you'll fall short many times, maybe even fall off the horse entirely. No worries, get back in the saddle. Each day we can do so is a blessing and reprieve beyond measure. One day at a time. 

Onward.

A Single Flower: A Vision for the New Year

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Hindsight is 2020, but 2020 is the here and now, and as I ponder my own vision for this new year, I’m unsurprised that a McCarthy quote effervesces to mind. He’s my go-to, a scribe of such surpassing grit, eloquence and vision himself, that I emerge, unfailingly, inspired to write—more and better—after reading anything of his.

2019 was eventful, personally and professionally. A new job, turned 50, a health scare, and my novel was at long last republished. Time plays large in the David Rose series, and it’s hard not to ruminate on it now, with numbers such as 2020 and 50, lurking about. I was scouring some writing contests today, and one was entitled, Old Writers Contest. Don’t say 50, I thought, don’t say 50(though part of me secretly was ok with the notion, inasmuch as I wanted to submit to the contest). Sure enough, 50. Doh! 50 = old, at least as writers go, apparently. Ah well, I’ve always felt old. (They say—whoever they are—it’s not how old you are, but how old you feel...to which I now reply: that’s not helping.) 

Alas, most writers are old souls, anyway, I think. Romantics, in our way, even if that’s not our chosen genre(most assuredly not mine—not that there’s anything wrong with that). But even purveyors of the rawest, grittiest prose—McCarthy could be considered among them—have their song to song, their verse to contribute, and want to—perhaps  need to—be read, and be heard. That what they feel, what they think, and the characters and tales who manifest it, might for the reader come alive upon the page, and evoke even a modicum of thought and feeling in turn.

As we turn the page into a new year, I am, like so many of us, setting goals, and making plans. But no matter the goals, the plans, the lists, the numbers, it tends to always come back to that vision of which McCarthy wrote. When all’s said and done, it’s all that I hope for, what most, if not all writers hope for, I’d wager. That through the pain and the beauty, the blood, sweat and tears, the maddening writers’ block and intoxicating moments of epiphany, we might in the end, exact the vision of a single flower(or whatever that vision looks like for you).

May your writing and your vision and your dreams bloom as you desire in this year ahead.

Happy New Year, and thanks as always, for your support.

Lessons from the Master: Considerations of Theme

Theme is one of the most essential elements of a good story. The David Rose series is driven by several, including time, antipathy, immortality, hope and coming of age. Much of my other work, including my literary suspense manuscript, Cucariva, mines more sobering terrain, building perhaps more than anything on the notion of lost love, and the fight to find salvation, and the will to go on.

I fancy myself a decent hand at the written word, but even though I’ve penned countless thousands, endeavoring to capture the essence of this struggle, I can find no better than these by one of the greatest writers of all-time(after the protagonist loses the love of his life):

“He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led to nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.”

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Poignant prose, and it resonates within me, wholly and eternally, more deeply than I wish it would. But its great for theme, anyway, and theme is great for story.

I look forward to updating you soon about mine.

What themes to you most like to write, or read?

Thanks as always for your support!