Books for Writers: "The Suburbs of Heaven"

                I fell right into the world Merle Drown created in The Suburbs of Heaven; two dozen years ago I might have lived there myself. In the book, published in 200o, Drown writes about blue-collar, semi-rural New Hampshire, a place I feel I know well. True, my own upbringing took place in blue-collar, semi-rural Maine, but my real-life folk and Drown’s creations are all Yankees under the skin. Yankees are hardy folks, and we do what we need to put food on the table, gas in our trucks, and women in our beds.

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On Writing: The Creativity Equation

I teach creative writing at a large public school, and there's not a day that goes by when I don't hear one student or other whinge about “not being creative” or not knowing “what to write about.” On those occasions I give them my patent-pending Creativity Equation: Character A plus Situation B equals Story, which is greater than the sum of A plus B, or A+B=S>A+B.

This equation falls under the nonlinear algebraic subgroup “magic math,” which most students are not familiar with. So, I dumb it down to an axiom: Creativity is the ability to link two points into a not-yet existent third. 

On Writing: It Feels Like the Very First Time

     I worked as a print journalist for more than a decade — first as a reporter, then as an editor —writing for everything from start-ups to established papers with circulations in the tens of thousands. I estimate I’ve written 1,000 to 2,000 articles, columns, and editorials. I won some journalism awards at the state and regional level.
     I’m a writer. I can put a sentence together, and I used that skill to pay my bills and buy my beer for at least a quarter of my life. Every week I put my name on work and stuck it in the public eye. No muss, no fuss, no stress.

     Why, then, did I have a hard time sleeping the night before my latest public airing, my paid-fiction debut in Something Wicked? I felt butterflies flopping in the acid inside my gut and sweat beading in the lines of my palms. I paced. I fretted. I drove my wife up the wall. Hell, I drove myself up the wall. 

The Blues: This Post Could Save Your Life

It snowed today, not an unusual occurrence in New England, but the first real accumulation since the freak October “Snowpocolypse” that left thousands of my neighbors without power and caused a four-day shutdown of the school system that employs me.

This storm’s timing was good. The public schools were already out for February break, so the resulting half foot of snow only caused a couple of hundred closings of various kinds. Traffic rolled on and most folks made it to work, albeit a little late. I went out to shovel twice, drank a lot of tea, napped, and hung out with my spouse, who opted to take the day off.

It could have been worse; it has been and likely will be again. That fact, and my recent perusal of William Forstchen’s EMP-disaster novel, One Second After, got me thinking, again, about my household’s disaster readiness.