Category: .: Writery things

To read, or not to read?

Posted under .: Miscellany Entertainment, .: Random Musings, .: Writery things on May 8th, 2016 by Mike D

This afternoon I was struggling to read a highly-praised novel that I was hating. I thought it was just me, that I was failing as a reader, so I kept trudging along, page after terrible page. I had promised myself to read today, and read I would. After about thirty minutes I realized I had finished several chapters. I didn’t hate it anymore. But I wasn’t really reading it either. I was actually just ignoring it. I could not remember anything I had read. I even clicked back a few pages only to discover the words were entirely foreign to me. I finally accepted defeat and closed the book forever.

Despite all of that I still wanted to read. After I deleted the daydream-inducing novel, I searched through the other titles I had available. I finally noticed the icon for Neil Gaiman’s new collection of short stories. I don’t know why I waited so long to start reading Trigger Warning. It has been on my Kindle for months, unopened. It is opened now, and it is delightful.

Random musings from this week.

I finished watching Sherpa this weekend. I can’t resist the allure of Mt. Everest.
I really really wanted the Penguins to close out the series against the Capitals tonight.
I feel inspired to finish that collection of short stories I’ve been working on for years.
I have already grown weary of all the election coverage.
The final season of Banshee is great so far.

Happy 400th anniversary William Shakespeare

Posted under .: Miscellany Entertainment, .: Writery things on April 23rd, 2016 by Mike D

Friday I set off to Stratford-upon-Avon for the annual Shakespeare Birthday Celebrations in his home town.

Source: Happy 400th anniversary William Shakespeare: Your genius still fires our imaginations| Fox News

To celebrate the master, some words from Hamlet (Act 3 Scene 1)…

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.–Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.

The Walking Dumb

Posted under .: Miscellany Entertainment, .: Random Musings, .: Writery things on March 28th, 2016 by Mike D

I have infrequently posted and tweeted about my growing contempt for The Walking Dead. This will be the final such post. I will watch the finale this weekend, but I will spare the critique. I am considering it a wake – you never want to say anything bad about the deceased. And The Walking Dead is now dead to me. I have listened to all the excuses and explanations, but I have finally decided that the show is just terrible. It is terribly written. It is terribly directed. And there are terrible acting performances. There is no longer any redeemable quality to this show whatsoever. I have grown weary of the pointless and illogical plot twists. There were moments of potential, but the lack of creativity was astounding: wasted characters, insipid dialogue, and irrational choices. The zombies have become my favorite character. I wish them well.

Other random musings from last week:

The Black Sails season was so good it inspired me to write a pirate-themed short story.
I posted my review of Erica Crockett’s The Ram on Wednesday. You should definitely check it out.
I don’t watch college basketball, but I successfully picked three of the final four. North Carolina is still alive as my choice for winner.

Random musings from this weekend

Posted under .: Drunken Sailors, .: Miscellany Entertainment, .: Random Musings, .: Writery things on March 20th, 2016 by Mike D

Black Sails killed one of my favorite characters and there is only one episode left in the season. Very depressed on both counts. On the plus side, I discovered that Michael Crichton wrote a novel called Pirate Latitudes. I am not a fan of posthumously published novels, but it’s about pirates, so I added it to the reading list.
Watched the latest episode of Better Call Saul. It keeps getting better.
I put the finishing touches on my review of Erica Crockett’s The Ram. I’ll post it on Wednesday to coincide with the official release. Be sure to check it out.
It is the first day of spring. It is snowing in western PA. What the hell?
I am mentally preparing myself to despise The Walking Dumb tonight. I am hoping they will eventually make me so angry that I will follow through with my repeated threats to stop watching.

What does this sentence mean?

Posted under .: Random Musings, .: Writery things on March 11th, 2016 by Mike D

On Wednesday night, two gunmen killed six people at a backyard barbecue. Several local and national news outlets have reported on the incident. Since the tragedy happened near Pittsburgh, not far from where I live, I have been keeping tabs on the investigation. Today I was reading an article on CNN.com. Drugs were likely involved, one of the injured was the intended target, no suspects have been identified, etc. However, once sentence has haunted me all afternoon…

“Another neighbor said he saw a bloody dog run out of the backyard with a bullet falling off its tail. “

What could that sentence possibly mean? Is the neighbor suggesting that a bullet landed on the dog’s tail and that the bullet fell off as the poor mutt fled for his life? The physical improbability of that is staggering. Was the blood from the dog or one of the victims? Could it be a typo? What other possible sentence could include a singular bullet and a dog’s tail? Was the dog struck in the tail by a stray bullet? Did his tail then fall off resulting in the blood? Where is the dog now? Is any of this information even pertinent?

Dear CNN: I need more information.

In case they edit the article, I grabbed a screen shot as evidence. After viewing it again, I have even more questions. Did the neighbor hear bullets or gunshots? There is an important difference. Does the ellipsis indicate an expletive or did she momentarily forget what to call the concrete structure adjacent to the door? Is the random inclusion of the red bible and the white teddy bear meant to symbolize the terror?

You will be missed, Harper Lee

Posted under .: Writery things on February 19th, 2016 by Mike D

NEW YORK (AP) — Harper Lee, the elusive novelist whose child’s-eye view of racial injustice in a small Southern town, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” became standard reading for millions of young people and an Oscar-winning film, has died. She was 89.

Lee died Friday, publisher HarperCollins said in a statement. It did not give any other details about how she died.

“The world knows Harper Lee was a brilliant writer but what many don’t know is that she was an extraordinary woman of great joyfulness, humility and kindness. She lived her life the way she wanted to — in private — surrounded by books and the people who loved her,” Michael Morrison, head of HarperCollins U.S. general books group, said in the statement.

To Poe

Posted under .: Writery things on January 19th, 2016 by Mike D

A simple salute to the master Edgar Allan Poe on his birthday. My favorite line by any writer in any form. Ever.

“Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?”

Coffee and Motherboards

Posted under .: Coffee, .: Random Musings, .: Writery things on January 17th, 2016 by Mike D

Coffee. Motherboards. The two have very little to do with one another except that they describe my Saturday in its entirety. One was quite disconcerting, the other, sublime.

My laptop died quite suddenly for unknown causes earlier this week. This is a cautionary tale for all writers. Although it was only a couple months old, it died in its sleep with no warning. I tried everything I could to wake it from its eternal slumber; I pushed every button, I cursed, I begged, and for a brief moment I nearly wept. As a last resort I headed to Best Buy in search of expert advice. “It’s the motherboard,” was all the guy at The Geek Squad could tell me. He then proceeded to extort $100 from me to save my files. As it turned out, it would take more like $250 since the motherboard was soldered to the hard-drive in some manner that all but ensured complete destruction of all the bits and bytes. I decided to roll the dice, since there was a chance all was lost already. I last backed up the files on 12/10. This is my warning to all writers: back up your files daily, or maybe even hourly.

For the rest of the day, I mourned the loss of my words. I don’t remember them all, but perhaps they were the greatest words I had ever written. I decided to brew some coffee to soothe my writer’s lament. I poured some filtered water into the kettle and turned on the stove. I opened a bag of Starbucks small-lot coffee and set the grinder to medium-coarse. I retrieved the Chemex brewer and carefully placed the filter. As I did these things, I already started feeling calmer with the scent of freshly ground coffee in the air. The kettle began to whistle. I slowly poured the boiling water over the grounds and watched them bloom. By the time I savored the first sip, I had begun to take solace in a few things: 1) The holidays were dry for inspiration, so maybe I didn’t lose too much, 2) the laptop was only a part-time scribing device; the desktop still functioned, and 3) I use a lot of index cards, journals, and good old-fashioned ink.

All that said, I hope karma is real and that my words are returned tenfold.

Here are some random musings about today:

The Seahawks are ruining my lazy day of watching football. No one likes a blow-out. The Steelers had best deliver later today.
I am deeply absorbed in a draft of Erica Crockett’s The Ram. You should probably befriend her and seek your own advanced copy.
Clicking through the news, I saw a photo of the freed hostages stepping off a plane in Germany. It is almost 35 years to the day since I watched the last Iranian hostage crisis unfold (January 20, 1981). I don’t ever want to see another one.

UPDATE 1/31/16: My laptop was returned from the Geek Squad this week. I held my breath as it booted up. Much to my surprise and delight, all of my files were intact exactly where I left them. There was much rejoicing.

Adele stole my favorite writing prompt

Posted under .: Random Musings, .: Short Fiction, .: Writery things on December 18th, 2015 by Mike D

Somewhere along the way a sage writing professor suggested that we should ‘mine our childhoods.’ I was never certain what she meant by mine. Excavate or explode? Either way, I think the effect can yield similar results. I instinctively wrote the following line on the top of the blank page: When we were young…

Over the years, I’ve grown to love that prompt. There is so much potential in those four words. At least two characters are introduced by the first-person plural. A perspective has been established, looking back some unknown number of years. The next word is also loaded with possibilities. Some days I simply chose “we,” other days I chose, “I” without really thinking. Occasionally I chose “there.” When we were young there was an abandoned house at the end of the street near the woods. The results vary and more often than not have nothing at all to do with my actual childhood. Tiny, delightful fictions.

I came across a reference to A. A. Milne a few years ago and realized that “When We Were Very Young” is a title of one of his Winnie the Pooh books. I decided I was OK with that. Perhaps the title was lodged somewhere in the recesses of my memory from when I was actually young. By removing “very” I have improved upon the phrase and made it my own.

This morning however, I was avoiding writing by surfing the internet. The new Adele song has grown on me, so I decided to watch the Jimmy Fallon video I had heard so much about. As I watched Jimmy’s rag tag band accompany Adele, my eyes were drawn to the right sidebar on YouTube. There, about three links down, I saw this title: Adele – When We Were Young (Live on SNL). Yes, I clicked on the link. And yes, I immediately confirmed on Amazon that Adele indeed has a song by that title on her new album. Of course I had to purchase the album. The song is now playing as I write this. I have to admit it’s not too bad. The line has served her well. I was distraught for a moment that perhaps I would have to find a new writing prompt, but then I realized I had stopped watching YouTube videos. I had stopped scrolling through Amazon. I had closed out everything else and started writing. In an odd and slightly ironic way, my favorite prompt has succeeded once again and yielded this:

When we were young I stole a kiss as we sat on the picnic table in your back yard at dusk. You seemed surprised, but kissed me back. We were thirteen and didn’t yet know where kisses led. We were thirteen and in love, perhaps the purest love either of us will ever feel. We were thirteen and my house down the street was empty, the boxes already hauled away to the new place. We were thirteen years old and I was moving to the other side of town, just a few miles away, but it might as well have been the other side of the planet. We were only thirteen and we never saw each other again. A different school district. Different friends. Different loves. Different lives. Although for me, forever changed by that stolen kiss near the sunset of our love.

Great opening line: Salinger

Posted under .: Writery things on December 15th, 2015 by Mike D

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

—J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

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rogue rhetoric

random musings by michael d. durkota