Author: Don

April in Paris, Part the First

As promised, the first in a series of thoughts and meditations on the words of some of my favorite writers from their interviews in The Paris Review.

The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours.  I try to encourage my student friends and my writer friends to write a short story in one day so it has a skin around it, its own intensity, its own life, its own reason for being.  There’s a reason why the idea occurred to you at that hour anyway, so go with that and investigate it, get it down.  Two or three thousand words in a few hours is not that hard.  Don’t let people interfere with you.  Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done.  If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.

 The Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 203, Ray Bradbury


It’s tempting for anyone who’s read Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, or even the rest of this Paris Review interview, to dismiss his “just do it” work ethic with, “That’s easy for him to say.”  I mean, I’ve certainly never cranked out “two or three thousand words in a few hours” without some difficulty.  And it’s been a pipe dream of mine for years to meet Bradbury’s suggested goal in Zen of one short story a week.   In fact, I’ve tried and failed at this for quite some years now.

But Bradbury’s approach doesn’t just represent a metric to me.  It’s a way of writing that has finally shown that, like everyone says, it’s about the journey.

Let me be clear: I’m not talking about “it’s the journey” in some head-in-the-clouds, stop-and-smell-the-roses, appreciate-the-here-and-now kind of way.  I’m talking about a journey that fucking makes me a better writer.  And I attribute every piece of (my pretty meager) success to that journey.

Why?  Because my personal writing journey–that attitude of “just fucking do it”–is fed by one aspect of my personality: my inherent stubbornness.  And it’s only been that stubbornness that’s been able to defeat another aspect of my personality.  the one that gets in the way of my writing: my inherent laziness.

(Edited to add) What fuels your artistic journey?

Next time: The other ways I beat my laziness.

“April in Paris”*

What you’re supposed to do is act like a fucking professional.

-Mr. White, Reservoir Dogs

You know how folks would get excited knowing that their favorite TV series were on, say, Hulu, in their entirety?  I felt exactly the same way when I read that The Paris Review has put all of their writer interviews online.  After years of passing up on purchasing the interview compilations, I gouged on them like a starving man.  I found–in a couple of cases, rediscovered–some real gems, which I’ve posted on my Tumblr.

You want to know how some real professionals get shit done?  Then you could do worse than to peer into the brains of the likes of Dorothy Parker, Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, and–for us genre folks–Ray Bradbury!

So I think over the next few days I’m going to post bits of their interviews, along with some accompanying thoughts.  Meditations, I guess you could call them. 

*Sorry, I’m still on the Count Basie Orhcestra tip from a few weeks ago.

“‘Cause whatever you do, oh, you’ve got to do your thing”

Like a lot of things in my life lately, this post is 9 days late.  Still, it’s the thought that counts, right?

This was going to be my “Why I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year” post.  But reading posts like that over the years, I’ve noticed that it seems difficult for me to write one without looking like a condescending jerk.

This isn’t where I’m going to turn up my nose at the NaNo, or go into my rationalization of why it just doesn’t fit in with my writing goals right now.  I only bring it up now because, despite my resolve to not even fool myself into thinking it was a possibility this year, I reupped my account anyway and found out that somehow, some of my peeps found and added me to their friends list. 

So, to them: You do your thing!!

Of course, the best part of reupping my account: the pep talks from famous writers in my email box.  I squeed when I saw Aimee Bender’s!

Showing Fools How It’s Done for 75 Years

Few things give me as much satisfaction as watching a consummate professional, in any field, at work.  Last Sunday night, I saw and heard a group of them–the 17-piece horn section, 4-piece rhythm section, vocalist, and conductor of the legendary Count Basie Orchestra.


I was expecting trombonist Bill Hughes to direct, but as it turns out, he retired last month. The band is now in the capable hands of Dennis Mackrel, one of the last members of the band to be hired by The Count himself.

I’d seen them play twice in college in the early ’90s.  The trumpet player in the pic above, Scotty Barnhart, was in the band back then, along with a few others.  If memory serves, he was the person who sold me the Live at El Morocco CD out of a duffle bag during an intermission.  See, I love that–even after 75 years, they’re still a working band.  Still on the hustle.  You can tell by the tour bus parked outside the theater.  The same kind of bus I used to ride on what were loosely called “gigs.”

My college flashbacks weren’t helped by the fact that I was also drinking cheap beer during the show.

The CBO in the vid below, directed by the equally legendary Frank Foster, was more or less the configuration that I saw in college.  My personal favorite song, “Corner Pocket” by Freddie Green and arranged by Ernie Wilkins, is at 2’40”.  I didn’t hear it on Sunday, which made me sad.  But the show still kicked ass. After 75 years and the inevitable personnel changes, the Count Basie Orchestra is still a group of what’s known in jazz circles as monsters and bad-ass motherfuckers.

Sort of makes me wonder if I can polish up the trumpet and revive my long-dead lead trumpet chops. I have to say, it’s been a long time since I’ve missed playing as badly as I did last night.

“God give us the blood to keep going”

I’ve had a bit of trouble getting a handle on my current work-in-progress.  It had such a promising start, judging from the critiques the first two acts have received.  But I struggled with the third act, so I took some time away from it to write other things.

This story’s for a closed anthology, and it’s due in about a month.  Time to get cracking again!  So after doing another round of hack-and-slash copyedits, I decided the piece needed a soundtrack.  So I picked some songs to mirror the sort of mood evoked from the picture above, and a couple of songs for different characters’ motivations.

Take a listen:

  • Chicago, “Prologue, August 29, 1968”
  • –, “Someday (August 29, 1968)
  • –, “While the City Sleeps”
  • –, “State of the Union”
  • –, “Dialogue (Pt. 1 & 2)”
  • –, “All the Years”
  • Depeche Mode, “Walking in My Shoes”
  • Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, “Battle of the Species”
  • Manic Street Preachers, “If You Tolerate This, Your Children Will Be Next”
  • Naomi Shelton & the Gospel Queens, “I’ll Take the Long Road”
  • Sons of Champlin, “Light Up the Candles”

Yes, I know there are a lot of Chicago songs on here, but at least it’s their cool ’70s and/or Robert Lamm-written stuff.

“I’m on fire/ On the playground, love”

Last Tuesday, I attended the first of this year’s Distinguished Visiting Writers Series at one of the local colleges, featuring author Jeffrey Eugenides.  He read an excerpt from his as-yet-untitled latest novel, which appeared in the June 7th New Yorker under the title “Extreme Solitude.” If you’ve had a college love affair of any kind, there’s a lot that’s familiar about the story.

After the reading, he took questions.  I was so glad I didn’t hear the types of questions I heard when his fellow Princeton colleague Joyce Carol Oates came to town.  Of course, this was an audience filled with writing students and teachers, so we were able to get past “Where do you get your ideas from?”  I was sure someone was going to ask him, in a slobbery voice, “How much input did you have when Sofia Coppola made The Virgin Suicides into a film?” or somesuch nonsense.  I’m so glad no one did.

On the upside, I managed to once again fight my fear of speaking to famous writers.  Of course, I was fighting it the entire time I was standing in line.  But in the end, it paid off.

“All the little kids growing up in the skids are goin’ ‘Cleveland rocks! Cleveland Rocks!'”

Over the holiday weekend, I made a long overdue trip to see my family who live a mere 20 minutes down I-90 from the front door to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  Of course I’ve always been fond of my hometown.  Make all the jokes you want about it, but at least we’re not Detroit.

Aside from ten years of stuff my folks have accumulated since I left, not a lot is different.  For instance, my old bedroom.  Some of the things tacked to the walls have been there for… Christ… 15 to 20 years.

Item One:
Poster of the best Batmobile. Why the best?  Chain guns.

Item Two:
A poster of the 1991 debut of the first Robin costume that didn’t include legless briefs (half-hidden behind a wardrobe).

Items Three, Four, and Five
More artifacts obtained during my high school years.

Items Six and Seven
An oversized button I bought from a booth somewhere in NYC when it was still considered the pit of the world, and another poster from the movie theater I worked as a teen.

Items Eight and Nine
Artifacts from a tad before junior high: a cross that, I think, my sister made for a project in our Catholic grade school and the appropriate Garbage Pail Kid.

“…going back to my old school.”

I never did buy into the whole “shit happens when Mercury is in retrograde” thing, but today I came close. 

Lots of stuff actually did go wrong today, but it started off badly from the jump.  I get up, get out of the house, and make it to my morning writing spot with a good hour and fifteen minutes before work.  And my beloved netbook, which worked fine before I left my place, refused to turn on.  I heard the hard drive doing… something… whenever I hit the power button.  But it just refused to boot up.

This is the point where, in the past, I would’ve gone off in a rage.  Actually, I’m not sure why I didn’t.  Still, I had a few options.  I had a similar problem sometime last year, which I fixed by flashing the BIOS.  I had a “rescue USB” drive with me, but I’d forgotten how to use it.  I could’ve gone back home, gotten online, and looked up how to fix what I thought was the problem–which would’ve eaten up my writing time–or, I could just take it back old school with an ancient method known as “longhand.”  And, that’s what I did.

Because, that’s how writers do it.  With a red-eye and no fucking excuses.