KICKING THE TIRES OF TUESDAY MAY 10

If Wanda the fairy godmother shimmered into my living room, wand at the ready to grant three wishes, the first wish I’d spill is to produce an eight-episode television series from “The Curse of Chalion” by Lois McMaster Bujold. I read this book at least three times a year. It’s my opinion that it’s a masterpiece of world building. The linchpin of this story is the elegantly constructed religion base upon Five Gods: a god for each of four seasons, and a fifth god for chaos. Perhaps chaos misses the mark. The fifth god governs the unexpected the misplaced. When I find my engine idling, I entertain myself by imagining myself as a producer of this show. Oops! Times up! Hit the publish button

KICKING THE TIRES OF MONDAY AUGUST 22, 2021

A 2021 Resolution Shot to H–!

The resolution was to post every day without fail as this was my personal record tracking my use of imagination as a means of tracking the third semester of my allotted “four score and ten.” Sigh! I couldn’t manage to string words into a sentence. Once upon a time, somewhere someone stated forcefully “there is no such thing as writer’s block.”

It’s true. I certainly can’t claim writer’s block. I lacked the stamina for noodling through half-baked ideas and pushing limp words into sentences until one morphs into a paragraph.

For seventy-four years, I asked myself “if I don’t write up to my standards, should I write at all?” If one can’t write deathless prose, what is the point of writing at all? Personally speaking, the point of “getting my hands dirty” putting  words on paper is that I learn to appreciate good writing. I have certainly stumbled across some great writing that will never appear on the curriculum of a university English. Except for mine of course.

There are books that I read three times for the story then five more times to analyze and admire how the author constructs sentences, or establishes a mood or arcs a small  recurring event through the story until it explodes as the turning point of the novel.

Here’s a thought. What fun it might be teaching my own English class, using my own favorite books as a curriculum.

Think about it!