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Decisions, decisions
Three days from NaNoWriMo, and I’m still deciding on the story I’m going to write.
I’ve got three to choose from, where I’ve got enough in mind to see the beginning and a good chunk of the middle. I’m going to be surprised at the ending, no matter what.
I suppose I should be worried, right? I know plenty of people who have been outlining and preparing character biographies and what have you. But I have rarely been that kind of writer, and I’m not sure I’m going to start now. -
Things don’t ever change
It’s horrible when a mass shooting occurs, anywhere in the United States, which is where it happens so frequently. It’s even more tragic when it happens in a place you know well.
That’s happened to me three times in a little more than a decade: Newtown, Connecticut, near where I grew up; Pittsburgh, where I’ve lived; and now Maine. Newtown and Pittsburgh were deep blows to people I knew who lost loved ones and friends. That it happened in a town I knew well, in a school I had been to, the whole thing shook me in a way that few other things did. And, six years later, covering the Tree of Life murders, which I did five years ago yesterday, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in a career where I’ve seen a lot of pain and tragedy.
And then it happens again. Because it always seems to happen. But the location of Wednesday’s murders was another gut punch to those of us who know and love the state. It’s a magical place, closeknit, and one where I have spent both happy and sad times. I’d like to think it’s pretty special.
Except that it’s not. A mass shooting happens there, just like so many other places. And it leaves behind shock, horror, sadness, and empty spaces where friends and loved ones used to be. The pain lives on, layer upon layer.
And, as the Maine native Steven King pointed out in a brief and depressing op-ed piece in The New York Times today, things don’t seem to ever change. I thought, in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, that 20 murdered first-graders might wake up our nation.
I was wrong. -
‘Maine in Mourning’
I hadn’t been paying attention to the news Wednesday night but checked my email to find mention of the president being informed about the latest mass shooting. Reflexively, I Googled and lost a breath with the answer.
Maine.
I’ve never lived in Lewiston, which is in southern Maine, hours from where I lived in the northern part of the state in the ’90s. Yet I’ve certainly been to Lewiston and Auburn, the twin cities the locals call L-A. It doesn’t have a ton in common with the other LA. These are old mill towns that dot the landscape in Maine and New Hampshire.
In the mid-90s, in fact, I was through Lewiston several times because of a friend who lived nearby.
But I can tell you that Maine, a big state, really is a small state. There are less than a million people in the whole state, top to bottom. The biggest city is Portland, with about 65,000 residents (I’m working from memory here.) Lewiston is the state’s second biggest city, with 38,000 people. It’s the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else.
There’s a lot of that in Maine. I’m from the New York City area and Connecticut, which are densely populated and full of more people even in a small-ish town than you could ever imagine. It’s where I grew up and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But I learned so much from living in Maine and it has a piece of my heart still. In fact, it has more than that, long ago.When I moved to Maine, in my late 20s, for a job, I had a culture shock not from the accents and the rural nature but from how familiar everyone was. Being from Away, as it’s called there, I was both a curiosity and also someone from the Big City.
Like I said, where I’m from, you can’t know everyone and you don’t really know the ins and outs of your town or city because it’s so big and things are going on. Not so in rural Maine, where if you work and live and worship in a small town, you get to know most everyone in it. I lived in a town of about 500 people in a county of about 14,000. I knew a lot of people there. And even when I moved to Aroostook County, where I ended up having the most ties, it wasn’t much bigger: I spent most of my time in a city of 9,000 or so and a town of about 3,000. And I knew people in other small towns there, too.
When something happened, either good or bad, you knew it. And you felt it.
And while I could tell you of the multiple Maines that exist, I also know that when it comes to tragedy, Maine is all one state and it’s hurting right now. I don’t know how it comes back from something so tragic, made all the worse by the fact that the suspect in the mass shooting hasn’t yet been found.
“Maine in mourning,” the TV station said.
I believe it. -
We had no idea
A fun thing I wrote back in August 1999, when I was writing a weekly business column for my newspapers. It was a story about how small businesses keep up with changes.
About halfway through the story, I wrote:At the end of the 20th century, Thompson pointed out, business moves faster than ever before. In years past, businesses had a fair amount of lead time to evaluate trends and options. But thanks to the faster pace of television and the Internet, “everything seems to happen faster,” Thompson said.
Talk about something that didn’t age well, through no fault of the interviewer or interviewee. Sure, TV and the early Internet brought a fast pace to the world. It even started to shake the foundations of the incredibly rural and self-sufficient place I lived and worked at the time, along the U.S.-Canadian border.
But that was about a decade before almost everyone started getting cell phones and then smartphones, when texting and then social media changed everything.
Twenty-four years later, I’m still trying to parse it all. -
My NaNoWriMo project, or not
Less than a week to NaNoWriMo. Just one problem: I’m not sure what I’m going to write.
Because of my yearslong sojourn learning to read and write in Welsh, I’ve got a backup of fictional story ideas in various stages of development. Not only are they pieces that are drafted but unpublished, but they’re also ideas that I keep in a notebook and in my journal. There are two reasons why I dropped out of my Welsh classes halfway through my third year: one was that I began a book project that I knew I needed to write. I’m still working on that book project, nonfiction, and earlier this month came back from a research trip. I’ve written some of that draft but I’m still in deep research, so that doesn’t fit the spirit of NaNoWriMo.
Instead, I’m going for something new. Driving around, working out, going for a walk, waking up in the middle of the night, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to write about. There are ideas I’ve been kicking around for a long time, others that have come to me only recently. I’ve never really hurt for ideas. Getting to the point where I want to release them into the world, that’s another story.
So many stories. That’s the way I like it: Enough stories to last me a lifetime or two. I know I’ll die with stories to write, no matter how long I live. The goal is to finish as many as I can. I love to write. I need to write. A year ago, I was called to it anew. I haven’t taken a day off since.
That commitment begins anew a week from today. -
The magic of game 7s
When I was covering TV in the early 2000s for The Hollywood Reporter, one of the annual storylines was the Major League Baseball postseason. And one of the things I learned early was a seven-game championship series and World Series was the holy grail.
Baseball was in the midst of a long, slow decline, having long ago given up space on the American hearth to the National Football League. Baseball was still No. 2 in professional sports, to be sure. But the country didn’t live or die on who was in the World Series every year.
Fox, then and now, held the rights to the World Series with the classic team of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver. Sometimes there were seven-game championship series, but seven-game World Series were pretty rare in those times. The 2002 World Series between the Angels and the Giants went seven games. Then the next seven-game World Series wasn’t until 2011, although there were plenty of dramatic seven-game championships in between, including my favorite, the 2004 American League Championship Series where the Red Sox overcame a three-game deficit against the Yankees on the way to a four-game sweep of another historical nemesis, the Cardinals.
I was thinking of this all this week with both championship series going to seven games, Monday night for the Rangers-Astros and Tuesday night for the Phillies-Diamondbacks. It’s the first time since 2020 both the ALCS and NLCS went to seven games.
I watched some of the ALCS on Monday night. It’s only the second baseball I’ve seen this postseason although not the first in October: I was in person for the final game of the National League team in the city I live in. My kid’s a big fan.
Game sevens are pretty awesome. As I write this, it’s 3-1 with the Rangers, who haven’t lost on the road yet this postseason, ahead of the Astros. To quote Depeche Mode, everything counts, in large amounts.
‘Course, I’m not the best baseball fan. I’m going to bed long before this one is over, and I won’t check until tomorrow. But I know Fox is rooting for an exciting game 7, all the way. -
Pulled from the mists of memory
A few weeks ago, I lamented I wasn’t able to read about 10 files from the ‘90s in Microsoft Word that I had inadvisedly password-protected. I had pretty much lost hope I would be able to open the files.
I thought a lot about what I would have used for a password. I thought I had the right word, but I was having trouble finding the right combination. Every time, it didn’t work. These were some of my early computerized journals, back from when I had switched from a handwritten notebook (we didn’t have Moleskine back then) to the computer. I don’t have a ton of those files, but I had several from the late ‘90s and early 2000s before I settled upon the system I pretty much use now.
I’ve kept up a pretty robust journal since the late ‘80s, and I’ve got entries going back to 1979 and 1985 before 1989, when I started my career and I began to journal in earnest. I’ve lost some of them for sure, but I have everything else. Or at least I think. I might have lost a few along the way.
These files were among the last ones I hadn’t gotten to read. And I wanted to.
Last night, when I was quietly thinking about things, I decided to try the passwords one more time. I thought about what I might have used. Back then, when we didn’t really need a ton of passwords, it was pretty simple. I knew it was something that no one else would understand, something that was linked both to my present and my past.
And I remembered.
I typed it, and was granted access to every file but one, which is apparently corrupted. But it was enough to let me see, and backup unprotected, each of the files stretching back to 1991.
Turns out, most of the files I already had. But some of the entries, which I haven’t seen in 30 years, I did not.Pulled from the mists of memory.
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Bookish
Back late December, as I looked at how I wanted 2023 to go, I decided I would track the books I read and try to go through a book a week. I made a few other new year’s resolutions. This is really the only one, other than a few writing goals, that I’ve so far met.
I passed the 52-book mark in early September. I like to read. And it’s also good for me, not just my soul but also for my professional skills. Reading helps me write.
I reached 55 books earlier this week, when I finished Dani Shapiro’s “Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life.” (I liked this book, and I will write about it sometime.) But it had been the first book I had finished since September. I was traveling the first week of October on a book-research trip. I had two really big deadlines at work, and I’ve disappeared into research on my new book over the last few weeks.
Over the past few years, I have been listening to Welsh-language programming while I’m in the car, driving to and from work. But I’ve really tailed that off. I haven’t resumed my NPR habit, which was a pandemic casualty. For the past several months, feeling homesick, I’ve been listening to WCBS Newsradio 88 out of New York City. But the invasion of Israel and the tragic headlines since have really taken the wind out of my sails.
I’m taking a bit of a break from podcasts. So I picked up an audiobook: Erik Larson’s “The Devil in the White City,” his account of the 1893 World’s Exhibition in Chicago and the serial killer who arose in and around the fair. I’ve always admired Larson as a writer, and been a fan since “In the Garden of Beasts,” which fair to say stunned me with its sweep and its story. I’ve read most of his other work since then, although I hadn’t gotten around to “The Devil in the White City.”
Now I have. It’s going to be book No. 56, as I’m already through about half of it, and I’ll be going back and forth to work four or five days next week. -
Check mate
I’ve tried to like chess, I really have. But like just about every other game, I just don’t have it in me.
Intellectually, I do. My father taught me to play chess when I was young, and we played a bit. I played with friends until I was about 12, when I stopped playing altogether. I never picked it up again until one of my daughters decided she wanted to learn to play, and I taught her.
She quickly got bored, so I was off the hook.
I’ve tried to figure out why I don’t like games. I don’t have any on my iPhone or iPad. We have them at home on a shelf, but they haven’t come out since the early days of the pandemic. I don’t remember the last time I played a computer game.
Read somewhere that guys my age love video games, and play them more than watching TV. I also was an early adopter of Dungeons and Dragons, loved playing APBA, Stratomatic and Statis Pro baseball when I was younger. I even played a few leagues. I played a few games in the early ‘90s. Then there was Microsoft Flight Simulator, which I used to enjoy and sunk some money into. One of my flight instructors told me I had been able to transfer the skills behind the screen to the pilot’s seat, so I guess it wasn’t a total waste. But other than that, games haven’t factored into my life.
Reading and writing have been my favored points of relaxation. I even would rather than than most TV or movies.
I thought about this tonight as I sat and watched an impromptu chess tournament. Kids of all ages paired up and played. I was impressed by their concentration, the moves they made on the board, and how they were willing to work together. For all the times kids get yelled at for looking at their smartphones or watch too much TV, it was heartening. -
‘All that’s missing is a sidekick and an all-Welsh crew’
In case you’re like me and you can’t wait for David Tennant and Catherine Tate to return to Doctor Who, here is their finale lo those many years ago as The Doctor and The Fabulous Donna, along with Captain Jack (John Barrowman).
Those are three talented people, right there. The song isn’t familiar to Americans, but you can catch up to that too thanks to YouTube.
I loved the old Doctor Who when I was growing up and it was on PBS, but the reboot is just – as the Ninth Doctor would say – fantastic and I’ve been to a lot of the places they’ve filmed in and around Cardiff, Wales, one of my favorite cities in the world.
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About Me
Journalist and writer. Loves writing, storytelling, books, typewriters. Always trying to find my line. Oh, and here’s where I am now.
Nows and Forevers 
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