Of late more young to youngish to younger writers have contacted me concerning writing. I do realize that this old special ed tard’s rate of writing seems amazing. I would emphasize that it was not so when I held down a full time job, when I spent 4 years writing Tribes,18 months writing The Fighting Edge, 18 months writing Of the Sunset World.

There comes a saturation point, with any endeavor that requires the development of adaptive skill, such as fighting and writing, when our experience converges with our training, to light a spark. This happened for me in 2011 with the rewriting of When You’re Food. [0] And, since I am addled, brain damaged, retarded, and possibly not sane, that spark stayed to become a flame that has nearly consumed its author. For, when we try to become writers of art, we attempt to remake our self as a tool to serve our weird ego, that lad that remains under the weight of manhood.

The man I am living with has never permitted that lad to wane, has turned down promotions his entire life to work in the trades, and remains stoked with wonder. His arts are building, cooking, fishing and gaming. Mine have been reduced to writing. Having the honor of being picked up by him from Portland and transplanted to this wonder wind place, where I have written Nightsong of the Nords, Prentice Dolphin, Cube, Can, Timejacker and where American Dog and Slave are set, I found myself struggling with SPQR.

My most unique work has faltered, not for lack of idea, inspiration or mechanical skill. But because its a bigger book than I wanted. The characters are rising to exact the promise from the author—the silent muse pact he made to make up for his writing deficiencies—that he would not sacrifice them to the exigencies of plot.

There is also the problem of my eye, which has been banging under the howling winds—and there is the graphomania. I was supposed to only write fiction here, to finish SPQR and complete Slave. But, I listen to copious audio-books in those long hours when I do therapy exercises trying to shore up the back.

There are also the monastic inspirations that have attended me here: Tim’s work pants, a friend gone now three years, the Colonel’s coat with the hitched zipper, Toby, the American Dog, the feathered raptors in the poultry palace I helped build outside this pump room door, the wood stove that kept me alive when the power went out and the family was insanely clamming in zero degrees down on the ocean shore. I am again strong enough to haul and split wood. But writing health, ocular and posture, leaves limited ink in the writing well.

So I have returned to the plight of the 500 or so writers who do me the honor of reading my work. You are tired from work, weary from the world, gaslit by the over world, needed by loved ones, and stalked by petty crime thieves as well. I have 12 hours a day available to write, but the eyes can bare four at the most. What is more, the nerve medicine has clouded the mind’s eye, sent a couple muses off into the mire of some unwritable abyss. My succor, the feed for the mind, sounds from this computer in audiobooks kindly donated at great expense by my editor.

This triggers the graphomania to write history, book reviews, poetic impressions. And, at the same time, Doris Synchronus, Minicus Thrax, Max Born and Clyde of Taps demand more stage time on the shadowed stage of SPQR—Max misses his imprisoned Mum, for one.

The Synchronus Twins, Orpheus and Doris, are based on the Brickmouse and his Bride, she who used to sing at night while I shook in pain on their living room floor. As I was plotting the novel in my head, looking for non combatant characters to use for vantages in a gladiator story, I observed who close like spirit twins they were, not the opposite sorts of mates that men and women of old acquired. So, I cast them as orphan twins, as orphaned they are, being so at cross morals to this sick world, trying to be free in their little hidden space among the world dedicated to eating their hopes and drinking their woes.

I have been around such a sweet woman, whose house I clean in this near wilderness at the knee of Cedar Mountain, that I have been able to write a female vantage easily—and Doris wanted more of her story told. Having made the decision to create poetic content outlines for my remaining novels, I here abide by Aristotle’s dictum [In On Poetics] that a story is to be told in three parts. With so little time on such a busy stage, Doris’ revelatory chapter, something that I spent 20 chapters doing for Three Rivers in Of the Sunset World, had been arrogantly envisioned as a 2,000 word chapter. This is a woman—one cannot contain such a whirl of quivering, self-seeking chaos easily in one scene. So, for the second time in this novel, the first when introducing Minicus in Tyke of Pipes, I have taken a single scene and broken it in three.

Using my waning writing powers and declining health as an analog to the young writer’s increasing work and family commitments—I am thinking of Richard Barrett, Derek the Human and Andy Edwards here—I strongly urge this method of scene or chapter amplification by division. As a pulp writer I am guided by a need to keep posts below 2,000 words. When you come to a chapter, which you had envisioned covering one battle, one argument, one experiment by Brill Yates on a child procured by the Gorgon Queen from a pizza party, one chase, and find that you should have allotted three chapters, do nor rewrite the outline. It will go more smoothly if you stick with the same viewpoint character and develop them more fully in a scene expanded internally, deepened and broadened from within.

My experience has been that the more I lean on the character for this, the better the story has been. My host’ wife, Jenn, is another singing angel that got me through an illness. I see her looking, mouth agape at her husband when he says, “Whatever woman,” and dismisses her so that he and I may continue to thoughtlessly drink too much. Just thirty feet from here, surrounded by two adult sons wrestling on her dining room floor after her birthday dinner last night, yarns a muse too sweet to fight the weavers on the loom of fate, yet too emotive to resist applying her own hand to the composition of her plight. [1]

When stuck on this point, stop brooding over your novel on the way home from work, and listen to some woman on the bus try and talk her son out of some bullheaded act, or watch her tear up in concern over the plight of some homeless wretch you could care less about—use her. She is your muse, some bit of ink for your prose.

Notes

-0. The original 300 pages manuscript existed only in hard copy. So I did a scratch rewrite, copying interviews from the survey [2] but writing the narrative in real time based on events in my current life, otherwise it might have been a gloomy resurrection.

-1. I told Jenn how I was using her to composite with Guillo Girl for Doris, as well the two are composited with a girlfriend of mine for the intimate part as I don’t think about them sexually, and she said, “Oh, you mean those moments, when I become suddenly invisible to my husband and sons?”

-2. The Violence Project, 1996 to 2000.