So it goes...

 I watched a Barnes and Noble interview with Barack Obama the other night about his newest book, The Promised Land. I'll confess, I didn't watch the entire thing, as I had screen/zoom fatigue by then, but what I saw of it was interesting.  What I found the most interesting wasn't necessarily the content of the book, but the commonalities we share as writers. He was frank and honest about his routines and methods. He mentioned he tends to do his best writing between 10 PM and 1 AM. This is actually the polar opposite of when I like to write. I tend to like writing first thing in the morning and into the afternoon.  He also mentioned that he writes all of his stuff using longhand on yellow legal pads. He said that is more productive for him and makes for a cleaner transcription. I thought that was particularly interesting given my efforts on my latest manuscript "At the Lake" (Working Title).  As I've mentioned, I am trying to write this one entirely in longhand...

 As I forge ahead with my next writing project, I often question why I do it. Why do I feel compelled to write out my stories and try and create something out of nothing? I am an ordinary lunchpail-to-work guy for what pays the bills and keeps the creditors at bay. What moves me to write? What motivates me and how did it ever start? Those are tough questions for any writer I suppose. I suspect a few do it out of a desire for some (seemingly unattainable) level of fame. Others may do it out of boredom or maybe even obligation. So where do I fall on that spectrum? All I can say is it is and always has been part of me. It is almost genetic that way. I've enjoyed it ever since I was a kid. Unfortunately there were a lot of lost years where the only way it manifested itself was in letters to my brother in New York, my friend Pat in Tulsa, and eventually to this girl, Donna, who I would eventually marry after a long courtship via letters back and fourth between WI and NY.  It's thes...

So, I've been fairly quietly shopping around my latest poetry collection, Thoughts From A Line At The DMV , to various publishers. I had it out to 14 different small presses in two different forms, a full collection and a pared-down chapbook. A few of the submissions required a "reading fee" and a couple were contests. These are always exciting times once a submission  has been sent, a time of waiting and expectancy. On Tuesday, I got an email with the subject "Kelsay Books acceptance." Now, it's hard to describe the excitement at seeing an email like that in my inbox. I opened it to opening lines which read: "Thank you for your excellent poetry submission, Thoughts From A Line At The DMV. We would love to publish your book!" Well, someone pinch me. The details are very sketchy at this early stage, but I do know that it should be published sometime in 2019. I also know that Kelsay Books is a highly respected publisher of quality, beautif...

My wife made a point of scheduling a two day stay at a cabin in central Wisconsin to enable me to write and her to read. She is brutally aware how important my writing time is to me and she really loves to read, so she found a place online. The cabin was near Big Flats with the closest town being Hancock. It was a quaint little A Frame cottage in the middle of tall pine trees. It is surrounded by farm land, but you would never know it once you were on this property. The front yard butts up to a wonderful little trout stream that winds through the area. When I got there, the first thing I noticed was the quiet. Nothing but the trees whispering in the breeze. It is something we never get in the city, so when I hear it - or don't hear anything - it kind of shocks me. Anyway, the writing started that night and carried on for practically the whole time. Of course I took time out for eating and conversations with Donna, but for the most part it was BIC's. Butts In Chairs. She...

It has been a while, so here goes an update on all things writing related. I will be appearing with fellow AllWriters' author, Julie Beekman and Constance Malloy at Books and Company in Oconomowoc on September 12th at 7:00. This will be a panel event featuring a book overview, interviews, Q & A and a signing to follow. Julie is coming all the way from Colorado and her book, Two Trees , is worth checking out! Click here for more details. I have been soliciting signed poetry books as part of my outreach as Poet Laureate for the Village of Wales for a few months now. I am getting books in at a good pace lately and am approaching forty books from nearly twenty different authors. My goal is to raise 50 books and donate them to Kettle Moraine High School's library. It will get local poets into the hands of young people and that's a win-win. I am about 60,000 words into my Work In Progress (WIP), a memoir about my high school experience at an all-male, Christian, m...

In my ongoing edits for my next book, I am increasingly called upon to recall events that happened forty years ago, or more in some cases. Looking back on my childhood, I forgot to carry a notepad around and write down every major event or milestone as they happened. Because of this, I am left to recall all everything by memory alone. It worked this way with the writing of Dirty Shirt as well. It was during that process that I discovered that sometimes we remember things wildly different than how they happened.  For instance, I point to the story where, after tipping our canoe, we were left to try and find a campsite near our entry point. I originally had written that we camped on an undesignated campsite on a nearby island after paddling out of the stream system we were in. When I passed the story to my brothers to fact check, they both reminded me that we indeed did not camp at the island. They both agreed that we had tried to camp on the island but it was already occupied on ...

A couple of nights ago was the quarterly AllWriters ' Friday Night Free For All event at Cafe De Arts in Waukesha. The event features students of the writing studio reading their work in front of an audience. They read from a bunch of different genres and styles including, Poetry, Memoir, Fiction, Short Story and Novel. And while I live the reading part, sometimes I get as much enjoyment out of the half hour before and half hour afterward talking to other writers. It's the closet extrovert in me. I enjoyed talking to Lila about her soon to be released book about her brother that she wrote using HIS point of view - something I've never seen too much before in memoir. She conducted interviews with him for much of it and it sounded like a fascinating way to write a book. She has worked hard getting her book finished and published and I am super excited to see it come to fruition. And I loved talking to Jocelyn, the newest member of the Mighty Monday Nighters group that I...

Lots going on in the world of writing these days. I try and post all of my publications on my Author Website publications page, but I realize most people don't visit the site unless it is a link somewhere.  I'll focus on the biggest news and pay lip service to the rest of the items. In case you haven't heard, I have a chapbook that was just accepted for publication as an ebook by Underground Voices .  Now, even most of the people in my writing class didn't know what a chapbook was, so let me explain. It is a collection of poems, usually forty or less, that are sometimes focused around a theme (though that is not required). Mine are not theme specific, and as it stands now, there are forty in this publication. This is a group of poems I am extremely proud of. I put them out for publication because the timing was right. I had accumulated a bunch of them and rather than trying to submit them individually to various magazines, I thought a grouping would be nice....

I've been actively writing since about the fourth grade. Of course, it has been an on again/off again affair over my lifetime, but if I had to pin down when I first realized my love for writing, it would have to be in fourth grade. It was then that I wrote some stories that were not even required for class. I did them just because I enjoyed creating them. Each of the stories were written on 1/2 sheets of paper which were then cut in 2 and put together like a short book. I still have the stories, Mom saved them over the years, and there are some common themes to them, namely disaster, some sort of resolution to the disaster and a moral to the story. I remember a nun teacher of mine asked if she could put one or more of the stories in a special box for the class and I really wasn't keen on the idea. (Author's rights at a young age, I guess.) She got the drift and backed off, but it was really kind of cool to be acknowledged for something I just thought was fun. Through high...

I am what you might call in-between writing projects at the moment. I am currently working up to marketing my BWCA book to publishers. The book is "done" although, like any work, I think it could probably be better if I spent a couple more years on it. (That is a joke, but not too far from the truth. Ask any writer.) At the same time, I am working piecemeal on my second book, an as-yet untitled work about the house I grew up in in Minnesota. Initially the stories came fast and furious, as I recounted the best ones first. I think of this as a sort of creative vomit, for lack of a better description. The stories flow readily because they have been recounted several times at family gatherings, and if not recounted, replayed in my head. Getting them down is relatively simple. Getting them cleaned up is a bit harder. In addition to those two projects, I am coming off a handful of fictional short stories that I wrote to stretch myself. I think it's important to push the bou...

I had another fantastic writing class on Wednesday. We've got a couple of new students in the class, so it's nice to not only have new faces, but to hear fresh, new writing as well. One of them is writing adult fantasy, a story about a witch from a coven. There are a couple of other students, past and present, that have written about witches, so I am learning more about witches and witching than I ever wanted to. It's nothing that I would ever write about, but I respect people who do their homework and research about the subject, enough to write creepy stories about them. Even more though, I respect their ability to use their minds and creativity to evoke emotions of fear, sadness, excitement and fun from their readers. The other new student is working on a fiction piece that is based on truth, or true events. That is a style I'm enamored with at the moment. Being someone whose style (strength?) is memoir, I like the idea of taking a true event and fictionalizing it, ...

We got some great news today from my daughters school. She had entered a piece of her artwork in a competition set by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers .  Her piece (above) was a self-portrait done with pastels. There were a few thousand from the state and her piece was selected as one of the Gold Key winners. This is a pretty significant achievement given the number of entries. She was excited, but in typical Sarah form, she is humble about it. Like many of her achievements, I am more excited than her. Part of what I admire about it is that I have never been good at art. I used to love to draw football players until someone pointed out that their head was pointed in one direction and their feet in another. They looked like Egyptian glyphs if you know what I mean. My players were " Walking like an Egyptian. " When the friend pointed this out to me, it kind of ruined my love of drawing. To top it off, he was able to draw football players and make them look real. Re...

I spent this morning at a great workshop on marketing your work, submission guidelines and the like. It was at allwriters and there were 12 of us there; 11 women and me. Talk about the odd man out. (Or just the odd man, if you know me.) It was an outstanding look into the intricacies and nuances of getting your work out there and published. There was a ton of invaluable information about query letters, cover letters, synopsis, agenting, and more. We were given a ton of links to great sites for researching the market, as well as a number of good books on the subject. It actually inspired me enough to go home and submit a work of memoir to a magazine I'd found on one of the research links. The piece is on some of the cats we had when I was a kid. It is a dark humor kind of piece talking about their lives in a household of six kids, their untimely deaths or other ultimate fate. I changed it up a bit from when I had written it a year ago and let it fly. The magazine doesn't pay any...