The Writing Life: reflections by a working writer.

The Writing Life: reflections by a working writer. The Writing Life

Reflections of a working writer, a university screenwriting professor, and the editor of Oregon Literary Review.

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Charles Deemer

Editor,
Oregon Literary Review

MFA, Playwriting, University of Oregon

Writing faculty, Portland State University (part-time)

Retired playwright and screenwriter.
Active novelist, librettist and teacher.

Email: cdeemer(at)yahoo(dot)com

The eagle flies!

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Literary archive

The Sextant Press

Personal home page

Electronic screenwriting tutorial

References

Bookstore
Highlights:

Finalist, Oregon Book Award

Practical Screenwriting

Love At Ground Zero

More books.

Blogs by (mostly) creative writers:

"Can We Talk About Me For A Change?"
Playwright Debra Neff Nathans

Inkygirl
Debbie Ridpath Ohi, a weblog for writers (resources)

Silliman's Blog
Ron Silliman, contemporary poetry and poetics

Maud Newton
literary links, amusements, politics, rants

Darren Barefoot
Technical and creative writing, theatre, Dublin

Rob's Writing Pains
Journey of a struggling writer.

Mad, Mad World
Cara Swann, fiction writer, journalist, "reflections on humanity, random news & my life."

Writeright
Random musings on a writer's life and times.

Flaskaland
Barbara Flaska's compilation of the best online articles about music and culture.

Write Of Way
Samantha Blackmon's written musings on writing (composition and rhetoric).

Alexander b. Craghead: blog
Writing, photography, and watercolors.

Rodney's Painted Pen
Rodney Bohen's daily commentary "on the wondrous two legged beast we fondly refer to as mankind." His pen runneth over.

Frustrated Writer
This one named Nicole.

scribble, scribble, scribble
Journalist Dale Keiger teaches nonfiction scribbling to undergraduate and graduate students at Johns Hopkins University.

The Unofficial Dave Barry Blog
The very one.

The Hive
The official blog of science fiction / horror author Terence West.

William Gibson Blog
Famed author of Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay.

The Word Foundry
Joe Clifford Faust's "blog of a working writer: tracking writing projects, musings on the creative process, occasional side trips into music, media, politics, religion, etc."

A Writer's Diary
By Cynthia Harrison, who has the good sense to quote Virginia Woolf: "The truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial."

Bow. James Bow.
The journal of James Bow and his writing.

Ravenlike
Michael Montoure's weblog about writing, primarily horror and speculative fiction.

Globemix
By David Henry, "a poet's weblog from Aberdeen, Scotland."

Modem Noise
By Adrian Bedford, a "fledgling Pro SF Writer, living in Perth, Australia."

boynton
"A wry writerly blog named in honour of a minor character in a minor Shirley Temple film."

Real Writers Bounce
Holly Lisle's blog, "a novelist's roadmap through the art and ordeal of finding the damned words."

2020 Hindsight
By Susan.

downWrite creative
Phil Houtz's notes on the writing life.

Vivid: pieces from a writer's notebook
Blog of Canadian poet Erin Noteboom.

The Literary Saloon
The literary weblog at the complete review.

Rabbit Blog
The rabbit writes on popular culture.

This Girl's Calendar
Momoka writes short stories.

Twists & Turns
Musings by writer Michael Gates.

Plays and Musicals -- A Writer's Introspective
A blog by John D. Nugent - Composer, Playwright, and Artistic Director of the Johnson City Independent Theatre Company

The American Sentimentalist
"Never has any people endured its own tragedy with so little sense of the tragic." Essays by Mark W. Anderson.

Screenwriting By Blog
David C. Daniel writes a screenplay online. "I've decided to publish the process as a way to push myself through it. From concept to completion, it'll be here."

SeanAlonzo.com
Official site of occult fiction author Sean-Alonzo, exploring symbolism, alternative history, philosophy, secret societies and other areas of the esoteric tradition.

Crafty Screenwriting
Maunderings of Alex Epstein, tv scribe, about life, politics, and the tv show I'm co-creating.

Letters From The Home Front
The life of a writer, 21, home schooled, rural living.

Venal Scene
The blog of bite-sized plays inspired by the news (by Dan Trujillo).

'Plaint of the Playwright
Rob Matsushita, a playwright from Wisconsin, "whines a lot."

I Pity Da Fool!
Glenn's adventures in screenwriting.

Time In Tel-Aviv
Hebrew modern literature at its best, by Corinna Hasofferett.

Big Window
Robin Reagler's poetry blog.

John Baker's Blog
Author of the Sam Turner and Stone Lewis novels.

The Writing Life With Dorothy Thompson
What goes on during a writer's busy day?

The Rebel Housewife
Not just a housewife!

Barry's Personal Blog
A running commentary on writing and the writing life.

Bonnie Blog
Maintained by Bonnie Burton of grrl.com.

Writer's Blog.
By easywriter. "From the walls of caves to cyberspace."

Flogging the Quill
Pursuing the art and craft of compelling storytelling, by an editor, Ray Rhamey.

Man Bytes Hollywood
Sharing tools, strategies and resources for the screenwriter's journey.

Mad for the smell of paper
A writing journal.

The Writing Life
A blog by Katey Schultz.

It Beats Working 9-5
A screenwriting blog by a young Canadian screenwriter.

Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God
Writer & Artist, Dee Rimbaud reflects upon politics, religion, art, poetry, the meaning of life, the nature of God and why toast always lands butter side down on carpets.

Robert Peake
Heart and Mind, Fully Engage ... a poet's website.

Sidestepping Real
By Ren Powell, poet, children’s writer, essayist and editor.

Suggest a writer's blog

The Writing Life...

"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's."
J.D. Salinger

"All my best friends are writers and are dead."
A friend over beer, Berkeley, winter, 1959

"And it came to pass that all the stars in the firmament had ceased to shine. But how was anyone to know?"
The Half-Life Conspiracy

After October 31, 2006,
new posts are published at

The Writing Life II

(Posts archived here are from 01/10/03 - 10/31/06)

Tuesday, April 22, 2003

Rock-n-Roll
[from a memoir in progress]
I became a teenager in the right place at the right time. In 1952, in Los Angeles County, white kids were beginning to turn on to black rhythm-n-blues music, and I was one of them. Suddenly the radio was more important than the new upstart, television, again. Over the radio came sounds of sensuality unlike anything I’d ever heard before. Up to my teenage years, I really wasn’t much of a music aficionado. I would listen with my Aunt Billie to her big band records. Billie was my mother’s sister, one of my favorite aunts, who in her youth had been a vocalist with a big band. I think I listened to her records as much for her stories as for the music.

I also was playing a little guitar by my teens, mainly cowboy songs. I wouldn’t get serious about my own musical expression until the end of my teens, after I’d moved to Berkeley, when I’d recreate myself as a folksinging beatnik.

But black rhythm-n-blues came over the L.A. airwaves like a signal of revolution, which in fact it was. Two shows in particular were listened to by most of the teenagers I knew: an afternoon show hosted by Hunter Hancock and a late night show hosted by a disc jockey who called himself Huggy Boy. I didn’t know any black people, though we’d had a black maid in Dallas, I had an occasional black schoolmate in Pasadena, and once even a black history teacher. But when Hunter Hancock and Huggy Boy played The Clovers, Billy Ward and the Dominoes, or The Flamingos, I was in a world that was new and exciting, sensual and forbidden, all at once.

It’s extraordinary how innocent the titillating lyrics of the 50s sound today. In "One Mint Julep" by The Clovers, there’s the line, “I’ve got six extra children from a-gettin’ frisky.” I’m sure the first time I heard the line on the radio I blushed. Even more daring was the song "Sixty-Minute Man" by Billy Ward and The Dominoes, with its chorus, “I rock ‘em, roll ‘em, all night long, I’m the sixty-minute man!” And later, “fifteen minutes of teasin’, fifteen minutes of squeezin’, and fifteen minutes of blowin’ my top!” At 13 I wondered how such sexual explicitness could get on the air.

And then there was the most titillating performer of all, a rock-n-roll hall-of-famer who died in 2003, Hank Ballard, who sang with his group, the Midnighters. Hank Ballard and the Midnighters was the most sexually daring rhythm-n-blues singer to hit the airwaves in the early years of rock-n-roll.

Ballard, who wrote and performed “The Twist” several years before Chubby Checker turned it into a smash hit, became best known for his infamous “Annie” records, the most notorious of which were the first two, “Work With Me, Annie” and “Annie Had A Baby.” The year was 1954, and I was 15. This is a pivotal year in the history of music, the year when most critics say black rhythm-n-blues gave birth to white rock-n-roll, a phenomenon led by a white singer who sounded black, named Elvis Presley. But the real notorious news of 1954 for teenagers like myself who still preferred the roots black sound to the new white sound was Hank Ballard and the Midnighters.

“Work With Me, Annie” has the lyric, “Let’s get it while the gettin’ is good, so good, so good, so good.” And later, “Annie, please don’t cheat. Give me all my meat.” This was incredible stuff for a white middle-class teenager to hear in 1954.

“Annie Had A Baby” was a more sophisticated song, full of wit and irony that I wouldn’t understand until years later. One verse goes:

She sings to the baby
Instead of me
Clings to the baby
Instead of me
Talks to the baby
Instead of me
Walks with the baby
Instead of me
Now it’s clear
And it’s understood
That’s what happens
When the gettin’ gets good
Annie had a baby
Can’t work no more

When Sam Philips discovered Elvis Presley for Sun Records, fulfilling his dream of finding a white man who could sing like a black man, the music scene changed forever. But I was already beginning to move on in my musical tastes by then to the cool west coast jazz sounds of Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker. For me, the sensual energy of black rhythm-n-blues in the early 1950s was more exciting than the white rock-n-roll that sprung up from it.

But there was no better time to be a teenager. More than the music scene changed when white kids started listening to black music. The culture changed. The excitement of this change is difficult for those who did not live through it to understand. The 1960s would present a dynamic cultural change of another kind, moving the borders expanded in the 1950s to still farther limits. I think all these changes began in the early 1950s when white kids like myself, living in cities large enough to have black radio stations, began turning the dial and discovered a kind of music that had far different energy and meaning than the relatively bland music of their parents. Today the Internet is offering the same kind of alternative to kids around the world. There are still cultural revolutions to come.

4/22/2003 06:31:00 AM | 0 comments

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__The Writing Life

After October 31, 2006, new posts are published at

The Writing Life II

After October 31, 2006,
new posts are published at