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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The Sextant Press

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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)

Wednesday, April 23, 2003

The Telescope
[from a memoir in progress]
Another obsession of my early teen years was my telescope. My father built it for me. This was proposed as a project for us to do together but projects with my dad ended up turning into his project, with me holding and passing him the tools. At any rate, I became the proud owner of a six-inch reflecting telescope with an equatorial mount, its focal length of 12.5 giving the tube a length in excess of six-feet. When mounted on top of our Packard for trips into the Mojave Desert, it looked like a small canon.

With my telescope, I became an avid amateur astronomer. When most teenagers were carousing at night, I was deep in the back yard, observing the stars with my telescope. Mostly I used a 150x lens, though I also had 250x, sometimes using this one on such objects as the moon or the rings of Saturn. But I typically cruised the heavens at 150x, a star atlas at hand as well as a flashlight with a red bulb to protect the sensitivity of my eyes. I stopped at star clusters, double stars, nebulae, and planets. Occasionally I would make drawings of what I saw, charting the movement of the four readily visible moons of Jupiter during a week. Now and again a comet would come within range of my telescope, which was always an event not to miss. “Huggy Boy’s” radio show started at midnight and often I’d be deep in the back yard by then, peering through the telescope, and I’d listen to Huggy Boy play rhythm-n-blues and rock-n-roll at low volume in the silent neighborhood night, staying up till two or three in the morning.

I built a cardboard device that held a screen at the telescope’s eyepiece so I could project the image of the sun onto it, and I charted a cycle of sunspots. One afternoon while drawing sunspots, an extraordinary thing happened. As I was drawing, my eyes moving from screen to paper, three oval objects in a “V” formation crossed the face of the sun. The sun was perhaps six inches in diameter on my screen, and it took these objects only four or five seconds to make their pass. I looked up – and saw flakes of ash. In those days every household had its own backyard incinerator, and Mom was burning trash. I dismissed what I saw as flecks of ash passing in front of the telescope.

But a few hours after I had put away the telescope, I realized this could not be so because the oval objects, like the sun, were in perfect focus. I had a problem to solve! I calculated the least distance from the telescope that an object would have to be in order to be in focus. It was far too great to be ash in the sky – the objects had to be flying. I made a graph, estimating their relative size, speed and height in order to pass across a six-inch sun in five seconds. The figures were literally “out of this world.” In other words, I had made a very unusual UFO sighting! I’ve believed in UFOs ever since.

Eventually I applied to become a member of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, an organization of amateur astronomers working for Harvard Observatory to record the varying brightness of variable stars in the sky. I was accepted and became one of the few teenagers in America to be a member of the A.A.V.S.O. I was assigned three variable stars to watch as often as possible, and I reported on the brightness of these stars with regularity throughout the year. If I had to get up at three in the morning to see them, then I set my alarm to get up at three in the morning. These stars were my responsibility, and as far as I was concerned Harvard Observatory was depending on me. I wasn’t about the let them down. My stars, for the moment at least, interested me far more than girls or even sports. I was on my way to becoming what many kids would call a nerd.

When I left home in 1959, I did not take my telescope with me. Although I reclaimed it in time, I never again used it with the almost nightly regularity that I did through most of high school. Eventually I gave it away to the astronomy department at the University of Oregon when I was a graduate student there.

I also stopped being an active amateur astronomer. I still remember much of what I learned in those years, such as the names of constellations and the location of galaxy highlights, but when I look at the night sky today it is with as much nostalgia as wonder, remembering a past life when nothing seemed more important in the world than to get up at three in the morning to estimate the brightness of a variable star so I could get the result in the morning mail to Harvard Observatory.

4/23/2003 07:08:00 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