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.

Posts from past seven days. For others, see archives (below).

Video welcome (AVI, 9.8M)

Home.

Site Feed.

Looking for permalinks? Click on time after each post.

Search this blog:


Find any book

Project Gutenberg
Online Free Book Catalog (classics, world lit, etc.)

AA Independent Press Guide
A free online guide to 2000+ lit mags and publishers.

Everyone Who's Anyone in Adult Trade Publishing and Tinseltown Too
Extraordinary free info useful to writers when marketing.

Preditors & Editors
A guide to publishers and publishing services for serious writers, including info on scam agents.

Free screenwriting software
Cinergy, a script editor, free from Mindstar Productions. Easily write your screenplay in correct format.

Recommended screenwriting books
Some important reading for serious students.

Spec Script Writing: An Annotated Example
Short guide to correct screenwriting format and writing style.

Today in Literature

The New Yorker

The New York Review of Books

NY Times Sunday Book Review

Make a post


























 

Looking for permalinks? Click on time after each post.

Technorati Profile












 
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!

Links:

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

plagiarism 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)

 
Monday, May 12, 2003  
Bros
[from a memoir in progress]
At this point in my life, it never occurred to me that I was an alcoholic. Alcoholics were homeless bums on skid row. I was a spy in the Army Security Agency with a top secret codeword security clearance! How could I be an alcoholic? Besides, all my literary heroes – Agee, Mailer, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, O’Neill, Saroyan – were heavy drinkers. Sure, I was a heavy drinker, too – and so were all my friends in the Army. But we didn’t let drinking interfere with work. We played hard and we worked hard.

During my last year in Germany, another important friendship began in Baumholder – my first close friendship with a black man. I was 22 years old but had never had a black friend or even been on a first name basis with a black person, despite growing up in Southern California. This all changed when I met Brad. Brad was assigned to be my administrative assistant in Operations.

By this time I was playing football on the company flag football team. I was playing quarterback in a modified single wing formation, what today would be like a spread formation with two backs. Brad came out for the team and had the speed to be tailback. When he ran, I was the blocker right in front of him. When we passed, the snap would come back to me and often Brad was my target, running out of the backfield.

We started hanging out together, as jocks often do. This presented a problem when we ventured downtown, however, because the bars in Baumholder had segregated themselves. There were white bars, black bars and Hispanic bars, and you quickly learned which were which and obeyed the unspoken tradition of sticking to the bars frequented by your race. Brad and I wanted to hang out together, so we ignored all this.

The first time I took Brad into the Family Club, Amazon took me aside and chewed me out. Why was I looking for trouble? she wanted to know. At a black bar called the Golden Hirsch I was welcomed more kindly than Brad had been in my white hangout – at least until the night a black soldier broke a chair over my head. He’d just been kicked out of a white bar, and when he saw me hanging out with the brothers, he was outraged. Brad got me out of there before a riot started.

We started hanging out together on base, which was safer. Instead of drinking in the E. M. Club, we drank in one of our rooms, which wasn’t legal but was tolerated. We’d listen to jazz and drink German beer.

Crooks liked Brad as well, and often we’d spend our free time at his home off base. Dick and Bev went beyond the call of duty to make their home available to lonely G.I.s like us, which surely must have put a strain on their marriage. With two small kids to care for, Bev often found herself serving and picking up after a house full of drunken linguists as well. It couldn’t have been much fun.

My Ivy League friends understood neither my friendship with a blue collar westerner like Crooks nor with a black man like Brad, and I began to drift apart from them. Brad became my closest on-base friend, Crooks my best buddy, and the three of us spent more and more time together.

There are very few entries in my journal during my tour in Germany. In January, 1962, I pose a math. problem to myself but work on it for only several pages. The next entry jumps ahead 18 months, written a year after I’d become a civilian again.

As my discharge approached, I began to think about the immediate future. What was I going to do? I still had a vague notion of becoming a writer but in the Army, despite constant barroom conversation about literature, I was doing no actual writing. Should I return to school and study literature?

Then I remembered a fact that I’d been able to ignore for almost two years. I was married. I had a wife, Dee, to return to. I hadn’t heard from her in over a year. Nor had I written.

In fact, we’d begun to drift apart as soon as we learned we couldn’t annul our marriage in Reno. I wrote with less frequency, and so did she. Eventually I stopped thinking of myself as being married at all. Later I learned Dee did the same, having had an affair that resulted in a pregnancy and abortion in Mexico. But I learned this much later.

I recall writing Dee a curt letter informing her that I was about to get out of the Army. Should we get together and discuss our future? She wrote back that this sounded like a good idea.

As it turned out, it wasn’t as good an idea as we thought.
5/12/2003 01:32:00 PM | 0 comments

Comments: Post a Comment
 


Sketch says, "Happiness is sunshine and a bone." Posted by Hello

This page is powered by Blogger. __The Writing Life