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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Extraordinary free info useful to writers when marketing.

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

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

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Short guide to correct screenwriting format and writing style.

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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!

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

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 19, 2003

The Daughter
[from a memoir in progress, which began 4/13/03]
Through much of the summer of 1966, Dee and I house-sat my parents' home in southern Oregon while they visited relatives in New Jersey. This was the summer I edited all of my father's home movies, a project that became great fun. When I decided to edit a special film starring my brother, calling it "The Death of Artie Rainbow," Dee volunteered to make title cards to give it some class. We were working together. We were happy.

The family home in Medford was on almost an acre of land outside of town, and there was a large vegetable garden to tend. When the Albertsons and Crawfords visited from Los Angeles, staying with us for a week, their kids argued over who got to weed the garden. They'd never been this far out in the country before. We let them all get out there.

The Albertsons and Crawfords were hoping Dee would deliver the baby early, while they were there. Everyone was excited about the future. These were the happiest weeks in our marriage.

Then everything changed in a matter of months. Summer in Medford seemed to be the proverbial calm before the storm.

It didn't take long after starting graduate studies for me to realize how much I'd missed by being a commuting student in Southern California. Suddenly I was meeting people who were bright and articulate and passionately interested in literature - and some of them were women, attractive women. Why wasn't I married to a woman like this, who shared my passion for the literary life?

At home Dee and I never talked about books or ideas. In Maxie's Tavern near campus, a hangout for graduate students, that's all people talked about. Not since arriving in Berkeley had I been this excited about the intellectual environment around me. I knew immediately that I was going to love graduate school - but I also knew that Dee didn't fit in, that these were not her kind of people. I began to regret that she was pregnant. I began to regret saying yes to all those questions she had asked me.

The birth of our daughter only reinforced my doubts. What should have been a glorious moment became a terrifying one. When I looked at my daughter, I didn't see a beautiful living baby - I saw the very embodiment, the very personification, of the trap that was my marriage. I'd made a great mistake, a terrible mistake that was going to ruin my life, by saying yes to Dee. I still didn't know who I was, whether I was going to become a scholar or a writer, but I knew I belonged with people like those in my graduate classes, like those hanging out at Maxie's Tavern, like those who enjoyed nothing more than talking about ideas and literature.

I began acting as badly, as thoughtlessly, as I've ever acted in my life. As a teaching assistant, I had an office on campus. I began to study there, not at home. Under the excuse that we needed more income now that we had a child, I found a job singing folk music one night a week, which was another excuse to stay away from Dee. Typically I left for school early in the morning and returned late at night, usually directly from Maxie's Tavern, where I'd drink and bullshit with my fellow graduate students, male and female. I was not acting like a husband or a father. I was acting like a single, male graduate student, which is exactly how I came to feel.

I wasn't chasing after another woman. I was staying away from home. It was as if by ignoring everything there, I could make it all go away. I created a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Dee was no dummy. Dee was no wimp. She only took this behavior for about a month. We lived in married student housing west of campus, and one night I staggered home from Maxie's to enter a bare apartment. All the furniture was gone, everything. On the floor were stacks of my books and personal belongings and a sleeping bag. On the sleeping bag was a note. During the long day when she and the baby were alone, abandoned by me, Dee had called her mother for help, hired a moving van, packed up, and returned to Southern California.

I think I felt relieved. The grief didn't come until later, in an unannounced explosion of emotion that may have been a nervous breakdown. But that first night I must have done no more than roll out the sleeping bag and hit the sack.

I remember camping out in the bare apartment for weeks, continuing on as if nothing had happened. I went to classes, I played my folk music gigs, and I hung out at Maxie's Tavern. I didn't tell anyone that my wife had left me, taking my daughter with her. I made no effort to contact Dee. I just went on, doing pretty much what I had done when Dee was there. I lived in the bare apartment for weeks - and then for months.

Eventually I received a letter from Dee, asking if I wanted a divorce. I replied yes. This seemed to be the end of it. After all, I'd become divorced in my mind the moment I entered graduate school and realized all the possibilities it offered.

One of these possibilities was meeting a woman as passionate about literature as I was. I had my eye out now but made no connection until a Maxie's regular brought by a woman for me to meet.

5/19/2003 04:30:00 AM | 0 comments

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Sketch says, "Happiness is sunshine and a bone."

__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