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.

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

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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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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)

Sunday, June 29, 2003

Ger's death
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
My best friend in Portland, Ger Moran, also died within weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. My personal experience with cancer has not been encouraging.

I met Ger in the mid-1980s. He’d recently come to Portland to change careers and to be near his girlfriend, who was a theater fan and a particular fan of my work. When she recognized me sitting at an adjacent table at a sidewalk café one afternoon, she got Ger to introduce them.

Ger had done some acting in San Francisco and was a great theater fan himself. We immediately hit it off. I introduced him to the regulars at Seafood’s and Nobby’s, and he became an occasional frequenter of the bars, where we’d always talk some more.

Ger became my closest friend next to Crooks. Interestingly enough, when I finally had the opportunity to introduce my two closest friends to one another, they didn’t get along at all. Crooks thought Ger was a phony for wearing an ascot, as he often did, and probably gay besides, which was a pejorative term when Dick gave it a certain inflection (even though Dick did have gay friends), and Ger thought Dick was a blue-collar ruffian and a phony for his barroom stories, which Ger didn’t believe even though I knew for a fact that many of them were true. I didn’t try to become a peace maker and instead enjoyed each as my friend, never again making the mistake of bringing them together.

Ger and I became closest after Dick’s death when Ger moved downtown close to Portland State University, where I taught on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We’d meet at least one of those times for coffee before my classes. Ger had been laid off in his late fifties and had had a hard time finding employment since then, finally taking an early retirement at 62. Then everything began to break his way. He found a wonderful downtown apartment where part of his rent was subsidized, which allowed him to live fine on social security and a small retirement benefit. He started writing poetry again and was given a poetry column in his apartment building’s monthly newsletter. He took an interest in dating again after a disastrous, brief marriage to an alcoholic, a city hall ceremony Harriet and I had witnessed. He even quit smoking. Life was looking good.

One a Thursday afternoon over coffee, Ger told me he thought he might be coming down with the flu. He’d neglected to get his flu shorts. Maybe he should go up to the V.A. hospital and get them. He decided to see how he felt after the weekend. I told him if he needed a ride to the V.A. on Monday, to give me a holler.

I didn’t hear from Ger on Monday so figured everything was fine. On Tuesday he called me from the intensive care unit at the V.A. hospital. On Saturday he had fainted in his apartment. They’d found lung cancer that had spread to his brain.

The outlook wasn’t good. They tried a week of chemo, which changed nothing. In less than a month, he was gone.

Ger had spread his mother’s ashes in the same Shakespeare Garden where I had spread part of my father’s ashes. This is where Ger wanted to be as well. His sister and stepfather, some friends (including Zeena) and I all went up and had a brief ceremony, during which I read several of Ger’s poems. Then we spread his ashes.

I helped his sister clean out his apartment and found much more writing than I was aware of. In the early summer of 2003, I assembled and edited a book called Midnight Cabaret: The Writings of Ger Moran.

Ger was a student of eastern philosophy and took his fate well. “It’s all in the hands of the gods,” he told me while he was still cogent. He lingered on for days with no ability to communicate before his sister asked my advice about removing the life support systems. As it happened, after Dick’s sudden death, Ger and I had talked at length about this, and both agreed that we wouldn’t want life support systems keeping us alive just for the sake of some kind of official life. Quality of life concerned us more than quantity of life. When his sister learned this, she made what I, the doctor and Ger’s friends considered to be the right decision, although it remained a very hard decision for her to make.

So now I have two loved ones in the Shakespeare Garden. It’s the closest thing to a family plot I have.

6/29/2003 07:00:00 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