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)

Thursday, June 26, 2003

Toward a personal philosophy
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Sobriety has brought me many gifts but perhaps the greatest has been a reintroduction to myself, to the self that got sidetracked in the Army when I learned that I had an abnormal capacity for alcohol and used this to pursue the social life I thought I’d been missing. Sober, I’ve learned that I’m reclusive by nature and that there is nothing wrong with this.

As I approach retirement, I find myself spending more and more time reflecting on my life and on the meaning of life in general. This memoir is a product of some of this energy. Today I’m able to articulate my belief system with greater clarity than ever before, even though I considered myself something of a barstool philosopher when I was drinking. But in those days, I was pontificating. Now my beliefs inform my actions, not my tongue.

Every experience I’ve related in these pages has influenced my philosophy of life. But I’ve purposely delayed sharing several important influences until now. Among these are the deaths of four people I loved.

Most people who knew my parents believed that my mother would outlive my father. Dad, after all, had had a stroke in his early sixties. Women, in general, outlived men. There was no reason to believe that Mom would die first.

There certainly was no reason to believe her days were numbered when she was scheduled for a routine rectal operation. I talked to her on the phone from Maryland the day before she checked into the hospital and teased her about her condition. I knew she would consider this particular kind of operation very “unladylike.”

We were always teasing Mom. She was the perfect person on whom to play a practical joke because she was so gullible. Dad set up the most involved traps for her, and his greatest practical joke of all was the night of the Willapoo.

Carol and I were visiting them in Medford. One hot summer night we were sitting around the kitchen table playing pinochle. Carol and I, of course, also were drinking cold beer. There was a large round thermometer on the patio, visible through the window, and the temperature was still in the 90s after nine at night. Mom, who hated heat, couldn’t stop complaining about the weather.

During a break, Dad took me aside and told me to keep Mom occupied when she came out of the bathroom until he gave me a signal to return to the kitchen table. I knew something was up and agreed.

We were back to playing cards when Dad suddenly shouted, out, “Oh my God, Flo, look! It’s a Willapoo!”

He was pointing at the thermometer outside – which now was registering only 60-odd degrees! Mom rushed outside, and we all followed her. Immediately her face lit up, and she started dancing across the patio, saying, “Feel how cool it is! This is so nice!”

Carol almost fell into the trap as well, mentioning that it did feel cooler. Dad explained that a Willapoo was a rare atmospheric event that happened only once every 250 years when the such-and-such and the so-and-so collided to cause a low pressure trough that pulled cold arctic air into southern Oregon.

Finally we went back to playing cards. Mom was no longer miserable from the heat. At the next break, I took Dad aside and asked him what was up. While I was keeping mother occupied during the previous break, and while Carol was in the bathroom, he had taken out some ice and held it on the thermometer until the temperature dropped. He had caused a Willapoo.

The temperature finally climbed to the high 70s again, and before the night was over Dad gave in and told Mom the truth, as he always did. She said, “Oh, Chick,” as she always did, and the matter was forgotten until the next time Dad had an audience to whom to tell the story.

I was very close to my mother. She told me things she told few other people. Once she told me how shocked she was that Dad had asked her to perform fellatio. “What kind of a woman does he think I am?” she wondered aloud. This speaks not only to the prejudices of her generation but to the intimacy of our relationship. I never missed sending her flowers on Mother’s Day or her birthday – except on one occasion, which she never forgot. I was raised by her, of course, while father was at sea, and for six years there were just the two of us. This formed a special bond that lasted all our lives.

In my office at home is a photograph of us, taken when I was about three, and both of us have bright eyes and broad smiles, mother with dark hair, pretty, myself silvery blond, cute, the pair of us looking like the two happiest people in the world, the bond of mother and son. When she was gone, I missed her terribly.

Mom dropped dead in the hospital lobby as she and Dad were checking out the day after her operation. The operation had gone well. Then my mother’s heart short-circuited, and she died instantly before she was able to walk out the hospital door.

I was stunned when I heard the news. I flew from Maryland to Oregon immediately. I drank through most of the long flight, thanks to an understanding stewardess who sympathized with me and let me buy more than my limit of liquor. I was pretty drunk by the time I stepped off the airplane. Mom was cremated and her ashes spread in the Applegate River at her favorite fishing hole. A few years later a dam project flooded the area, and the fishing hole disappeared.

6/26/2003 05:56:00 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