Postcard #1

  So, it’s been a bit since I’ve managed to post anything here on this blog. Not really surprising, my whole focus lately has been on  getting “Screaming in Paris” ready for digital publication. Still, I feel a bit guilty about the posting drought, especially since it wasn’t that long ago that I would get into a tizzy if I didn’t post every day. In the hopes of keeping interest alive as well as ease the shame of my lackluster blog performance, here’s a snippet from what is now “Chapter 32” of Screaming…

  Okay, time for a slight break from the narrative. Let’s take Paris out of the equation. Isn’t it amazing, when you are dealing with multiple family members and trying to select a food destination, that the whole process becomes this maddening, excruciating journey through hell?

  Picture this: Trace and I are innocently sitting in our humble domicile, our Fortress of Solitude, when one of our families (I won’t say which one), calls and announces that they are coming down for the weekend. That’s fine, great, love to see ya. So the platoon of relatives descends on Dallas, and everything is fairly decent, lots of love all around.

  Until it’s time for us to go eat somewhere. Then the soul-sucking hatch to madness opens up, and we fall through it, with a big batch of Alices tumbling down the rabbit hole.

  First, it takes two hours for everyone to actually get in to the vehicle that has been chosen for our drive to a restaurant. This should not be difficult. You stand up, you walk out the door, and you get into the car. This should take five minutes, ten if you need to set the security alarm and make sure the cat has food.

  Instead, two hours. No one is prepared to actually leave the house, even though we have all been up for hours and everyone has bathed. Everyone is dressed. Makeup has been applied. Yet all these people still have last-minute things that they need to take care of before we can leave.

  So people are stomping all over the house, doing who knows what the hell, and no one is getting in the van. No one. The departure announcement has been made, people. Get your asses out here. I’m in the driver’s seat, ready to go.

  No one in sight. Tumbleweeds blow past and a cow moos.

  So I go back in the house. Everyone looks the same. In fact, they appear to be in the same positions as when I left the house to start the car thirty minutes earlier. What are you doing? Come ON!

  Still, we spend more time gathering things that nobody needs, changing blouses that looked just fine the first time, and thoroughly inspecting the contents of purses that will never be opened during the entire journey.

  Finally, when I’m just shy of pulling out a cattle prod (no need to ask why I happen to own one), we get everybody in the van. Then it’s another thirty minutes while people jostle around, switching seats, adjusting car seats for the little ones, screwing with the seatbelts, arguing over who gets the window and who gets shotgun, and having to wait while people check their purse for the fourth time to ensure that they still have the things that they will never need.

  Eventually, and several gray hairs later, we are able to close all vehicle doors. I maneuver down the driveway, but pause before pulling out into the street. I know from experience that we need confirmation of the destination. When you are dealing with ten people having sidebar conversations about food, there will often be furtive executive decisions made where you didn’t get the email.

  “So, we’re still going to Ingrid’s House of Pasta, right?”

  Total silence.

  “Okay, somebody say something. Yes or no. Ingrid’s?”

  Total silence.

  I am now gnawing on the steering wheel to keep me sane.

  Then a small voice from somewhere in the back: “Well…”

  I jerk my head up and look in the rearview mirror. “Who said that? Somebody in the third row. I see movement. Show your face.”

  Everyone is still as stone.

  “Fine.” I start to put the van in gear. “Ingrid’s it is.”

  From the back again: “But we were thinking…”

  I turn off the engine, take a deep breath, force my eyes to bulge in an obvious display of lunacy, and whip around to face the demons behind me. “Okay, here’s the deal. You will come to a decision, and you will come to a decision NOW. I am not starting this car until every single one of you is in complete rapture about our destination. Do. You. Understand. Me?”

  Total silence.

Slash and Burn

  So I’ve been banging around, trying to convert the Paris Chronicles blog series from 2009 into something that could have the pacing and flow of an actual book. As many writers will attest, it can be a very painful process, trying to edit something you’ve worked on years before, something you thought had been put to rest, for better or worse. And now here you are, dragging the poor thing out of the ground, editorial meat cleaver held high.

  It’s not all doom and gloom, of course. It’s very nice reviewing a particular blog post and thinking, okay, that holds up pretty well, I just need an intro and an outro and the post is now a chapter. Yay! I must have been really focused that day. (Writers need that boost, that reassurance that you are actually capable of cleanly hitting the target from time to time.  Otherwise, we get a little crazy.)

  On the flip side, some of the posts are a disaster, especially from the viewpoint of turning them into book chapters. There might be several lovely paragraphs in a row, full of wit and charm, and then BAM, I run into two paragraphs that basically suck, with the suckage factor loud enough that the cats race from the room and they are not seen for two days. Why did I think this section was funny, or even publishable, at the time? The mind, it can be a terrible thing to cut and paste.

  So the literary renovation has been rather time-consuming. (As it should, if you want to get it right.) Entire original posts have been excised and banished, never to be spoken of again. Paragraphs of pointless meandering have vanished, and subplots that slammed into a brick wall and then limped back to the  main story are now in the trashcan. (But I promise I will never actually empty that trashcan. It will simply be placed in the attic along with all the other “well, that didn’t really work out” ideas that might gain some useable worth in the future. Until then, they shall gather the dust of time.)

  However, the remodeling hasn’t been just a slash and burn. In fact, I have worked in far more new material than I have deleted of the old. Expanded dialogue and scenes, additional adventures that didn’t make the cut the first time around, transitional passages that smooth over the sometimes abrupt sting of original posts that ended simply because I was tired and I had to get another post out the next day. The resulting book will be a different read from the blog run, with much more of, hopefully, the things that worked the first time.

  Which actually gets us to the point of this post. I’m down to just a handful of posts that need to be converted. And one of them is a blog entry concerning a sidebar, completely fictional story I wrote as a response to a picture that I took at the Chateau de Chambord. This bit has nothing to do with the real-world adventures on our trip, removing it will not affect the flow at all. But I still kind of like this one, and I’m on the include/don’t include fence, wondering if the effort to “make it fit” is justified by the value of the content.

  And this is where you come in, dear reader.

  I am pasting the mostly-original post below. (There have been some minor modifications, because I can’t help but tinker with things.) But you don’t need to know where it fits in the overall story, because it’s outside that story, it’s a stand-alone, and you should read it as such.  (For those who followed the original run of the blog series, you will notice that my family members’ real-life names have been converted to whimsical French names, something that I have done throughout the new book, for a number of reasons.)

  So, if you accept the challenge and have the time, please read the story and then add a comment (either here or on Facebook) with one of three ratings:

  A  -  Very funny, fit this in somehow.

  B  -  Amusing, but Argentina will not cry for you if you cut it.

  C  -  Make your peace and let it go.

  Easy enough, right? And no, you don’t have to comment, if that’s not your thing. But I would certainly appreciate it if you do. Since I’m truly undecided about keeping this bit or not, I will not be offended in the slightest with your ratings.

The Picture:

The Story:

This is the clan standing just outside the Salle du Grande Fromage at the Chateau de Chambord, waiting for some servant to make the formal announcement that we have arrived for tonight’s masked ball. This is procedural protocol for such royal events. You do not do anything until you have been announced.

This, of course, is unlike the American concept of arriving at a party. Back home, if we were headed to someone’s shindig, one would typically bang through the front door, usually without knocking, slam down a casserole on the kitchen table (a dish that you usually didn’t even prepare yourself and instead relied on one of your bored, socially-awkward relatives to prepare for you), high-five whoever is standing near you, and then reach for a beer. There are no announcements, formal or otherwise.

Anyway, the guy on the far right is with the castle staff. Since we only heard about the festivities at the last minute and arrived without an actual invitation, he is checking with the head chef in the kitchen to ensure there is enough food to pacify the over-sized American appetite, as opposed to the French appetite, where an entire ballroom of slender Parisians can be satisfied with one jar of olives and maybe some leftover brie.

Right next to the staffer, you can see that Maman is the official representative for our clan. She felt it was only right that she be the first one announced to the exclusive gathering, since it was her idea to come to this castle in the first place, she was the one who coordinated the whole van thing, and she’s been to France more than any of us and therefore is the most sophisticated about the French culture and she can show us how it’s done.

(We simply chose to ignore the weaknesses of these qualifications, especially the last bit about French culture. Seriously, if Maman ever tried to actually order something in French at a restaurant, she would be arrested immediately, deported, told to never come back, and a discreet phone call would be made to the White House.)

She actually got to go first because she’s the shortest, therefore less intimidating, and she likes to chatter a lot. These qualities are appealing to the French. They like short, chirpy things. After all, we were basically crashing the party, and we needed to ease into the setting. Sending Mom in first would be a more agreeable sight as the royal guests got their first sight of an “Oklahoman”. If we had sent Darrin in first, towering over everyone and stomping in his biker boots like Godzilla attacking the city, there would have been screams of terror, broken china, and spilt wine.

Proceeding left in the line up, we then have Reina. She is not the least bit happy at this moment. Maman is forcing her to wear a poofy dress that she hates. On top of that, since we were running late, Maman had decided to just slam the dress over her head, wheelchair and all.

This, of course, led to some immediate complications. The voluminous material of the dress kept getting caught in the gears of the wheelchair, locking the wheels and abruptly stopping all forward movement of the vehicle. Normally, this would send Reina tumbling to the ground. Instead, because she was wearing the material locked in the wheels, she was trapped in place but quickly losing the available material to actually wear, making the dress tighter and tighter as the wheels gobbled more of the fabric.

Reina was being eaten alive by her own couture.

By the end of the night she would be wearing nothing but a sash as a tube top and a hastily-snatched drapery tassel as a creatively-arranged thong.

Continuing left, we have Trace, who is also not in that great of a mood. He’s a little miffed that his outfit looks astonishingly similar to the one worn by Maman, even though they worked with two completely different designers on opposite sides of the city. He will not be able to stand out in the crowd as much as he had hoped. At least the foo-foo thing on his head is more flamboyant than Mom’s foo-foo, so he does have a height advantage. There is still hope for a stunning entrance.

(Then again, looks like he may have made an unfortunate choice in going with the asymmetrical cut of his evening wear, with the one completely exposed leg and the other sheathed in taffeta. Perhaps J-Lo could have pulled off this look. T-Lo, not so much.)

Care to venture a guess as to who is next in line? With the queenly bearing and the only one in the clan to be directly facing the paparazzi?

Tatum. Naturally.

She, as expected, was the most perturbed at not being designated as “First to Be Announced”. After all, she is still convinced that her family ruled this country at one time, so it was a total shock that she was not going to be the first float in the parade. But she understood, as all ladies of the court understand, that any revenge you seek should not be brash and hasty. You must plot wisely and carefully. And plot she did.

Her left hand that is chastely hidden behind her back? It’s holding a knife. She is just waiting for the right opportunity to whip it out and hack at those who have wrongly not recognized her noble breeding. It’s simply a matter of time until there is bloodshed.

Speaking of plotting, if we jump left to the other side of the stone column, we have another example of a scorned female seeking to show displeasure at having something she wanted rudely snatched from her grasp. This is Nynette.

Her issue?

Well, Nynette also had dreams of being the Belle of this particular Balle. Let’s face it, she’s traveled all the way from Odessa, Texas to be here. Might as well go all out. She had worked tirelessly the whole day on her attire and presentation, racing from shop to shop to get everything she needed, consulting with Tatum to ensure that she purchased the highest-quality makeup and top-of-the-line hair products so that she would be a goddess of beauty and light.

Then, just five minutes before this shot was taken, as we rolled up to the Chateau de Chambord in our horse-drawn carriage that we stole from a stupid man in a nearby quaint village, a devastating conversation took place between Nynette and one of the many servants who rushed out to greet us and attend to our immediate needs. The dialogue went something like this:

Male servant, assisting Nynette down from the carriage: “Ahhh, madame, your costume is magnifique.”

Nynette, slightly blushing but thrilled: “Well, thank you! I appreciate that. I worked really hard to-”

Servant: “You are being the… the name is not in my mind at this moment… the American woman who sewed the American flag… a grand idea to come as such, very much clever.”

Nynette, momentarily confused, then realizing: “Sewed the flag? Wait. You think I look like Betsy Ross?”

Servant: “Oui, madame. Very much a good image. Very… convincing.”

Nynette, now outraged: “But she was UGLY! I don’t want to look like Betsy Ross. Do you think I spent all this money just to look like some simple seamstress from Philadelphia?” She snatched her hand away from the servant and helped herself out of the carriage.

Servant: “Madame… my English is not of perfection… but I am not saying of the ugly and simple-”

Nynette: “Just go help somebody else. I’m fine. Leave me alone, you wretched man.”

Then Nynette stomped away on the finely-maintained alabaster gravel of the entrance courtyard, crunching off to one side, then turned to watch as the rest of our party descended from the carriage.

Next out of the carriage door was Tatum, bursting through the opening in a glowing and radiant way, instantly charming most of the servants who then rushed to assist her, one of them rudely pushing Nynette to the side in his haste to offer comfort to the latest vision of loveliness.

Nynette, scowling, barely paid attention, at first, to this rush of devotion for her friend. And then it clicked.

Tatum was the one who convinced her to buy this particular makeup. Tatum was the one who insisted that she wear this specific outfit because it would “look fab”. Tatum was the one who said “no, shoving your hair up into this wig does NOT make you look like a serial-killer posing as a high-school cafeteria worker.”

Tatum was not a bestie. She was the evil opposite. She was a bitchie.

And with that thought, Nynette began to plan her own revenge. She wasn’t sure how, but justice was going to be served. By the time the photo above was taken ten minutes later, she had a rudimentary plan. Details still needed fine-tuning, but the basic gist was that Nynette was going to shove Tatum’s treacherous head into a silver punch bowl, washing away Tatum’s own carefully-applied makeup, thus revealing all of the traitor’s skin flaws to the entire court. Nynette hoped that somewhere along the line the royals had installed florescent lighting, thus making the Big Reveal even more shocking and traumatic.

Back to the group photo.

Moving to the left of Nynette/Betsy, we have Daisi, looking naturally stunning and thin as a blade of grass. Daisi is also a woman scorned (we seem to have a lot of them in our family), and Daisi is a woman who is about to take the life of the man she is glaring at with murder in her eyes.

That man is Dash, her up-to-this-point-at-least husband. You see, Dash has an interesting concept of how to behave in public. For the most part, he’s harmless. He just goes with the flow. But he’s a firm believer in taking care of bodily needs as they arise. He feels that anything which naturally occurs should not be offensive. It’s just part of being a human.

In this case, the natural occurrence is that he has just let rip with one of the loudest examples of flatulence that has ever taken place in the history of our planet. The sheer energy that has been released could power a small village for several days. As this photo is being taken, the reverberations of his release are still echoing throughout the five stories of hand-carved stonework in this palace.

Daisi is mortified. Dash is mystified at her mortification. What? You expected me to keep that IN? A gas bubble the size of Jupiter that could work its way to my heart and kill me? Do you want that?

As the thunderous rumble slowly dissipates, let’s move to the final person on the far left. This is me. As you’ll notice, I’m facing away from these obnoxious people, hiding my face in shame. We get all gussied up for a fancy ball, but the hick still oozes out like somebody’s got a major problem with their septic tank.

I’m wanting to leave. I’m wanting to just quietly slip out the door and walk away. I don’t care about the carriage. I’ll find my own way. I will walk until my feet are bloody nubs, hoping to find a secluded spot in the country where I can have a simple life, raising goats and reading poetry to the tomato plants that I lovingly nourish.

If only Tatum hadn’t talked us into coming to this party. If only-

Wait a minute. There’s the key.

Tatum.

Oh my God. It’s like the end of that movie, “The Usual Suspects,” where the detective stares at his bulletin board and suddenly everything is clear. Clues that he should have picked up on, but he didn’t until that final moment when the pieces clicked. Scenes from the our whole day flash before my eyes:

Tatum telling Maman: “Oh, go ahead and get the poofy dress for Reina. It won’t get caught in the wheelchair at all. It’s silk. Silk doesn’t catch. But on the teeny tiny chance that it does, I can take your place at the front of the line. It’s the least I can do.”

Tatum telling Trace, over brunch: “You have GOT to use this design for your costume. It’s totally unique. No one else in the world will be wearing anything like it. And that asymmetrical part? To DIE for.” A bit later, I should have known something was up when I spotted Tatum racing away from the hotel fax machine with a furtive look in her eye. I just thought she was helping Trace out by sending the pattern to his designer. But she must have been sending the pattern to Maman’s designer as well, thus ensuring that there would be an awkward twinkie situation.

Tatum to Nynette, as they were sharing a beer and makeup tips in the bathroom: “No, sweetie, pancake makeup is NOT a bad thing. It’s very hip these days. And wear this dowdy wig, which is also very current. Trust me. You will NOT look like that woman who happened to share a pew with George Washington at his church, managing to score a gig to make a flag in an early form of social networking.”

Tatum to Dash, as they are perusing the fresh vegetables at an open market while the rest of the women are back at the hotel, squeezing themselves into their outfits for the evening: “Do you like broccoli? I LOVE broccoli. Here, try some. Try some more. Isn’t it good? More.”

These whizzing scenes in my mind come to a halt. Tatum has done all of this to make sure that she would be the standout at the ball.

I pull back from the stone pillar at Chateau de Chambord where I have been banging my head. I turn and glare directly at Tatum.

She knows instantly that the game is up.

“You!” My voice echoes upwards, joining the lingering gases of Dash’s ass.

She yelps. Then I hear a clatter as she releases the knife she had been holding behind her back. “But I didn’t really mean to-”

“YOU!” I repeat, marching in her direction. “What is WRONG with you? Do you have to be the center of attention SO bad that you would-”

Just then, we hear the odd two-note siren of an approaching French police car. Great.

Tatum’s eyes are wide with fear. She instinctively reaches for her lip gloss with a trembling hand…

Where I’ve Been, And Why

  So, in the middle of December, last year, I suddenly stopped posting on this blog. Absolutely nothing for over 3 months. I basically avoided any updates on Facebook, although there were a few drive-by snippets here and there. I didn’t throw anything out on Twitter, although, to be fair, I never really got invested in the Twitter thing. (There’s something about the 160-character thing that just irks and inhibits me.) My Pinterest boards went silent, I apparently stopped perusing books according to Goodreads, and Google Plus became Google Minus.

  Last month, the silence on this blog was briefly broken, with three half-ass posts, not my best, then the tumbleweeds started rolling again. I essentially went AWOL from social media, and I gave no reason why. But today, with the arrival of a certain something in the mail, I decided it was time to chat a little bit about what’s been going on.

  Despite the concerns expressed by a few people who emailed me privately, I did not go into a depression. Rather, I went into a distraction. Two of them, actually. My creative juices did not dry up. Instead, the juices were squeezed into different containers than this one.

  The first container was one of my other blogs, “Backup Dancers From Hell”. At some point late last year, something I did, or perhaps something someone else did, caused a huge spike in hits on that blog. I went from an average of less than a hundred hits a day to over a thousand a day. And the spike held strong, continuing for weeks. It eventually abated somewhat, but I still regularly get 500-600 hits a day.

  Granted, an analysis of hits is rather mundane and boring for people who aren’t writing an actual blog. But if you are a blogger, any time you see a spike, you do the best you can to recreate or reinforce whatever caused that activity. Trouble is, I couldn’t figure out what was causing all the commotion, what  might be the source of the influx, because the tallies of hits on the individual posts did not add up to the overall total that Blogger was reporting for that site.  And I still haven’t figured it out, even after I went to the Blogger IT people. They were just as flummoxed as me about the discrepancy, but they confirmed that the overall total was a valid and wonderful thing.

  Hmm.

  Bottom line, something or somebody somewhere was paying attention to that blog. And the only way to guarantee the attention was to keep posting. So I have been. Which means less time for this blog.

  The bigger container for my juices (that sounds a bit naughty, but I’m keeping the phrase anyway) had two fundamental ingredients. The first was the abysmally low number of hits for this blog. Although I like ALL of my blogs, at least those that are still active, this one is my pride and joy. This is where I have the most fun, where I don’t limit myself, and where you can get the truest glimpse into what I’m really trying to do. But nobody was coming to visit, despite my promotional efforts on social media.

  And that’s ingredient number two, social media. I had been spending an enormous amount of time on the various outlets, from Facebook to Pinterest to lesser-known vehicles that might generate some visits, especially repeat visits, which is crucial, to my blogs. Yes, some of my time, especially on Facebook, was purely social in nature and I do enjoy that angle, but a big chunk of my efforts were concentrated on the business side.

  And it really is a business, for me. I love writing, don’t get me wrong, if The Fates decree that I am never to earn a penny from my writing, so be it, I will still continue. But I would like to earn some pennies from it, many pennies, to be blunt. I would like it to be my career. Scratch that, I dream nightly about it being my career. It’s the one thing I’ve always wanted, since day one when I first composed a sentence as a young child and thought, wow, that felt really good. More, please.

  But we all face obstacles when approaching  fervent goals, and mine are currently these: I have a soul-sucking day job that takes up a tremendous amount of time. (And most of us do, I realize, I’m just listing my grievances to present a better case in court.) I’ve been spending a lot of time on social media promoting my material, instead of producing my material. (And as I’ve mentioned, that promoting doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere.) And I have a tendency, on this blog, to create hugely-epic, multi-part posts that only attract my few hard-core readers. (The average visitor drops into the middle of this mess, immediately gets confused about what is going on, and leaves.)

  Those are the lesser-evils. The biggest impediment? My using the above excuses to justify and explain why I’m not getting anywhere with this blogging thing. It was time for me to suck it up, get real, and do what I’ve always wanted to do, which is write books. The blogs are fine and dandy, for what they are, and I’ve had many fine moments where I’m overwhelmingly proud of what I’ve done, even if only my hard-core readers pay any attention.

  So that’s what I’m going to do, write actual books. More importantly, I’m actually doing something about it instead of just wishing and hoping. I’ve started on the first book (in this decade anyway, more on that later) and things seem to be going okay. It’s a reworking of the “Paris Chronicles” series from this very blog, which originally ran at the tail-end of 2009. I’m chopping and shifting and adding and subtracting bits of those 52 posts so that they read in a smoother narrative flow, so that it proceeds like an actual novel and not something that was invented on the fly, as it was, one post at a time.

  Why revisit something that I’ve already done? Why plunder that which was once writ? Well, because I think it’s worth the recycling, and the opportunity to revisit “old friends” has been rather fun, both the good (“oh, I like what I did there”) and the bad (“holy cow, that sucked”). Over the years and all the various blogs, I’ve amassed a huge number of posts. If you lay them out end to end, you probably couldn’t circle the world, but by sheer odds alone there’s going to be a nugget or two worthy of rescue.

  To put it another way, here’s an excerpt from what is now the opening chapter of Screaming in Paris, a working title that suits me now but is obviously subject to change. In this bit, I address those well-intentioned folks who ask why I’ve never written a book…

  In the years since, as my blog-work wandered through a range of stories and experiments (some efforts producing pieces of which I’m proud, other efforts calling into question the severity of my alcohol intake), there was one thing which remained constant: People were always asking me when I was going to “write a book”. (Because, as the snooty authors with actual “hard-cover” trophies on the mantel loved to point out, a blogger just isn’t a “real” writer, he’s only playing in his own little sandbox.)

  But the truth is, I have written a book. Three of them, many years ago. None of them were exceptionally brilliant, and all of them were soundly (and probably wisely) rejected by publishing houses back in the day. (The first effort no longer exists, the worn pages having been lost at some point as I moved between houses and cities and states. I believe there might be a copy of the second manuscript in a box in the attic, but I haven’t tried to find it in years, fearing that it, too, may have joined its older sibling next to a manual typewriter in the sky. The third and last child is neatly tucked in a cardboard box and shoved to the back of a shawdowy, rarely-used drawer in my desk, patiently waiting for me to love it again.

  There was a dark period where I wrote very little, a lost decade or two, running in place and even slipping back down the stairs from time to time. But I never stopped paying attention, observing, filing away images that planted seeds, quietly distilling a new approach to my writing. And then this magical concept of “blogging” came along, a new playing field where you can get real-time reaction from readers, and you realize rather quickly whether or not an experiment is working. My seeds now had plenty of water, I just had to keep fertilizing them.

  My farm, over time, exploded. At one point I had nine separate blogs, each constructed around completely different concepts, using various writing styles. The years of pent-up non-expression came pouring out of me, two or three posts a day. I don’t think my fingers ever stopped moving in 2010 and 2011. It was a glorious, wonderful release. But there was a potential price. “You’ve got to slow down,” warned my more-seasoned blogger friends. “You’ll burn yourself out, you’ll get all cranky, and people won’t invite you out for cocktails anymore.”

  And they were right, of course. The little engine that could can only cover so much track before the scenery starts to get a little too familiar. I transferred my engine to a smaller network of tracks, one with fewer departures and a more relaxed schedule, and I spent some time reviewing the logs to see just where my train had been.

  My overgrown garden is now full of thousands and thousands of pages. Bits of this, long stretches of that, weird snapshots of whatever, planted hither and yon. THERE are my books, the new and preferably better ones, the books I actually have been writing during the years when people thought I was just playing. It’s time to get out my trowels and shovels and pruning shears and, yes, the dreaded axe, harvesting the good stuff and sadly sending the not-so-tasty produce to the compost heap so they can help feed next season’s crop.

  And there you have it, a snippet of the future, at least for me, one wherein I focus on writing books and not so much on my blogs. There’s a bit of pain with that, because I like the immediate response of comments on my posts. But it’s clear at this point that I’m not doing whatever is necessary for the blogs to become a source of income. I can’t keep pointing fingers and hoping for something magical. I have to take concrete steps.

  And one of those firm steps involves what I hinted at earlier, the arrival of something in the mail this morning. This package contained finalized documents between me and the county of Dallas, state of Texas. Officially, I am now a publishing company, Bonnywood Manor. (A name which should come as no surprise if you have followed me for any length of time.) It cost me a little bit of money to do so, not overwhelming, but still, it would certainly cover the tab of several consecutive happy hours at my fave restaurant, Ojeda’s.

  What does this mean? It means that I can retain complete ownership of anything that I publish, and that seems rather important to me even if it really isn’t in the long run. It also means that, someday, once I’ve figured out the hazy maze of getting things published, I have an umbrella to hold up, where I can reach out to others who type endlessly into the night and dream during the day, and help them share what I hope to share. Baby steps now, strong strides later.

  But first I have to finish my first/fourth book, make it festive and enticing. Which means, somewhat sadly but also encouragingly, that this blog will transition. I’ll still be using this site to post original material, especially when I need input on tricky bits where I’m needing critical insight. But it won’t be what it once was, which was a repository for my literary whims. Instead, it will become a sounding board as I reflect on life, liberty, the pursuit of publication, and a never-ending quest to find the perfect queso to compliment a margarita.

  Or, as some purists will say, it will become an actual blog, a hitching post for what is happening in my life. This scares me a little bit, because I have a tendency to hide the real me from the spotlight, after years of being misunderstood and defaulting myself into obscurity. I initially named this blog “The Sound and the Fury” for a reason. I’m going back to that reason, and I hope you’ll join me.

  But there will always be my stories, either here or somewhere else, that I promise.

  Stay tuned. Please.