Praises From Beyond the Pale Moon-the Joy and challenges of Writing!!!

This is my New Blog space. I am working on a new website as well. I have heard great things about wordpress so I am giving it a go. I am also developing a new website for my business-change is in the air! Change is necessary! This blog will be much more based on writing about and documenting my day to day activities. I am moving towards realism and away from trying to work out my vast inner workings ( ie., my mind. )

As far as my life goes, I am settling in for the winter-both literally and figuratively. This summer was kind of boozy and in a way a step back in time for me. Or perhaps it was just an indication that time can sometimes stand still. It seems I am living my life in a hazy fishbowl and I am constantly in a kind of holding pattern. I can see myself swimming around inside my life but I can’t get out of the fishbowl…I am struggling with self-awareness and trying to escape from my fish-bowl existence. I am also cleaning out the attic so to speak so this blog space is going to be very busy.

My life stepped back this summer in that my priorities got skewed. What is it I am doing in life? In a way I am still troding down the decadent path of my early twenties but I have found the path overgrown with pricker bushes and weeds. The hedonistic life style can only go so far, now that I have crossed through 4 decades the whole edge kind of comes off the buzz. Still I like my beer and my occasional smoke-let’s leave it at that. The key is knowing in your heart that you are a healthy person-both on the outside and inside. The libido sweeps that notion aside as the decades go spinning by in my haze.

Still, all and all I have some good friends. I am still a bachelor which is rare in my peer group of friends from College and high school. In a way I am isolated from the people that know me the best. I am gregarious enough to make new friends but my younger friends are still partying with the sun glasses on so to speak. They may be scared of me but believe me-they frighten me as well for wisdom only comes with age.

It is important to leave regret behind or we don’t progress in our lives. Its important to do something constructive with the past and that is what has motivated me to try and make writing my number one thing in life. I feel my perspective is unique but also a very intelligent one. I am also becomming less selfish and elitist in the coming of my old age in the respect that I have become very interested in what makes other people tick. That’s what writing good fiction is all about.

All and all I enjoy my life although I know its the kind of life which others don’t easily understand. I see myself and my life as a journey through different stages of awareness. In my early days I wasn’t aware in the respect I am now; I wasn’t self aware. I have been busy studying myself and trying to get my life back on track. I think in time all the mistakes and different ignominies will slowly fade away to laughter.

Lately my Raison d’etre has been enveloping myself within my book business. That means taking advantage of all the time I have to read as well as increasing the profit lines. It also means using my free time productively. I plan to spend a lot of time trying to develop myself as a fiction writer. That means thinking like a fiction writer. Right now I have been reading a book called the Weekend Novelist by Richard Ray. It outlines a plan for creating a first novel within a year’s framework working only on the weekends. Since I have escaped the 9-5 lifestyle, I plan to accelerate this process and get something together quickly (and than probably burn it in a moment of self-doubt.).

I have written extensively in the past and have a kind of roughed out 1st novel already written, an On the Road type living diary of some of my wanderings as a youth throughout the western United States. I have not been studying or practicing the literary art enough though . The first section of the Weekend Novelist deals with characterization. Traditionally a novel or play usually has a hero an an antagonist. There are helpers and hinderers as the storyline and plot unfold. Developing realistic characters requires back story writing. You have to create a biography for each character that helps define motivations and breathes light into characters. This is a much more demanding art than writing a biography.

One thing the Weekend Novelist points out as that literary characters are either flat or round. In other words many act in a completely predictable fashion based on there personality traits (flat.) Others tend to be more dynamic and often act in ways that are completely unpredictable (round). Thinking like a novelist often causes one to start categorizing people. Are the people in your life round or flat. What makes people really tick?-that’s the question.

I have found the Weekend Novelist to be very helpful in my quest to try to develop my writing skills. A lot of what it outlines I am already very familiar with but at the same time it kind of gives one a recipe with which to work with. For me writing is incredibly therapeutic in that it gives one a palette with which to work out different personalities that one faces within day to day life. I plan to spend a lot of time writing in the next few years. In a way I find it a lot more fulfilling than music which used to be my main interest in life. I still like writing songs and creating music but writing frees one up to be totally self-sufficient. Its totally a world of your own. I feel my creative juices haven’t even begun to flow.

At any rate I will continue to work on reading through and working on the exercises for the Weekend Novelist. I also plan to start taking a lot of pictures and writing about the various places in downtown Denver and Capitol hill which interest me.

Paul’s Reading activities:

Aside from the Weekend Novelist I have been reading State of Denial by Bob Woodward. The famous Watergate reporter is taking on the Bush military Junta and this book definitely gets into the kind of party line inbreeding and outside agendas that have put this country into the mess we now face in the Middle East. Its amazing to see how this country can be ruled by Ideologues who twist reality to fit their own agendas-which are often very short sighted. The kind of web of intrigue as to the various little sub groups and the interpersonal dichotomies that govern these little cliques within the Bush administration is disturbing aside from being mind boggling to me. Still the micro/macro elements that govern human social interaction can’t be stripped out of politics. I see parts of my own life in theirs-you always are going to run up against people with different ideas, agendas, and world views and this interaction governs social life on every level in this society. That also includes our government and its war cabinet when it goes to war.

I have also been finishing American Gods by Niel Gaimans which I find to be entertaining but at the same time the plot is a bit thin and the characters are a bit flat (using my new terminology.) Gaimans tries to employ surprises and twists in his writing but in order to really pull it off the reader needs to feel a chill running up and down his spine when the bottom falls out; I have yet to have this feeling while reading the book. There is an art to blurring reality with dreams/nightmares/fantasy and I am trying to master that art. Still, his writing is a step above guys like Dean Koontz or James Patterson who are perhaps more popular in the same genre. He has better pace and his characters are a little deeper-for me psychology lurks just underneath the modern novel. I have always been extremely interested in psychology and the a good fiction writer must get into the heads of his characters or his hero…more about that later…

Well soon the new website will be rolling out and hopefully that will signal more change in my life-positive change. Until next time-enjoy!