The Writing Life, 1 June 2024
Five months of transition, traveling, and terrible writing productivity are (almost) at an end.
For those who have been following this space, the past five months have been a mix of transition, travel, and terrible writing productivity. We’ll go over it for a bit.
The Home Front
To be honest, things have been a bit weird for me ever since December when I found out we were going to be moving from our home in Chariton to someplace a bit closer to our roots.
Returning to the River
Hi, everyone. I know I promised you some original writing, maybe even fiction, this weekend. Let me assure you it is coming - at 5 p.m. Central Time today. However, I wanted to take a moment now and let everyone know about some personal news. It turns out I’m soon to be on the move, and both my wife and I will be returning to more familiar territory and a very familiar river.
Things were merely unsettled from then until February, when I dealt with our old house being sold and starting my new life as a traveling teacher while dealing with our son Jake being in first hospital then rehab after a fall at his work (he’s now returned back to work and taking care of himself well). What has followed was three and a half months of driving across Iowa, between Bussey, Pella, Des Moines, Iowa City, Fort Madison, and spaces in between, living in at least three different spaces, trying to help out both my kids as well as my wife, finding a new job while wrapping up my old one, and somehow trying to find time to write during all the time I’m not driving somewhere, working, eating, or trying to get other stuff done.
What I’m Writing
As I suggested in the previous segment, there hasn’t been a massive amount of words produced over the past couple weeks (or the past few months). However, I have been working on some writings.
Work on The Yank Striker 2 has continued. I finally just finished a party sequence and chapter I’ve been mucking around with for forever, and you have no idea how thankful I am I managed to finally wrap it up.
Now I need to follow through on the planning I’ve worked on for the remainder of the book. Since this is going to be a series, I don’t want this second book to be a massive tome. The first book, which covered about a year’s worth of time, topped out at just above 83,000 words. I don’t want this next novel in the series to be more than 70,000-75,000 in length, especially since, because this is a series, I can subdivide these books in the series to be as small as I want them to be.
I’ve also been keeping up with poetry. I finally finished a poem I’ve been thinking about for at least a month connected with some of the places I’ve been traveling for the past few months. It took me a month’s worth of thoughts and about 15 minutes worth of writing, which might be a preview of how this poetry will work for me moving forward.
Poetry Night at the Writing Life, 25 May 2024
The past three months of my life have been symbolized by rivers. One, the Mississippi River, symbolizes home for me, both past and future. It was the river my parents grew up on back up in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where I grew up in Muscatine, Iowa, where I and my wife raised our family in Clinton, Iowa, and back in Muscatine, and where my wife and I have settled at Fort Madison, Iowa. If there is anyplace I consider home, it is the banks of the Mississippi.
With some of the things going on this next few days, I estimate I’ll have about 10 solid weeks to catch up and get back on pace to writing at least 200,000 words this year. It will be a bit of a push, and I don’t know if it will work. But, I’m not planning on giving up yet. I did it the past two years in a row, it’s possible for me to do it again.
What I’m Doing Having to do With Writing
There’s not much I wanted to mention in this space, but I will mention one thing coming up in the next month or so.
After some time away from the organization due to my move to central Iowa, I have renewed ties with the Midwest Writing Center in the Quad Cities (with their headquarters in Rock Island, Ill.). This week I took an opportunity to drive through the wilds of western Illinois to attend the annual meeting for the MWC, which I believe is the first time I have done so.
It so happened I entered a drawing for prizes and I happened to win a full scholarship for the MWC’s annual David R. Collins Writers’ Conference from 27 to 29 June next month. I’ve attended this conference in the past and have really enjoyed it, and I was considering attending this year as well, now I’m closer to the site of the conference (Augustana College in Rock Island). So I’ve started to look over some of the events and workshops on offer this year and see what to attend. There’s some poetry events I’ve not ever attended during past conferences, but my growing interest in the form has gotten my attention. I’ll have to let you know how the whole thing goes afterward.
Writing Quote for the Week
There’s a lot of women this applies to over the years.
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Writing Advice
As usual, my standard operating procedure for this part of the newsletter is me taking a look at famous or popular writing advice and analyzing how effective or relevant it is. For this newsletter, the advice is this:
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
- Zadie Smith
I have to say this is a very sound principle to stick to. Smith is talking here about how other people and their issues can be a distraction to those who are in the writing process. Writing is something requiring a large amount of mental energy and focus. If you devote your energy to more than one thing at once, the level of energy and focus you have is drained away, leaving you with either a diminished or wiped out writing capacity. What Smith leaves unsaid is there are plenty of equally capable distractions of a non-human nature (games, Internet, movies, and television, among many others).
This advice absolutely applies to me as well. I’m grateful my wife allows me plenty of time to write without distractions, although in all fairness I think it also has the advantage for her to decompress from her day and get rest without having to entertain me. As for non-human distractions, this has been a lifelong and ongoing battle I’ve had to deal with. I would say I’m better at eliminating or setting aside those distractions, though I am by no means perfect or consistent in doing so.
A Writer's Biography, Volume II, Part 3: Procrastination
There could be epic poems written about the concept of procrastination. Despite my best efforts, I would not classify myself as a poet. So, this will be about the best effort to do this that I can muster. I have been an expert at wasting time for as long as I can remember. My natural state is to be at rest, and now in my 40's, I have the physique that indicates that. But exactly what distracts me is a little harder to place.
Final analysis - a solid piece of writing advice, two thumbs up.
A Few Links About My Books and Where to Find Them, as Well as Something About This Site
My first book is a journalism thriller set in Chicago during the turbulent days of the 2008 election and the start of the Great Recession. Check out more about it here.
The Holy Fool
Debut novels are tricky things. While I’ve not asked this question specifically of some of my fellow writers, the general impression I get is most writers consider their debut novels both with pride at their accomplishment and ruefulness at missed opportunities for improvement. And I’m no different.
A fellow Iowa writer and organizer of the Windsor Heights Book Fair, Tyler Granger, recently did a review of my book: you can find it here.
My second book, the first in the The Yank Striker series, is a soccer drama telling the story of the beginning of a young American’s career as a player. There’s more about it here.
The Yank Striker: A Footballer's Beginning
What would an American soccer superstar look like? Not just someone who was a good player, but an actual legendary, world-class player, someone on the level of a Lionel Messi, a Diego Maradona, a Pele? Where would he come from? What would he be like as a person? And what would his path to soccer superstardom look like?
For direct links to purchase my books in paperback and ebook form, including The Yank Striker: A Footballer’s Beginning and The Holy Fool, click on the links in the Substack sidebar or the links on my Substack author page. Or, you can go to this page on my Wordpress site, Liegois Media.
You can also get them in person at these fine Iowa bookstores:
Beaverdale Books, 2629 Beaver Ave # S1, Des Moines
Pella Books, 824 Franklin St, Pella.
The Book Vault, 105 S Market St, Oskaloosa.
I’m always looking for some new places to place my books (especially in eastern Iowa), so feel free to hit me up in the comments if anyone has a suggestion.
Let’s talk briefly about how The Writing Life works.
With a free subscription, you always will have access to my newsletters on the first and third weekends of the month, as well as selected articles up to a month after they’ve been published. However, if you have a paid subscription with me (which is pretty inexpensive), you will have access to all of my articles here, all of my archives, and my eternal gratitude. Plus, some first-dibs on possible future offers.
Final Thoughts
Well, I’m glad I have this newsletter in the books. Now, it’s back to family, fiction, and a bit of poetry as both the writing and life journey continues.