Quito, Ecuador 2023
So why did a retired music attorney and semi-avid birder start writing? If two years ago, you told me that I was going to have published two books by February 2024, I would have laughed in your face. Matter of fact, when I think about the whole process, it does make me laugh. Here is a bit of an explanation about how it came to be.
If you read SLOW DESCENT AND MORE STORIES, you know that the title story "Slow Descent" was written as a potential song in the late 1970s. It lay dormant for decades before I sent it to my friend Dennis Welch who did, in fact, turn it into a song and recorded and released it in 2023. That fact, along with inspiration from the Ken Burns PBS Country Music documentary gave me the, perhaps mistaken, idea that maybe, just maybe, I could write another song. I know one song every 40 years is not a great record, but I wanted to give it a try.
That led to the writing of the lyrics/poem entitled "Tired Apologies" which began in September 2022. At the time we were living in Cajón Arriba de Grecia, Costa Rica. I liked the lyrics, but I didn't have any way to try to turn it into a song.
Shortly after "Tired Apologies", I started having little flashbacks about growing up in Texas, particularly the Brownwood area, and ideas for lyrics began popping into my head - usually in the middle of the night. I began to think that since these little snippets were not going to be music lyrics, they could at least exist as poems.
The next story line that found its way into my brain served as the basis for "Brown County Heat" (October 2022). As the title suggests, this poem is set in Brown County, Texas. In writing this, I did have in mind a couple of friends I had known in my younger days in Brownwood and inserted a bit of the essence of these two friends into this poem. So now I had three. The more poems I completed, the more inspirations came, and they came fairly quickly.
During this period, Isa had begun teaching through Zoom and together we began planning our nomadic adventure through South America for 2023. Still I had plenty of time to write.
"Mustangs Dance" was the next story the edges of which started to form in late-October 2023. It was my little first shot at historical fiction. The attraction to this style of fiction would carry forward into the next book. This poem also was set in west Texas. I had always been drawn to the story of the Comanches in Texas and loved Big Bend. Those two melded together in this story. I also wanted to write a poem that had a young female protagonist, so this would be it.
By this fourth story/poem, I was not finishing one before the next idea came. I could not predict or control when the ideas would crystalize. Consequently, at times I could be working on two or three poems at a time. I also decided somewhere around this time that if I could come up with ten, maybe I could publish the collection.
Shortly after "Mustang's Dance" came the idea for "Nothing Was Important Until Everything Was". This poem is set in Brownwood and definitely focused on life as a teenager there in the 1960s. Anyone from Brownwood who reads this one will recognize some of the locations. Now there were five poems in the works.
Story ideas began falling out of the sky more rapidly. The next, "Walk Away from Trouble", showed itself in early December 2022. The story starts out in Texas and then moves to the west coast. If you are a child of the 60s, you might have experienced this pull to run away to the peace and love of California. Maybe you are even one of those who did. It was easy for me to write. Although I never ran away, I certainly thought about it, and I certainly lived the hippie lifestyle of the time. Over halfway to the goal of ten poems now, at least in theory, since I still needed to finish them.
Around this time, something happened in terms of the concepts and ideas for the stories. The next couple were not connected to anything I had experienced in my life. I cannot say how or why the ideas formed. They just did. "Breaking Out", another story/poem that features a women as the protagonist, came about between Christmas and New Year's 2023. Isabel and I were spending the holidays in Tortuguero, Costa Rica in the northeastern part of the country. Nothing from that trip specifically inspired this story. Again, it just happened.
Almost immediately after we returned to the Grecia area at the beginning of 2023, the idea for "Black and White" showed itself. Again, no connection whatsoever to any event in my life that I can recall, but very different from all of the previous stories. I did and still do love this story. This would be the eighth story. Now I put a little pressure on myself to come up with just two more so I could publish the collection.
I had also discovered through an expat friend in Costa Rica a company called Draft2Digital. D2D is not really a publisher, but more like an aggregator. It makes it very easy to format ebooks and paperbacks and makes them available to most platforms like Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble and many others. It is by no means perfect (paperback versions can only reproduce photos in black and white), and it particularly has problems with Amazon making available its writers' books in paperback, but it is free. In other words, it does not charge the author to format books or to make them available through the various outlets.
In late-January 2023, the idea for the one and only short story in this first collection, entitled "Hungry", came out of nowhere. This was less than a week before we started our nomadic life in South America with our first stop in Colombia. I don't want to give away the premise of the story yet, but I did enjoy writing it. Because it was a short story and not a poem, and it was my first, it took some time to hone it down.
I did not focus much on writing during our first month in Colombia. We were traveling, planning the next steps and enjoying our adventure. Still, in the first week in March, during our second month in Colombia, another poem entitle "Café Guayoyo" came to life. There is an interested story behind this poem and a big coincidence. I will save that for one of the next blog posts.
Finally, I want to mention "Life Imitates Life". This is actually one of the first poems I started while still in Costa Rica. It was originally entitled "The Waitress Waits". I could never decide if I really liked it or where it was going, and not a clue about how I would end it. I put it aside several times and thought it might never see the light of day. I finally found a way to complete it and liked the way it changed throughout the writing and in the poem itself. It was too late for the first collection, however, but found its way into the new book, THE UNLIKELY TWINS AND MORE STORIES, and is the only poem in that collection of short stories.
I continued to work on the first collection throughout our three months in Colombia. Somewhere along the line, Isabel and I discussed the possibility of translating each of the poems to Spanish. We decided that it was a good idea and Isabel took on that arduous task We finished all of the poems and translations for the first book during our time in Medellín in April 2023. The publication would happen when we were in Quito - June 1, 2023.
In the next blog post, I will address how and why the writing-focus changed from poetry to short stories.
Unedited photo - Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay - January 2024
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