The dream of the rhinoceros

Oh. A rhinoceros!

Just before waking Sunday morning, I was looking up a long dark staircase with random people sitting listlessly on a stair here or there. The dream was progressing in usual fashion when at the top of the stairs appeared a rhinoceros.

It pawed and looked down at the people. We were filled with alarm. Should we sit still and hope we weren't noticed or, as some contemplated, should we creep up and slam the door? What if that enraged the rhinoceros and it broke through the door and down the steps, trampling all in its path?

While we were contemplating, the rhino lifted its head, turned proudly and charged away, out of sight.

I awoke in the predawn and did some contemplating of my own. I've never dreamed of a rhinoceros before. I looked at the clock. 4:31. The alarm was set; I had thought of getting up at 5:00 on this Sunday morning and butt-kicking my writing career. I could settle back in for a half-hour's sleep or jump up and get to it.

The nap tempted me for a moment, but then I realized I wouldn't be dreaming of rhinos unless it was time to do some hard-charging.

I got up, made coffee, and sat down to write. I finished this little essay at 4:56.

On re-reading ‘The Rocket Man’ by Ray Bradbury

So sad – so beautiful – with a final line that kills.

Sometimes I read a story at random from the short-story collection R is for Rocket, my first exposure to Ray Bradbury, and think, no wonder I was enchanted for life.

No wonder Bernie Taupin and Elton John wrote a song about it – a beautiful, haunting song. So much wonder – no wonder. No wonder why we fell under the spell of the words.

Bradbury is a master weaver, a master magician, who knew instinctively (No! who knew after practicing his craft diligently for years) how to use his words to paint fabulous pictures in our minds.

“Come with me here,” he cries, “and I’ll tell you about a young boy on the cusp of adulthood and his lonely mom and his dad who comes home for a few days every three months and then disappears into the sky …”

P.S. Inside the parentheses is the most important point of this post for those who mean to be creative.

Take up the tools of creation

He sat in his chair, trying to be creative, but the duties of his day job kept pressing against his consciousness. A memo left unfinished - a report left unread - It was difficult to concentrate on creating new worlds when the real world kept calling.

The doubt birds kept calling: "You can't - you shouldn't - no time for that - no talent - no discipline - you can't - you can't you can't you can't."

"No," he said, not sure he believed himself. "I can."

"You can't," chattered the doubt birds.

"I'm going to," he insisted.

"You'll regret it," said the doubt birds.

"Try and stop me," said he.

They swarmed. He screamed. All was quiet.

And the words appeared, one by one, slowly at first and then all in a rush, over the blank pages.

"It's crap," said the doubt birds.

"Of course it is," he said, "but it will get better - and I invented the doubt birds this morning, didn't I?"

- - -

Sit down to create. Put the tools of creation in your hands. Move your hands. Something will be created. If you're just starting, it may not be much. 

But it will be something, and something is better than nothing. A feeble effort is better than no effort.

Do it again tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the many days after that. With practice the creations will be better, and at some point, as you keep it up, they will become so good you can say, "This is the creation I imagined - this is what I dreamed of."

"It's crap," the doubt birds will surely say. But it's not wasting away inside you anymore.

Sit down to create. Take up the tools of creation. Move your hands. See what happens? It's a creation.

"I made this!" you cry in astonishment. Yes, you did. Yes, you can. 

Is it good enough? Well, Theodore Sturgeon famously once said 90 percent of everything is crap (well, he said "crud," but he meant something more colorful than "crap") - but the corollary of that is that 10 percent is pretty good. You can't create that 10 percent by worrying about the 90 percent.

And maybe you can fix some of that 90 percent through repair and revision - at least 10 percent of it ...

Sunset electronica, entry 3

He stepped away from the glowing screen, picked up his pen and his journal, and sat down to write.

The whirr of the computer taunted him - "Here I am, I have the world here waiting for you, come over and sit down with me" - and the device next to his chair joined the chorus - "Here I am, everything you need in the palm of your hand."

But that morning, he heard the rest of it: the woman he loved playing with the dogs in the other room, the songbirds calling their music, the passing traffic from the road above.

It was on that day that somehow he sensed the computer's whirring would be silenced one day. He foresaw the cataclysm that ended with rationing of electronics, and he knew that in the end he would have to depend not on electricity but on the power of his fingers' ability to scratch thoughts and concepts across a piece of paper.

"Preserve the code, preserve the written language," a warning sounded in his mind. "The words will have no meaning to those who cannot read. The storage is useless to those with no key to the storeroom."

Armed with that knowledge, he understood that all you need in order to read the book is the book. The book is the ultimate device.

He feared the fire that could consume paper and snatch centuries of words away, but he feared more the silence of the machines - devices meant to pull the world together reduced to useless bits of plastic and silicon that no longer held what they were designed to hold.

He picked up the obsolete device and found nothing.

The seemingly magical device that once glowed and cooed and gave him books and sounds and games and pictures was silent now, replaced by the songbirds and the sunrise and the rustling of leaves in trees. There was no charge, and the words and pictures were trapped inside the device.

Good thing someone preserved the words on paper and parchment. He pulled a book off his shelf and found a voice from 500 years ago. 

"Have faith. Here they are, the words," the book whispered to him. "Here is your wisdom. Here is your past, delivered by a time machine of bound paper."

The man still could not bear to set aside his device, but he slipped it into his pocket, opened the book, and began to read.

The persistent pursuit of The Stuff

"A place for everything, and everything in its place."

Have you had this feeling? You want to accomplish something, but your mind and even your physical work space is such a jumble that you can't even figure out what it is you want to accomplish. Many mornings I'm there.

Tumbled piles of books and phonograph records and toys and even a rock or two - where is their place? Surely not in this mess.

On the other hand, there is that little plaque in the corner: "Creative Clutter is better than tidy idleness." Yes, but why does my work area look so much like idle clutter?

Still, I keep at it, spilling words onto a page at the appointed hour every morning, and at some point I find that among the nuggets in my careless pile of stuff is the stuff of dreams, the stuff of magic, the stuff of capital letters:

The Stuff, not just the stuff. The Stuff.

When you find The Stuff within you, or resting on a branch, or soaring with the pelicans overhead - ah, The Stuff and its magic spell will lift you - there, where The Stuff is waiting to be discovered, there is when it becomes Creative Clutter.

Keep creating - just digging and building from the stuff that's inside you. It may take a while to happen, but if you keep at it, eventually The Stuff will begin to happen. Don't quit now; keep creating.

A closet full of universes

Technology is freedom. The toaster changed the universe. The boat opened worlds. Clumping-style kitty litter saved continents. Tissue-paper handkerchiefs saved lives.


Every picture tells a story - but words expand the picture - and every person who sees the picture sees a different story - and every person who encounters the words hears a different story.

How many novels did she write? One - and several million.

I built bookshelves into what would be the clothes closet if we were using this room as a bedroom. It is a closet full of universes. A shelf packed with lifetimes. Each book a unique miracle, a collection of rare gifts waiting to be unwrapped.

We each pass this way just once, and forever. What miracle will we unwrap today? The joy of discovery is endless when we open ourselves to joy. The pain is endless when we focus on the pain.

Choose the joy, overcome the pain - open the closet and discover another universe.

How to overcome the restrictions of time and space?

He was helpless to be anywhere that this mobile vessel of a soul carrier, this container of flesh and blood, was not.

If his soul needed to be 20 miles away in a half-hour, he had to transport this soul carrier to that location. If it was better to be 1,500 miles away, well, then, he was helpless to do anything - although he could transmit his image and his voice to that far-away location, and that worked almost as well. And there, in that fact, was the reason for the technology. If the tech failed, how would he get the message across the miles? 

Even with the tech, how would he sense the how would he sense the feelings in the room when only the image and voice could be experienced? And how would he understand the community he was talking to, without walking its streets and among its people?

No, to be real, he needed to move the body into those other places. Or ...

Or else ...

He pulled a book off the shelf and was on a riverboat chugging down the Mississippi River a century and a half ago.

He was a young girl hiding from insidious forces that wished her harm because of the accident of her birth.

He was a scientist traveling to the moon in the faraway future of 1962. He was the captain of a submarine plying 19th century ocean watsers.

Each book a time machine, a moment captured in amber to be preserved for the ages.

Another scene from Sunset Electronica

He thrust a small sheaf of paper into the other's hand. The papers were bound together at the top, and the last sheet was of heavier stock - cardboard, in fact.

"This is what we used to call a tablet," he said, next handing over a box of small, thin sticks. "And these are pencils. Bring the wood and the graphite inside to a point, and you have a writing instrument."

"Writing?" said the other. "Where's the keyboard? How do you attach a screen? What about the batteries?"

"There are no more batteries and may not be ever again. We must relearn how to write with these utensils. We must relearn how to make paper. We must relearn how to make pencils and pen and ink."

"But why?"

"You weren't listening, were you? Because there are no more batteries and may not be ever again. Your tablet is now a useless slab of glass. Well, not useless. You might be able to use it as a hard surface for your paper as you write."

Sunset electronica

"This is the dawning of a new age," said the wise old woman, "not an age of hypnotized, mesmerized empty heads, but an age of being and doing and looking alive." She took the now-silent device from his hand, examined it, and dropped it to the ground. "It will not harm you anymore. The Web has gone quiet."

"But it wasn't harming me," he protested.

"Wait a few days for the fog to clear," she said. "Then you'll see where the hurting is. The trouble will come from the trolls. They thrived under the Web. They lived to be in the magic electric land, and now they're lost. They won't be happy, and lord knows they won't be kind. We'll have to be prepared for them."

He blinked and stared at the sun as if seeking information there. No phone? No contact with the outside world? No answers to questions? How would he live?

"You'll be fine," she said, as if reading the questions on his face. "That wasn't a magic helper, young man, it was a mesmerizer. It granted you wishes and kept you pacified while it was sapping your will, infecting your brain. It's a marvel you have any gumption left to walk and talk. You can walk and talk, now, can you?"

The quizzical look on her face was funny, and he wanted to take a picture of it. But the camera had been in the device. He longed for it, and he had a notion in the back of his mind that the longing was the reason he needed to be rid of it. The back of his mind – he realized it had been some time since he had used it.

The apocalypse had been happening all these years, and they had been too spellbound to realize it – but now the fog was lifting, and he saw that post-apocalyptic life would not be brutal and chaotic, as people had feared for years, but alive and well. The devices had been the agents of the fear they had all felt.

He was anxious – chalk it up to fear of the unknown – but something in her words assured him that everything was going to be all right.

Except for the trolls ...

Sometimes a new idea is discovered in hindsight

For the last month I've been sitting in a chair with a pen and bound paper journal instead of turning on the computer first thing in the morning. I let the words take me where they will. Sometimes they're related to my current projects, but more often they're just little explosions – a thought, an image, an idea, an observation.

Last week Monday I posted one of these spontaneous outbursts on my blog with a photo of Willow as a pup. Tuesday I posted another with a photo of Dejah. Two weeks later I seem to be developing a habit.

You never know how one thing will lead to another, so I suggest you try something different and see where it goes.

4 days to go - In the nick of time

It is with considerable relief that I can now announce there need be no delay in the April 7 release date for The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur, the sixth in the current 12-story series of Adventures of Myke Phoenix, protector of Astor City and super guy extraordinaire.

I will spend the next three days reviewing and preparing this story-you-must-read-if-you-read-no-other-Myke-Phoenix-story for its scheduled release Monday at Amazon and Kobo.

Thank you for your patience this past week as I suspended all other musings about the world to concentrate on wrestling the dinosaur to the ground and extracting her story to share with the world. It has been an interesting exercise that taught me a few things about what it will take to get back on schedule and complete the entire arc on time. I am a fool for asking a mere 99 cents for this amazing tale, but it is no surprise to me that I am a fool.

I certainly encourage you to take advantage of the links in the right column to introduce yourself to the legend of Myke Phoenix. I try to write these stories in such a way that you can join in at any time, but why deprive yourself of the pleasure of the entire journey?

Objective: Release The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur on April 7
This morning's output: 1,456 words, finished first draft.
Session: Approximately 2 hours.
Total words to date: 13,555 (goal 13,500)  

Talking dinosaur update 8 - 5 days to release date

© Ralf Kraft | Dreamstime.com

I have waited 20 years to say it, and only the epilogue remains to be written of the first draft and the speaking of the word: "Finished." This darkest Myke Phoenix story of deadly danger has eluded my grasp since I first conceived of the prehistoric predator who runs Astor City's underworld. I'm hoping this last desperate plunge of authorial activity will give it the punch The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur has always needed.

This story is so special, so important to the Myke mythos, that I'm going to experiment with putting out a print edition. I'm not confident it can be available Monday, when the ebook comes out, but certainly by the end of next week. So if you prefer the crispness of ink on paper to the plastic feel of e-ink, wait a few extra days.

Objective: Release The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur on April 7
This morning's output: 432 words, finished first draft of Act 5.
Session: Approximately 25 minutes.
Total words to date: 12,099 (goal 13,500) 

Talking dinosaur update 7: Still 6 days to go

Objective: Release The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur on April 7
This evening's output: 493 words, finished first draft of Act 5.
Session: Approximately 45 minutes.
Total words to date: 11,667 (goal 13,500)

Talking dinosaur update 6: And 6 days to release

There's just something about a deadline. If I could give fellow writers any advice at all, it would be to put a time and a date of completion on your project, and let no force on Earth allow you to move that deadline. It certainly appears that, even though an ailment sidetracked me Monday, The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur will be released on time.

Objective: Release The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur on April 7
This morning's output: 1,293 words, moving through Act 5.
Session: Approximately 75 minutes.
Total words to date: 11,174 (goal 13,500)

Talking dinosaur update 5: 8 days to release

Objective: Release The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur on April 7
This morning's output: 1,869 words, completing Act 4 and beginning Act 5.
Session: Approximately 90 minutes.
Total words to date: 9,881 (goal 13,500)

Talking dinosaur update 4: Serenity, with 9 days to go

An hour's time stolen on a Saturday morning resulted in the extension of a vital scene in Act 3 of The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur, and a strong start to Act 4. I also diverted to begin an Author's Note that will come as an afterward, which begins:

What you have here is Serenity.

The reference, of course, is to the 2005 film that attempted to tie up some of the loose ends of the Firefly ’verse, the story of Malcolm Reynolds and his motley crew of fellow travelers, a 2002 television series that was canceled long before its time – after a mere 14 episodes were made and only 11 aired on the Fox television network. The series had a small but fierce crowd of fans that grew and grew after the 14 episodes were released in a DVD set. The collection sold so well that creator Joss Whedon was able to convince The Powers That Be to greenlight a cinema sequel. And oh, what a film it is.

At this writing Myke Phoenix has a tremendously smaller, fierce crowd of fans, but it does have a creator who wanted to pick up the story years after it fizzled. I first imagined this as a monthly series not unlike the wonderful pulp heroes of the 1930s and ’40s, but in shorter stories to fit the needs of the modern comic book reader. I wrote brief synopses for (ironically enough) 14 of these adventures, but only fleshed out four of them into completed stories, where they sat on a Commodore 128 floppy disk, then a Macintosh, and finally the iMac with which I type these words, until I published them in The Adventures of Myke Phoenix in 2008.

Five years later, after Kindle revolutionized the publishing industry and ebooks began to flourish, I finally saw a way to bring new stories to the world on my limited budget. I moved the tale along by 18 years and started over again, beginning with The Song of the Serial Kisser. Here and there I dropped hints of the adventures Myke had during the interim, but there was one story from the original 14-episode list that still needed to be told, because it involved the revelation of Myke Phoenix’s arch-nemesis: Deinonychus.

The opening scene of The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur was written two decades ago. Morty Davis has been awaiting justice that long. What follows is my attempt to replicate the purpose of Serenity: To fill in the gaps, leaving a few mysteries in case of a sequel, of course, but to condense the action of what could have been quite a few stories into one blockbuster. Whedon has estimated the seminal events of Serenity might have occurred during the second-season finale of Firefly, so let’s say the climactic scene you’ve just read would have occurred somewhere around Myke Phoenix Adventures #24, had I stayed on course back then ...

Objective: Release The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur on April 7
This morning's output: 720 words, extending Act 3 and beginning Act 4.
  (Extra output: 500 words of an Author's Note)
Session: Approximately 60 minutes.
Total words to date: 8,012 (goal 13,500) 

Talking dinosaur update 3 - and Countdown, Day 1

QUOTIDIAN WARNING: I got up a little after 4 a.m. because of deadline pressure at the day job and spent most of the next four hours doing homework. I'm proud to say I resisted the urge to skip this project for a day, and instead I spent 20 minutes banging out a key "intermission" scene that takes place between Acts 3 and 4. Beyond the extra act (You have noticed that Myke Phoenix stories are generally four acts, haven't you?) there are a number of structural innovations in this story because of the important role it will play in the Myke Phoenix mythology, linking the early years to the present day.

COUNTDOWN, DAY 1: I have been making a habit of issuing a 10-day countdown to the release of each of these monthly adventures, and so I'm obliged to point out to eager readers (with no small trace of anxiety) that the next new Myke Phoenix adventure is due for release on April 7. Save your 99 pennies or their electronic equivalent!

Objective: Release The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur on April 7
This morning's output: 636 words, ready to begin Act 4.
Session: Approximately 20 minutes.
Total words to date: 7,292 (goal 13,500) 

Talking dinosaur update 2

A breakthrough today: Act 3 finally finished, I sat down to map out the remaining three acts – only to discover Act 5 was fated to slow the action and drag down the story.

"Kill your darlings," said William Faulkner, who knew a bit more about writing than I do. By proceeding straight from the horrifying climax of Act 4 into the astonishing climax of the entire tale, without meandering somewhat aimlessly through a fifth act, the story gains a punch that it didn't quite have until now.

Not much actual writing today, but better: I gained an improved plan, and the fog has lifted over the final leg of the journey.

Objective: Release The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur on April 7
This morning's output: 107 words, finished with Act 3 of 5.
Session: Approximately 40 minutes.
Total words to date: 6,656 (goal 13,500)

Talking Dinosaur update 1

Wednesday, March 26 – Release date: April 7

This morning's output: 421 words, almost finished with Act 3 of 6.
Session: Approximately 25 minutes.
Total words to date: 6,549 (goal 14,000)

1 reason why this little ebook must be finished on time

This is the most exciting part of the creative life: When the going gets tough.

I made a goal to write 10 new Myke Phoenix stories in 2014, for a total of 12 in the latest series. That’s one a month through October. My sub-goal was to have the next month’s story finished when I released this month’s. That means The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur was supposed to be finished by March 3, when I released Duck Man Walking.

I should have May’s story almost finished by now, but less than two weeks before the release date of April 7, I’m halfway through the dinosaur story. This is the exciting part.

Anyone who’s followed my creative journey – I think there are four or five of you – knows that I am pretty good at setting goals and getting started. The problem comes with the arrival of what Seth Godin calls The Dip and Steven Pressfield calls The Resistance. This is when, if I don’t watch out (and I usually don’t), the quotidian of daily life interferes and the project gets set aside. My office and the Internet are filled with partially finished Bluhm projects.

It would be easy to shift the deadline – sure, I could finish this story by May and just move everything back, because at this stage almost no one is paying attention – but that’s a slippery slope. Nope, I have to have this story done by April 7, and the May story not long after that, so that by June I’m a month ahead again.

Why? Why press forward to meet a deadline that only I, of 6 billion people on the planet, care about?

Because the alternative is to let inertia take over, to yield to the Resistance. And I prefer to keep pressing forward.

So: Ready or not, something called The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur will be released to the ether on April 7. I’m terrified. And excited.