Creative Process
I’ve been waiting for this since the story of the email transgressions of Raiders’ head coach Jon Gruden broke. Even though the pandering woke pro sports leagues don’t deserve any coverage or accolades, I occasionally include stuff that highlights their hypocrisy. Here’s the opening paragraph of the article filed yesterday by NY Post sports media critic Phil Mushnick: “Reader Keith Marston has a splendid idea: Now that Jon Gruden is available and has shown himself to be a vulgar, women-degrading racially inflammatory bigot, he qualifies to perform at halftime of the Super Bowl.”… Later in the article, another gem: “With the Braves closer to the World Series, reader Bill Unger asks if Manfred (MLB Commissioner) will order their home games to be played in Colorado.” Intelligent columns attract intelligent readers. Kudos all around.
It took longer than I expected to hone my latest short story, Chance. I hope I made it more than porn, although it certainly doesn’t have the weight of Inside Out, which is rife with sex and carries the tag: “Can a novel be explicit and meaningful?” Unless I’m wrong about the term, neither is erotica. Since this blog is PG, Chance doesn’t belong her. And since I don’t know if I’ll ever have enough pages for another book, I looked for a website to place the piece. Please don’t click on the link if you are offended by raw sex and profanity. https://literotica.com/s/chance-14
One of the reasons I’m not doing much creative writing these days is a lack of ideas. What hasn’t been done to death? So far I have 15 pages worth of new material in a Word file. Two of the stories are basically rants, one against lawyers, another against celebrity phoniness. As I was writing the porn-plus piece, an idea came to me. I used Rhonda Byrne’s mega successful work of non-fiction, The Secret, as the basis of a story. At first I didn’t know where it was going, thinking it might evolve to a Twilight-Zone-type work. I went in a different direction that readers may find disappointing. I followed the naughtiness of the previous story with nice. Well, maybe not nice but close to it. And there will be a third new one, an incident from the past that was once painful but that time has rendered benign, one that I’d never found a place for in any of my novels or short stories. There is another such piece in the file. Right now I’ve resolved to do another book only if I get to 200 pages, a goal that doesn’t seem reachable. I doubt the new addition will be more than a page and a half, upping the total to 16.
It was average return at the floating book shop on this gorgeous indian summer day. My thanks to the woman who donated seven books in Russian, and to Movie Buff, who bought a collection of four condensed novels published by Select, and The Lost Wife and The Last Van Gogh, both by Alyson Richman, and The Final Solution: A Story of Detection by Michael Chabon; and to the woman who purchased an instructional work on English-Russian grammar; and to Lou, who took home three DVDs: Set It Off (1996), Gone Baby Gone (2007) and A Hidden Life (2019); and to Steve, the poet laureate of Sheepshead Bay, who selected Thank You for Smoking (2005) and I’m Not There (2007), which includes several actors. including Cate Blanchett, playing Bob Dylan.
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