Category Archives: Writing

I almost missed my slot this week

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John Ramsey Miller

After a hectic week of preparing for my youngest son’s gallery opening–not his showing in a gallery–as in he owns a gallery. The one painting he sold was his. Between the food, wine, and beer I figure he lost about two thousand dollars on the opening but it was a large crowd and they liked the food and drink. He’s showing high dollar art, and as much as people like to look at $12,000.00 paintings, most people don’t feel the need to own one. He has to learn his own lessons just like we all did. When he took me to see the place I thought I’d found out the source of Hoarders. “I want to put a gallery here,” he said.
“Yeah, right,” I said.

Kids operate on sheer will and they don’t know why they shouldn’t do a thing, and do not want to hear our negative views. I’ll keep you posted on how it turns out.
Any way I was at the opening when I remembered it was Friday and almost eleven and I had forgotten to write a blog. I mean I forgot because I was working with my son to open his gallery. He has more talent than I do. Everybody knows it. But he’s the baby and he’s had me off the farm and writing in his office while I was waiting for one tradesman or a modem to be hooked up. I have to admit I enjoyed being downtown and interacting with people again. It’s been good for him, good for me, and good for our relationship.

I talked books with people tonight, and it was amazing how many people at the opening knew who I was, but asked me if I’d written a second book. Now that is out of touch.
“Yes, I’ve published six since that one.”
“Really. How did I miss that?”

Well, this is even less of a blog than usual, but it’s all I got. I’m tired, proud and going to bed.

Finding the Time to Write

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By John Gilstrap
www.johngilstrap.com

“Where do you find the time to write?” It’s among the most common questions asked of me—by writers who find out that I have a day job, and by neighbors and colleagues who find out that I write books. As if we’re only capable of doing one thing at a time.

Back in the early nineties, when I was in my transition phase between thinking about firing up my writing muse and actually doing it, I was inspired by the story of Tom Clancy, the then-unknown insurance guy who had rocketed to fame with The Hunt for Red October. Clancy’s calendar was constructed of the same 24-hour days as mine, yet he was able to find the spare time to write a blockbuster novel. Ditto Stephen King and James Patterson and Linda Fairstein and Tess Gerritsen and . . . a lot of people.

The bottom line is this: If you want something badly enough, you don’t find the time to do it, you create the time to do it. If we waited until it was clear how we could afford any of life’s milestones—the courage to get married, the commitment to have kids, the money to buy a house, or the time to write a book—nothing would ever get done. You set the goal and you forge ahead. Along the way choices have to be made, meaning maybe the nightly reruns of Seinfeld aren’t as important as you thought. Or maybe you can in fact survive on six and a half hours of sleep a night instead of eight. The ticking clock being the constant, every choice made within its cycle is a statement of one’s priorities.

Let’s start with the basics: family and the day job. One nourishes the soul—gives us a reason to live—the other keeps food on the table. As far as I’m concerned, neither is expendable in the pursuit of publication.

Childhoods are fleeting, and soccer games are important. Don’t sacrifice those. Stories are important, too, but imaginary friends should never trump their flesh-and-bone counterparts. Not in my world, anyway.

The day job is the day job. While I have always been blessed with jobs that I enjoyed, none of them have ever been about writing, except as incidental other duties. I imagine that it’s probably easier to settle in to write after a day of safety engineering than it would be after a day of, say, writing technical manuals; but toughing it out is what victory is all about. If it were easy, everyone would do it.

When all is said and done, there are a gajillion reasons not to write your book. Just about anything on earth is more appealing than addressing the Page One blinking cursor. There’s no shame in not creating the time. But the words will not write themselves.

None of us has enough time; but each of us has all the time there is. How do you create the time you need to fulfill your writing jones?

FAMILY AGAIN, A Short Story Story

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By John Ramsey Miller

When we came up with the idea of producing an e-book of our short stories, I was horrified. A SHORT STORY? Like Gilstrap, I wrote short stories when I was in high school. I lived in the Mississippi Delta, a story rich environment if there ever was one. I don’t remember but a couple of them. I wrote one called “Baby’s Chair,” which was about an ancient black woman, called Baby, was living in a cypress shack on a cotton plantation. I knew a lot of Cotton Plantation families, and spent time on several so I wrote about an elderly woman who, having long passed her usefulness to the place, and being almost totally blind, spent her days rocking on the porch when the weather was warm. She’d spent her life in the service of several generations of the owners, but now she was totally dependent on the largess of the young owner, whom she had basically raised, and he loved her like family and made sure she had food and shelter. He was all that stood between her and the street.

This youngest of the owning family was running the place and he’d married a coldly calculating-spoiled bitch. The ancient woman had only had one major possession, an old Stickley Brothers rocking chair the plantation owner’s great grandmother had given the now old woman’s mother because it didn’t fit in her refurbished home. The old woman’s mother had rocked this old women in it when she was a baby, and Baby had rocked her own children and grandies in the chair, as well as the owners’ children. There was a cigarette burn in the arm where her father had died and his cigarette had caused the blemish. In fact the chair was filled with memories of her hard life.

The bitch came by with a casserole and it was fast obvious that she coveted the chair because it did fit in with her new den remodel, and it was valuable and she was greedy and coveting what she didn’t have kept her heart pumping motor oil. Sticky sweet, she flatters the old woman, eventually offering a new recliner for the old rickety chair. Baby manages to cleverly deflect the woman’s entreaties, and leaves the woman frustrated and angry. The new owner comes by later (prodded by his wife) and makes the entreaty that his wife wants the chair and he’ll pay her more than it’s worth. He even tells Baby that the chair is valuable to him because it means so much to her, which is true. He obviously loves the old woman, and is embarrassed because his wife is pressuring him to get the chair back. Baby tells him he can have the chair soon because she will have no more use for it, being on the edge of “Going To Glory” as she was. That afternoon as Baby sits in the chair with her memories, she can suddenly see everything, and to her amazement Baby looks at her hands and they are the hands she had when she was very young. Looking up, she sees a horse drawn wagon pull up in front of the porch. Her father is driving the wagon and invites her to accompany him home. Happy, she steps into the wagon and goes off toward Heaven.

Later the young owner returns and finds Baby dead in the chair. He cries. When the ambulance picks up baby, the bitch puts her chair into the back of her husband’s truck.

Weeks later the bitch is entertaining her friends in her new den with pecky cypress walls she’d had taken from Baby’s demolished home, and telling them how this valuable antique has been in her husband’s family for generations and she lies about the history of the valuable chair. When she is alone after the party she sits in the chair and finds she can’t get out of it. In the space of a few minutes, her eyes dim as cataracts bloom in them, and her hands become wrinkled and covered in liver spots.

I wrote dozens upon dozens of mostly forgettable stories––Southern Gothic themes all––and they entertained my family and were good exercise. One was about an old man in a collapsing (but once grand) mansion, who put the stringer of fish he caught in a dresser drawer. They were all hand-written on onion- skin paper and were all lost decades ago. I didn’t care that they were lost so they wouldn’t embarrass me later.

When we Kill Zone authors to write the seven short stories for FRESH KILLS I played with a few ideas. What I came up with was extrapolating on the what would happen if our civilization collapsed and our children and grandchildren were left to for themselves in a world that placed no value on them. I imagined my grandson at ten or eleven wandering in the woods and coming upon a couple, a pair of survivalists, who’d managed to survive in a home built into a hillside and impenetrable to assault. They take the child in, warm him and feed him and things take a deadly turn. I called the piece, FAMILY AGAIN, and hope it is as entertaining to readers as it was for me to write.

I think we all think about what would happen to our loved ones if we were not there to nurture them, and their welfare was left to the kindness of strangers. How would they figure out ways to survive without anything more than the tools we have given them? This is one scenario of how things might turn out, and of course there’s a twist at the end.

A Wonderful Time To Live

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John Ramsey Miller

It is snowing outside and I spent the day getting the old place prepared for the storm by cutting kindling, stacking logs on the porch, covering woodpiles and steps with tarps, gassing up my SUV and making room under the carport for it, making sure the chickens had plenty of water and food, putting a cover over their heated container, putting covers on the faucets outdoors, building a fire in the wood burning fireplace, and all while babysitting my granddaughter who was out here sick from school while her parents worked. I have a motorized wheelbarrow and I was making trips back and forth while she stood in the window waving at me. When she is well she rides in it.

Lately Sasha is preoccupied with her grandmother and me being soooo old. This afternoon she told me that I was getting too many sparkles on my face and hands. I said, “Sparkles?”

“No, that isn’t the word,” she said.

“Wrinkles?” I asked.

“Yep, wrinkles. Too many wrinkles. CAuse you’re old.”

On the way home she said, “Look, Dotz, it’s a graveyard.”

“Yes, that’s a graveyard,” I agreed.

“Is that where you and grandma are going to sleep when you die?”

“Well, no,” I said. “We’re going to a much nicer graveyard where they have cable TV and Wi-Fi for our computers.”

My grandsons are more interested in what they can have when we die. They have asked for very little but are very specific about it.

Like Gilstrap wrote on his blog, I also think and write about death and destruction and it’s a subject I know better than I’d like. I have seen death and the destruction guns and knives and cars can do to human beings and it made quite an impression on me starting at an early age. We lived across the street from a funeral home when I was ten or so, and that was where my experience began. Our neighborhood kids used to lie on our stomachs and watch Mr. Barry embalm people in the basement. He always had the louvered-glass windows open and he never saw us as his back was usually to us. It was like watching horror movies. We used to run when we heard the ambulances heading for the hospital and we’d stand, an audience of innocents, watching as some unfortunate victim was wheeled in on a gurney. Often the ambulance (again Mr. Barry) would often make a quick stop before putting the vic back into the ambulance (it doubled as the hearse for black funerals at the other Barry home in another part of town) and it had red lights in the grill and a howling siren. The lights were covered with black cloth baggies for funerals. It showed me a side of death I’ve carried with me since.

I have a problem in that I never know what to tell kids about death, how to explain it without instill fear and worry in them. I told Sasha that the old moves aside so the young can have room to grow up, that it was true with every living thing. I told her that dying was just like being born into this world but in another place. I’m not sure about that but I don’t mind lying to children about that.

Before my funeral home days in Starkville, Mississippi, when I was five or six, my eighty-four-year old grandfather died, and I remember how empty I felt and how sad it made me. I took little consolation in people telling me he was in heaven. I only knew he was never coming back and that I’d never sit in his lap and use his pocket knife to carefully cut cubes of tobacco for him to chew. I’d never hear him tell me stories about his life as a cattleman, about gunfights in downtown Hazzlehurst, about driving cattle in storms, of lean times, of being gored by a bull and thrown by horses into bad places. Although I took no consolation in the idea of Papa in heaven, I did in the fact that he died of a stroke while cheering the Friday Night Fights on TV in the nursing home. I am so glad that I knew him for the years I did, and how he called my mama, “baby” and I thought she was truly old.

As I’ve grown older I’ve seen a lot of people I knew and loved die, and it’s never easy. Never. But it has given me feelings to run my fingers over and to put into my words.

Sasha told me she liked graveyards with rocks in them, not just lots of vases with flowers in them. I agree, those graveyards with flat plaques are pastoral but bleak, and if I intended to end up in one, I’d want to be in an interesting one where people come and walk around and read inscriptions, and maybe even sat lean against a tombstone to read a book on a warm summer day.

After we passed by that bleak country graveyard, I also told her that although I seemed old to her, I was going to live a long, long time and that I planned to be there when she was older and maybe I’d even drool into my lap at her wedding. And I told her I’d be there to hold her babies just like I held her when she was one. I don’t know if I’ll be true to my word, but I plan to try.

DON’T AXE ME, MAN

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By John Ramsey Miller

Last week I mentioned I’d tell you about my experience felling a tree, so I’ll make good but warn you, dear reader, that this is not directly connected to my writing, but what I do between the pages. It’s also an explanation as to how I find the material for writing my incompetent characters.

I have a wood-burning fireplace in my living room that opens to play fireplace for our grandkids to roast marshmellows in when they stay over in the winter. When it’s got a bunch of logs burning in it, it will flat run you out of the house and into the yard. We have several acres of trees on the place and we only buy wood to supplement what I cut that is standing dead on the farm.

Okay, maybe I’ve seen too many segments of Ax Men on TV. Those guys drop monumental trees exactly where they want them to hit, and they do it with amazing ease. I love the smell of a fresh cut trees. I have been using a chainsaw most of my adult life, and so I’m not without some experience at it. Two weeks ago I dropped several trees on a nearby farm to help a neighbor lady cut, split and stack firewood. Susie and I joined several of her friends in sub-zero weather to cut dead-standing trees of decent size one recent Saturday. We cut a couple of cords (for you non-woodsman types that is a stack four feet wide, four tall and eight feet long). A cord, while seeming enormous doesn’t last very long if you heat with logs like she does since it’s her only source of fuel. Did I tell you I live out in the woods with my wife, 70 chickens and two dogs?

I’ve had this sixteen-inch-diameter-dead tree standing beside my shop/shed since we moved in and over the three years it has shed rotten limbs like a drunk carrying a four foot tall stack of boxes of chocolates up a flight of stairs in the dark––each barely missing the shed’s tin roof. I hadn’t cut it down previously because due to lean it needed to be tied off near the top and to have increasing winch tension-(I have one of those on my four-wheeler that was in the shop with a blown motor)-put on it to make it fall in a direction it was not inclined by design, physics, and the non-flexible principles of weight distribution and balance to take. When the most major limb fell off a few weeks ago and left it looking like a pole, I decided that, although it was leaning ever so slightly toward a collision with my shed roof, that like the Ax Men, I could cut it so it would have no choice but to buck nature and fall where I desired it to drop.

Taking out my Echo ES 440, with a newly sharpened chain, I stood and peered up studying the fifty odd feet of tree for several long minutes. It was cold, but there was no wind to help or hurt my enterprise, and so I cranked the saw and after revving the hell out of it for Ax-Man effect I carefully cut a perfect and deep watermelon slice out of the debarked trunk. She (we farmers call any inanimate object of substance “she”) was not as rotten through the base as I’d imagined, which was good as it would make nice firewood, and firm centers reduce the danger that it might twist as it was cut through. From slightly above the center of the wedge I started the blade on a downward angle in her backside as to hit the apex of the missing wedge. [Think of the missing wedge as being a wide-open mouth.] Also to make sure I was being an Ax Man I cut in about ten inches and inserted a wedge behind the blade to induce her to fall forward. As I cut I used a small two-pound sledgehammer to drive the shim deeper to nudge the tree so it would more definitely fall where the nose would be pointing if there had been a tree nose above the open mouth.

All went as planned until the cut was almost through to the apex. Unlike the show, my tree defied everything I believed and pinched my saw blade as I was pulling it upward and free. The tree headed backward bound for my shed …and time stood still.

It hit the tin roof under which I normally park my four-wheeler when the engine isn’t blown, my motorized wheelbarrow, and the zero-turn radius mower, which I had moved, just in case. The old gal, despite my efforts at pushing, fell backward the corner of the open structure and she landed on the roof like she had been punched out by a giant. I noticed that my chainsaw was missing its handle, which is never a good thing, so I couldn’t even cut up the tree to get it down in sections. For several minutes I felt almost as let down as I do when I receive a rejection notice from an editor.

I have a shirt that says, “Professional Author. Don’t try this at home.” I should have one printed that says, “Amateur Ax Man….”

Taught me a valuable life lesson. “Life teaches you lessons–boy does it ever!” Just because someone else can do it doesn’t mean I can. Writing isn’t cutting trees, thank God. I don’t know anybody who’s ever harmed more than the English language doing it either. Oh well, like writing, you’ll never know unless you try.

Dreams, Schemes & Chicken Wings

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John Ramsey Miller

In a dream I had the other night I was teaching a creative writing course and in class we were having a round robin and each student proposed a character and a setting. I chose three characters (the maximum number allowable by my rules) and I chose the time and place. Each student used those elements and came up with a plot. The short stories were written and I was going to put them all together in booklets without the author’s name being included and the students would vote on their favorite. I thought the only problem would be a perfectly split vote, but I was wrong as all of the students turned in the same story, which meant that all but one had cheated.

I think I remembered the dream correctly, but looking back I doubt that the dream could have lasted long enough for all for the segments I just wrote to be faithful to what I dreamed. So I probably perked the dream over the past few days, which brings me to the point of my blog. We get ideas from sparks we catch in our everyday lives, and those sparks grow into flames over time. It doesn’t take much to trigger our imaginations, and to give us the basis for a story. The same idea tossed out to a group of individuals would become a group of stories that would be entirely different. There really are no new ideas, just variations in execution of those ideas.

I have never been afraid of anyone taking my big idea and writing the book I was going to write. They could write a book, as can I, but they would be as different as scotch and grape juice.

I don’t mind telling people what I’m working on, but not for fear that they will steal the concept and beat me to the punch. I don’t talk much about what I’m working on because in my case I think it robs the project of crucial energy. When authors (let’s say aspiring authors) ask me about the safety of sending their golden pages off to an agent or to publishers and fearing someone will loot their MS for their great ideas, I assure them that there is no shortage of ideas, just a shortfall of quality executions of ideas. What publishers want is decent-selling authors who can deliver a well-executed book at regular intervals. Oh, yeah, they want each book to sell enough to make up for the ones that don’t sell, but that’s a different story.

We all see the world differently. Each of us filters what we write through our experiences just as we write in our own personal styles and we more or less can’t help but do it that way. Someone asked me recently what my style was, and I replied that I wrote like I talk, like I think, then tried to cut out 75% of the words on the draft pages.

This week my wife wrote a story for www.Goodnewsgirlz.com, which is a great lifestyle site her sister coproduces. I read the first paragraph and thought it was something I had written about our chickens. I made a few minor tweaks for her, but truthfully it was every bit as well written as what I write, maybe better than what I had written on the same two incidents. It was clear, clean, concise and humorous She said, “writing is fun.” She’d discovered my secret––one I’d managed to hide from her for 34 years.

My editor once told me that writing was only hard if you do it right and I agree. I think most things are that way, especially building model cars.

I watch AX MEN, but I’m not sure I should. Next week I’ll tell you about dropping a dead tree that I feared would fall on my shed, and felling it directly onto my shed.

So long, and good writing.

BACK FROM MY BREAK, Y’ALL

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By John Ramsey Miller

The truth is I forgot all about New Years, and it was around five PM on December 31 when I was returning from a trip to see close friends in Apex, NC that I remembered. My mind is rapidly turning to liquid soap with an A1-sauce center. We kept two of our grandchildren New Years Eve and were in bed asleep by nine o’clock. Am I getting old? God I hope so, because if I’m young, its all over for humanity.

It was nice taking a break from the blog. I turned in a short story, which readers will be able to purchase as a download along with a short story by each of the other bloggers here. Until recently I didn’t think of myself as a short story writer, but a short story is no harder to write than a good chapter in a novel. Truthfully I was tempted to publish the opening chapter of a book I’m writing now. It worked well as a short story and that got me to thinking that perhaps most opening chapters in novels would make stand-alone stories. I’m reading a book right now by a first-time novelist that will be published in a few months and the first chapter would make a great short story. It’s the assassination of Tsar Nicholas and his family from the Tsar’s POV.

I have truly loved all of the Arkady Renko novels by Martin Cruz Smith: GORKY PARK, RED SQUARE, HAVANA BAY, STALIN’S GHOST, and WOLVES EAT DOGS. I truly love Russia in the Winter, although I never intend to be there then. In fact I do not ever intend to visit the Soviet Union ever. Not my sort of place even though it’s a successful socialistic model of Utopia.

God, I love a good story, long or short. My favorite book of short stories (of late) is Laura Lippman’s HARDLY KNEW HER. What a brilliant collection of stories. THE CRACK COCAINE DIET stunned me and I went rollicking through the book and couldn’t set it down. I don’t read a lot of short stories, but when I hit a great collection like Vonnegut’s classic, WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE, Stephen King’s NIGHT SHIFT… It’s great. Feel free to make recommendations for your favorite great short story collections here under comments.

Happy Holidays!

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AWREATH3 It’s Christmas break here at the Kill Zone blog. During our 2-week hiatus, we’ll be spending time with our families and friends, and celebrating all the traditions that make this time of year so wonderful. We sincerely thank you for visiting our blog and contributing to our rants and raves. We wish you a truly blessed holiday season and a prosperous 2010. From Clare, Kathryn, Joe, Michelle, John G., John M., and Jim to all our friends and visitors, Seasons Greeting from the Kill Zone authors.

See you back here on Monday, January 4.

The Christmas Gift

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John Ramsey Miller

I was twelve years old, it was 1962, and the struggle for civil rights was gathering speed and the social fabric and traditions of the old South were undergoing enormous strains and stresses, and the threat of violence was thick in the air. My father was the minister of the First Methodist Church in Starkville, Mississippi. I remember that September on a warm evening standing on our front porch with my father and my brothers and watching a torch-lit parade of citizens came into view and marched past the church and parsonage en route to the courthouse where they hanged an effigy of James Merideth, a young black man who was registering at Ole Miss. My father was a Christian and spoke each Sunday in a loud voice from his pulpit, and during the week in softer tones, but always steadily on message. His message was that regardless of skin tone, all of God’s children deserved to live their lives as equals. It seems odd now that we lived under an established and traditional social and economic system of apartheid.

It was three months later, and the weather had turned cold enough so that there was ice on the ground. I remember that my brother, Rush, and I were passengers in the family station wagon that afternoon. We stopped at a light on the highway and watched as a group of black children, who had been standing on the corner, hurried across the highway in front of the car. I remember there were six or seven children and that they were shivering in the wind, and that they wore tattered clothes and that one of the children was shoeless, and I remember horns honking behind us and how my father stared at the group until they were on the porch of a hovel, and had gone inside.

Later that afternoon, or that night, I remember one of the few loud arguments I ever heard my parents have. After a while my mother came into the den and told us that Christmas was going to be a slim one because our father had spend our family’s main Christmas funds on the needy. I think we were not happy about it at the time, but we had Christmas as a family and if it was slimmer than usual I can’t say because I do not remember and it matters not at all. The only thing I can say is that there was a family that lived in a house where the wind found its way through the cracks, but that the family who lived there had new coats and shoes, and enough to eat that Christmas because my father made sure of it. I don’t know what other gifts I got that Christmas, but I have never forgotten the one Christmas gift that my father gave me that day. But for him I might not have understood what Christmas is really about. The spirit of Christmas is in showing our love and appreciation to our family, our friends and to reach out to touch as many of the people we can who are in need of our love, our understanding, and our compassion.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

My Bad Self Redux

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Well, dear readers, this is the last time we’ll be chatting for the next couple of weeks, so I thought I’d finish the thread I started a while ago, when I wrote about needing a new bad-ass photo of myself for Hostage Zero, coming next summer.
There were a couple of other options that we rejected, and this is where we ended up. Frankly, I like this one. I think it looks authorly, but more importantly, I think it looks like me. I’ve given up on the thought that my photo might actually sell books, but at least this one should do no harm.
I hope you all take time to hug your families in the nexet couple of weeks, and for those who are separated from family for whatever reason, I wish you all a blessed peace and fulfilling reunion in the near future.
Merry Christmas, everyone!