I’ve been an outdoorsman all my life, and camping has always been an integral part of those experiences. I’ve slept on the ground with nothing but a blanket over me and an ocean of stars stretching from horizon to horizon. I was sick that frosty night in South Dakota, and full of fever, which limited movement to only my eyeballs. Everything else hurt. Propped up against a fallen log, I could do nothing but watch the Milky Way.

I think it healed me in a way no drugs could have touched.

I’ve slept in the back of a pickup truck, wrapped in a sleeping bag, and in a canvas tent so hot the July humidity drove me out onto a concrete picnic table that felt better than any five star hotel bed. One night beside a gurgling stream, I retreated to save my life, chased there by a million mosquitoes determined so suck every drop of blood from my body. As the sun settled below the pine treetops, I peeked out the door flap and realized it wasn’t as dark as I thought. The yellow nylon was so thick with those little winged vampires, the sunset in reality was a living horde of insects.

As the years passed, we owned pop-up trailers, small campers, Class C campers, bumper pull campers, and 36-foot fifty-wheel that was larger than my first apartment. They’ve all been a learning experience, and the memories we’ve shared in those shelters still come up in pleasant recollections.

The Bride and I have pulled off into national forest campgrounds and spent both hot and cold nights in the back of our conversion van. We’ve cooked over hardwood fires, charcoal, small pump-up backpacking stoves, Coleman stoves, and even over the heat of a homemade stove made from a tin can.

It’s been so cold, that our water froze in the tent with us, so humid the breeze from a passing hummingbird felt good, and so hot we couldn’t rest. There was one sultry night in East Texas where we lay in pools of sweat, laughing at the symphony of tiny frogs that sang until an agreed-upon moment when they paused for a buffalo-size bullfrog to croke one deep bass note, and then the music continued.

So why are you telling us all this on a writer’s blog?

Because writing is much the same. You’ve found what you like doing, and that’s creating worlds that either don’t exist, or are based on a character you developed from firing synapses.

Many writers search for that magic formula to help them get words on paper and create the Great American Novel. It’s the same as what I described above, experiments and experiences that finally solidify into your own personal recipe. We all have, or had, our idea of what a writer’s life might be like, and it usually isn’t what we’ve seen on television or in the movies.

On Thursday night, the Bride and I attended a wine tasting fundraiser for my old alma mater, and I was introduced to a former Texas senator who has donated a gamebird research facility to determine while bobwhite quail numbers have dropped to alarming numbers in the past thirty or forty years. They’re working hard to bring them back to our state, and as I discussed my recent visit to the Lyon Center for Gamebird Research, he asked about being an author.

“Do you get up and write every morning?”

How many times have we heard that? “I try to write at least five pages every day. It sometimes comes early, at noon, or whenever I can find the right time to sit down and work.”

I didn’t tell him it was because I found what works for me, and what I enjoy.

A few months ago I had a long talk with a fellow bestselling author who hit the market like dynamite with her first novel. As our conversation meandered down unfamiliar trails or the same old paths authors follow when they get together, we discussed how far our manuscripts progressed in a single day. She was awed by my output, see above, and shook her head.

“I do good to write a single paragraph in a day. Sometimes I lock up on a single word and it takes forever to find the right one.”

Fine, then. That’s her working day, but like the camping discussion above (see, here’s that page a day thing), everyone is different. The only truth is that we all aspects of this world in different ways, and in terms of writing, we all have different goals. Just be inspired.

I’ve written newspaper columns on a yellow legal pad in front of a tent as lightning moved across the valley below. My best day of writing so far was one day in a 36’ fifth-wheel as rain thundered on the roof and it was impossible to go outside. It’s not where or how I produced my books, it’s the fact that I found a comfort zone somewhere that spoke to me.

There are hundreds of books on how to be a successful author out there. Read them if you want, but find the process speaks to you and follow that unexplored road, just the way the Bride and I experimented with camping, be it good or bad.

Find your comfortable place and get that first draft finished. At least put down page a day, but even that’s not for everyone. Then agonize over the post production, if you want or need to, in a figurative four-star hotel somewhere.

Quit talking about it, and over-thinking the process, and write.

Sad news to report: After 42 years, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which showed how hilariously horrible the English language can be, is no more after its founder decided to retire it. Founded in 1983, the contest was to compose the most atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written.

If you think Edward Buller-Lytton’s opus, “It was a dark and stormy night…” was a masterpiece of pukable purple prose, you should check out some of the beauts and treasures housed at the BLFC website. I spent time scrolling through the list of winners and runners-up for each year. In no orchestrated and orderly organization, here are some spectacular and stunningly-silly specimens spewed by competent, creative creatives.

“Gwendolyn, a world-class mountaineer, summoned the last of her strength for one more heroic haul on the nylon strap (for she was, after so many failed attempts, dangerously close to exhaustion) and looked heavenward with resolve, aware that, in spite of her fatigue and anguish, she must breach the crevice in one well-coordinated movement, somehow cleave the smooth fissure with the flimsy synthetic strand even though she was chaffed raw by her repeated efforts, or more sensibly, just give the heave-ho to this new-fangled (and painfully small) Victoria’s Secret thong and slip into her well-worn – and infinitely more roomy – knickers.”

“Emile Zola wandered the dank and soggy streets of a gloomy Parisian night, the injustice of the Dreyfus affair weighing on him like a thousand baguettes, dreaming of some massage or therapy to relieve the tension and pain in his aching shoulders and back, and then suddenly he thought of his Italian friends and their newly invented warm water bath with air jets and he rapturously exclaimed that oft misquoted declaration — “Jacuzzi!”

“She strutted into my office wearing a dress that clung to her like Saran Wrap to a sloppily butchered pork knuckle, bone and sinew jutting and lurching asymmetrically beneath its folds, the tightness exaggerating the granularity of the suet and causing what little palatable meat there was to sweat, its transparency the thief of imagination.”

“Ulysses Simpson Grant, having just finished a meal of Virginia ham, stretched out in his underwear of Mississippi-grown cotton, puffed on a Georgia cigar, swilled straight Kentucky bourbon whiskey, and thought just how good it was to be in the Union Army.”

“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”

“A small assortment of astonishingly loud brass instruments raced each other lustily to the respective ends of their distinct musical choices as the gates flew open to release a torrent of tawny fur comprised of angry yapping bullets that nipped at Desdemona’s ankles, causing her to reflect once again (as blood filled her sneakers and she fought her way through the panicking crowd) that the annual Running of the Pomeranians in Liechtenstein was a stupid, stupid idea.”

“Gerald began–but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them “permanently” meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash–to pee.”

“Seeing how the victim’s body, or what remained of it, was wedged between the grill of the Peterbilt 389 and the bumper of the 2008 Cadillac Escalade EXT, officer “Dirk” Dirksen wondered why reporters always used the phrase “sandwiched” to describe such a scene since there was nothing appetizing about it, but still, he thought, they might have a point because some of this would probably end up on the front of his tunic.”

“Through the gathering gloom of a late-October afternoon, along the greasy, cracked paving-stones slick from the sputum of the sky, Stanley Ruddlethorp wearily trudged up the hill from the cemetery where his wife, sister, brother, and three children were all buried, and forced open the door of his decaying house, blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that was soon to completely devastate his life.”

And this one wins the Christmas turkey…

“Space Fleet Commander Brad Brad sat in silence, surrounded by a slowly dissipating cloud of smoke, maintaining the same forlorn frown that had been fixed upon his face since he’d accidentally destroyed the phenomenon known as time, thirteen inches ago.”

Kill Zoners — Who feels creative and wants to take a crack at competing for a Bulwer-Lytton even though the contest is officially closed? If you don’t feel creative, there’s always ChatGPT.