For the most part, it’s been a fun ride. A number of people have contacted me, praising my work, and I’ve been able to use the blog as a sketchbook, a testing ground if you will, for various styles and subjects. I made some people think, I made some others laugh. In light of these points, blogging has been a success.

So, then why am I hanging up my blogging cleats? There are many reasons.

• Among the white noise of countless bloggers and Twitterers screaming, “Look at me! Look at me!,” I believe the only way to stand out is to not be a part of that noise.
• I think a hell of a lot of people are writing blogs, but few people are reading them.
• A lot of blogs appeal to very specific audiences and are stultifying to readers not from their tribe.
• The writing and maintenance of this blog dissipates my creative energies, keeping me from focusing on my real writing.
• The quick and easy nature of blog publishing conflicts with how I prefer to write—in drafts.
• I don’t want to contribute to the devaluation of writing as a paid skill by giving away the stuff for free anymore.

Those are the quick reasons, and I realize that some of my statements are debatable. I don’t care. They’re my reasons and I’m not interested in debating them.

As you see, I’ve unpublished most of my entries. If scarcity of a thing makes it more valuable, perhaps some of my entries will rise in value through omission. From now on, I may post an occasional thought or two here, but if I do it will be strictly as its name suggests—a web log, as in “Captain’s Log….” Down the road, I may decide to “reboot” the blog, but only if I come up with a value proposition I care to invest in.

This decision goes along with a monastic paring-down I’ve undertaken recently in all aspects of my life. Last night, after 4+ years, I cancelled my Publishers Marketplace account, erasing my online shingle to the publishing industry, as well as my ads for my PI novel series. Why? Because I didn’t want them hanging in the background, giving me false hope that a miracle-working agent or another movie studio (like Warner Brothers, two years ago) would see my online presence and “rescue” me from ignominy. No thanks, I’ll forgo the false sense of hope and take the ignominy.

Not only am I burning my ships, I’m burning them five miles from land, diving into the shark-infested waters and swimming to shore—with a knife clenched between my teeth. I’m closing up shop on NotWriting. I’m taking down my main website, including most of the free content I had there, and possibly moving some of that content to this blog. I’m giving away three dozen books on writing and the publishing industry because I’ve learned they’re all crap—full of recycled platitudes and Utopian visions of how the industry operates. (They also all send the tacit message that you the writer are not enough, that the answers are always “out there” someplace. Well, friends, let me assure you that the answers are most definitely NOT out there. You have to go within, find your own truth and just keep at it.)

All of this paring-down—particularly of my online presence—will have the effect of making me a little less exposed, a little more scarce. One of my role models for this anti-marketing approach is a painter who lives across the street, D. Francis White. If you do a Google search for this guy, you’ll find practically nothing. But his work (which you can only see in his studio) is amazing, and it’s all master-level quality. Last year, when I offered to create a web site for him, he said he didn’t want one. He wanted to be somewhat difficult to find. (He has a modest display in the pharmacy bay window a block away, with a cryptic set of directions on how to get to his studio.) “Besides,” he said, “I’m not trying to become rich and famous. That’s not why I do this.” His work is incredible—it really is—and I have to wonder how much of its high quality comes from his choice not to dissipate his energies on sales and self-promotion.

My wife and friends have heard me mention the following metaphor several times in the past month; I have a habit of playing with new ideas until they’re in tatters, then groping around for the next one. Here it is: There’s a reason why many Zen monasteries are high on mountain bluffs and that when a prospective student shows up, the monks shout at him and dump water (or worse) on him. It’s to keep out all those who are not truly dedicated. It’s how they weed out the dilettantes.

Make no mistake, down the road, when I have a new work I’m proud of that I’m trying to promote, I’ll be back—in some fashion. It’s just that, in the meantime, this “look at me, look at me” stuff reminds me of the line from Ecclesiastes 1:14: “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.”

I gave the blogging/online promotion thing a go—a 7-year go—and I don’t think I gained a hell of a lot from it. I concluded that I’m better off focusing on my craft, on becoming the absolute best writer (not blogger) I’m capable of becoming. I can’t worry about the market. I can’t worry about whether, and to what extent, people have heard of me. I can’t try to get “their” attention. I have to focus on dedication and the art, and that’s it.

To my loyal readers, I say thank you from the bottom of my heart, and I ask for your understanding about why I’m doing this. I want to become a better, deeper writer and in order to do that I have to burn some bridges—chief among them, my blogs. If my work has given you any pleasure over the years, I’m glad, and I hope that I can count on you as a reader once I’m ready to put my work back into the world again. Best wishes to you.

This is Orcutt, signing off.

Round Table Publishes Last Issue, Closes Its Doors
 

I was numb as I went inside and had my two cups of black coffee. Part of me wished I still drank, so I could go pick up a fifth of this good stuff and lace my coffee with it.

To me, a guy whose first job out of college was as the lone reporter for the Round Table, reading that the paper had gone under was like hearing that an old friend—a friend you hadn’t spoken to in years—had died suddenly, and penniless. But looking into your friend’s death, you discover that it actually came after a long illness, and in the case of my old friend, it was an illness caused by three factors:

1. The Internet.
2. The World Economy.
3. The fact that nobody reads newspapers anymore (see #1).

EXTRA, EXTRA! Read all about it!

Sadly, the Millbrook Round Table was just one of scores of local newspapers forced to close down, because the holding company of many of them, Journal Register Co., defaulted on loans and was de-listed from the New York Stock Exchange. However, despite the sympathy I feel for all of those reporters, editors, photographers, graphic designers, proofreaders, ad salespeople and delivery people, no one can say we didn’t see this coming. The truth is, newspapers have been an antiquated technology, and try as they might, they haven’t been able to find a new business model that would enable them to be profitable in the post-paper world of instant, online publishing.

Former home of The Millbrook Round Table, on the corner of Merritt Avenue and Front Street in Millbrook, NY.

But this piece isn’t meant to be a dirge to newspapers in general; it’s a dirge to one newspaper I knew well and loved because, for a brief time, I was a part of its 117-year history. In fact, I count myself lucky to have been the reporter for the Round Table in 1992, during the centennial of both the paper and Millbrook itself.

I was home on spring break and hadn’t even graduated yet when then Executive Editor Diane Pineiro-Zucker and Managing Editor Gene Lomoriello interviewed me for the reporter job. As a philosophy major, I was an anomaly in the newspaper world. I didn’t know the difference between a nutgraph and an inverted pyramid, but they appreciated my ability to write clearly and concisely, as well as my desire for precision and exactitude in sentences, so they hired me. I went back to school the following week, took my final exams and began on the newspaper two weeks later.

Despite its small size, the paper was technologically advanced, using networked Apple Macintoshes throughout the office for reporting, editing and layout. The publishers at that time, Hamilton and Helen Meserve, were intelligent, cultured Manhattanites who had retired from big city finance to the Millbrook countryside, and they ran the paper judiciously and creatively, going so far as to buy a boarding house for their reporters to balance the low salary. Hamilton Meserve was a serious man and from what I remember an avid trout fisherman, and he was also the son of the Wicked Witch of the West (a.k.a. Margaret Hamilton).

Every Tuesday afternoon, when we were on deadline for the weekly edition, I would pick up the phone, hit the “INTERCOM—ALL” button, and screech (in my best Wicked Witch / Miss Gulch impersonation, which was pretty damn good), “I’LL GET YOU, MY PRETTY! AND YOUR LITTLE DOG, TOO!” Once, Mr. Meserve was there and no doubt heard me. But he never fired me. Either he appreciated my brash, unbridled, manic energy, or I was just too damn talented to fire. I like to think it was both.

As a reporter in the country, I didn’t get many of what you’d call “sizzling” news stories. Most of the time, my job as the small-town reporter was to serve as chronicler of the community’s events: fairs, pageants, horse shows, auctions, art expos, book sales, library drives, ball games, village council meetings, and profiles of both local celebrities and regular joes.

Still, there are several stories that have stayed in my mind, some of which I believe made a difference. I investigated a development company on their plans for restoring the abandoned Bennett College site in Millbrook, and I discovered that they hadn’t done any of the Florida building projects they claimed. I interviewed a Silver Star winner—a bombadier over North Africa in WWII—who told me he could make out Patton’s shiny helmet from 30,000 feet. And in one of my first stories at the paper, I reported on a German Shepherd that tore a rabid raccoon to pieces. Gene questioned its newsworthiness, but at the time rabies cases were springing up all over New York and Connecticut, and folks wanted the rabid raccoons dead. The dog’s name was (I’m not kidding) Rocky, and shortly after my story and his photo appeared in the paper, he became a local hero.

And then there were the humorous moments. Like the time I went to a Village Board meeting for the annual budget review and one of the Village trustees complained about a number of the items, until the Village Clerk finally said, “Dammit, R–, you’re looking at last year’s budget!” Then there was the time I was covering the Memorial Day parade and the police chief (who was directing traffic in mirrored sunglasses) called me over, looked around and urged me to poke him in the chest. So I did, and he said, “Yeah…bulletproof. Stop a goddamn .357 point-blank, this son-of-a-bitch will.”

Or take the time I wrote about an event from 1892 in my weekly “Reporter’s Notebook” column. I made fun of a news item from 100 years before, when a local citizen had, “lost control of his horse, letting it ride up on the Village green.” In response I wrote, “Sounds like somebody was dipping a bit too much into the sauce.” Well…the day the paper came out, a woman (who, ironically, worked at the Round Table) confronted me, demanding an apology because her grandfather was the one I’d inadvertently written about. Unfortunately for me, Millbrook had, and still has, a predilection for producing centenarians.

I wasn't quite as good-looking as Robert Redford in "All the President's Men," but I was just as tenacious.

Without question, I’m pleased that I began my professional writing career in journalism—the same way two of my idols got their start: Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway. It was Hemingway who once said, “Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.” I feel a pang of regret that most young people coming up today won’t get the same opportunities to hone their writing skills while being paid for their words. In essence a paid apprenticeship, newspaper work taught me a lot about writing and work in general.

I learned the importance of writing short declarative sentences. I learned the role of commas in creating nonrestrictive clauses. I learned that nouns and verbs are the meat of writing and that whenever possible you should eliminate adjectives and adverbs. I learned how to produce under time pressure. I learned that spelling DOES matter—particularly the spellings of people’s names. I learned to use semicolons sparingly. I learned how to write a lead. I learned how to spot a story, how to notice details, how to take notes. I developed close to a phonographic memory, especially when it comes to dialogue—the diction, accents and rhythms of people’s speech. I learned how to LISTEN, and that often the best thing you can do as a reporter is to keep quiet and let the other person talk. I learned the value of preparation: having your questions planned in advance, knowing you could always stray from the agenda if you wanted to. I learned how critical it was to be fair and accurate in your reporting—in any form of writing, I believe—if you wanted your sources to continue being your sources in the future, and if you wanted to maintain a reputation for integrity.

Most important of all, writing for the Round Table day in and day out built up what I think of as my total word count, or the amount of overall experience I have with words. George Bernard Shaw once wrote that a writer shouldn’t expect to be paid for his own work (something that wasn’t journalism) until he has written a million words. That’s right—a MILLION. What the Round Table did for me, more than anything else, was give me a head start on this million-word journey, so that by the time I finished there about a year later, I had written, by my estimate, at least 900,000 words.

An old-school newsroom, when reporters played pranks by switching the numbers on each other's desks.

Coincidentally, last weekend I was going through old boxes of letters when I came upon several letters of praise from former subjects of Round Table articles. This serendipitous find spurred me to unzip my leather portfolio and browse my clips from those days, almost 20 years ago. My writing is sharper and much more felicitous now than it was then, but even then it had that spark—a love of language and a desire to get it right.

After The Millbrook Round Table I wrote for the area’s daily newspaper, The Poughkeepsie Journal, and while I learned a lot from my editor, Stu Shinske, and while the challenge of meeting a daily deadline was exciting, the Round Table had taken my journalism virginity, so it would always be first in my heart. I can still remember waking up at 6:00 am to eat breakfast with my grandparents, then driving in a rush into Millbrook to be the first one in the office, to sit down at my desk with the cool, lilac-tinged breeze wafting in the window, sipping my coffee and starting to type.

I’m glad I got to experience this piece of Americana before it died, if only for a short time. I loved being a newspaperman, and I’m proud to say I was one.

This is Orcutt, signing off.

• under the couch
• in your field coat pocket
• under the car seat
• in the box of cat toys (cats, too, appreciate good literature)
• in a knapsack
• in the freezer (for real; inexplicably, I’ve also found my belt in there)

Over the years, I’ve had this experience with a few books, the most recent being Ernest Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast. While rereading it a few days ago, I had the serendipitous experience of finding five other copies around our small apartment.

This is not meant to be a book review, nor is it “literary criticism” (I never got that stuff, and still don’t). That being said, for those of you who don’t know this book, here are the facts: It was published posthumously in 1964 to mixed reviews. It appeared first as a serial in Life magazine, then came out in the hardcover pictured below. Most importantly, as executor of his literary estate, Hemingway’s fourth (and last) wife, Mary, engaged in some significant editing of the final manuscript, cutting what many scholars believe were significant sections, including a long apology to his first wife, Hadley, for leaving her.

Hemingway’s posthumous memoir of his early years in Paris. The above was the original cover.

Many scholarly articles have been written about the version of this book that “might have been,” but as insightful as they may be, I’ve never read any of them. Besides, I’m not a scholar. Never liked school much. Tended toward autodidacticism. Like Mark Twain said, “I never let schooling get in the way of my education.”

But I digress. In plain, honest, regular English, not academese, let me tell you why A Moveable Feast may just be my favoritest (grammatically incorrect for emphasis) book of all time.

At least once a year since I was 17, I have read this memoir of Hemingway’s early life as a writer in Paris. That’s cover-to-cover reading. I couldn’t even count the number of times I’ve opened it just for inspiration. The opening alone gets me every time:

Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside.

Not bad, right? For me, it’s the first sentence—”Then there was the bad weather.” This is a perfect example of Aristotle’s admonition to begin stories in media res (in the middle of things). Starting out with “Then there was the bad weather” immediately begs the questions of, “Well, what happened before…before the ‘then’? What was the fall like? What happened?” By raising these questions with the first sentence, Hemingway also creates narrative drive, which I’ve written about in greater detail elsewhere.

A snapshot of some of the text.

It’s the language that makes me read this book so often. The lyrical nature of the prose borders on hypnotic. Yet it’s other things, too, like the evocation of place, and the voice, and the precise details. The bottom line is, what the narrator Hemingway does throughout the book isn’t very important; it’s how he does it, the combination of all of the above—the style—that pulls you along helplessly.

In the spring mornings I would work early while my wife still slept. The windows were open wide and the cobbles of the street were drying after the rain. The sun was drying the faces of the houses that faced the window. The shops were still shuttered. The goatherd came up the street blowing his pipes and a woman who lived on the floor above us came out onto the sidewalk with a big pot…. I went back to writing and the woman came up the stairs with the goat milk.

Every time before I begin a new project, or if I’m in the dumps about a current one, I’ll grab a copy of AMF out of the freezer and open it to one of my favorite passages, like this one from the chapter “Hunger Was Good Discipline,” beautifully read by actor James Naughton in the audiobook version:

As a rule, I don’t care for audiobooks, but I bought this one and copied the entire thing over to my iPod. I play it during my long walks through the Millbrook countryside, letting Hemingway’s elegantly simple, detail-driven prose seep into me. It’s a blustery autumn day out there today, a lot like Hemingway himself describes in his story, “The Three Day Blow,” and I think I’ll take a walk later and listen to AMF as the wind shakes the leaves from the trees.

I believe this book is an absolute necessity for writers, for buried within Hemingway’s descriptions of cafés, horse-racing and exotic cocktails are dozens of gems about the craft of writing, like this one…

It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I’d had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. . . . If I started to write elaborately . . . I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.

As epigrams on writing go, “…write one true sentence” has been profoundly over-quoted, when most of the people who mention it don’t know what the hell it means. I’ve meditated on it like Kant meditated on Hume, and I’m not sure I get it either.

One couplet of Hemingway’s in particular has occupied my thinking on and off for weeks, and that’s this: “What did I know best that I had not written about and lost? What did I know about truly and care for the most?” I believe those two questions, more than any other two that I’ve read, contain some of the best advice to writers—especially struggling novices, like I was when I first read them.

Of this Paris scene, Hemingway writes, “At the head of the Île de la Cité below the Pont Neuf where there was the statue of Henri Quatre, the island ended in a point like the sharp bow of a ship and there was a small park at the water’s edge with fine chestnut trees, huge and spreading….”

A Salon.com travel writer, Don George, eloquently describes his attachment to A Moveable Feast in this article. However, the passage I like the most is one in which he gets to heart of the book—its poetic and nostalgic (but not sentimental) recollection of a simpler time in a man’s life, before his senses were dulled and his passions quashed by practicality:

Doubtless you have your own Paris…it’s the place where life first came vividly to bloom for you, where you walked out the door and fell in love, where you couldn’t believe the exquisite beauty of the buildings, or the clouds, or the sun that shone after the rain.

For me, that place was, and will always be, Boston, where I fell in love with the Red Sox as a boy and where I went to college, where I dated many pretty (and a few crazy) women, where I smoked cigarettes and marijuana and drank, and listened endlessly to The Doors, and stayed up all night, unmedicated and unstable and loving it. I’d tell you more about those days, but sorry, I’m writing about them elsewhere now.

The new cover of Hemingway’s posthumous memoir.

The Orcutt weblog followed a couple of years later. Whereas NotWriting was supposed to be all about the “stuff one writer does when he should be writing,” this blog was meant to chronicle my thoughts and revelations as I struggled to make it as a fiction writer. Both blogs were meant to be ancillary at best, not the main results of my writing output.

What I’ve learned is exactly what I suspected before I began blogging, and that’s this:

Blogs are too easy and too cathartic. The ease with which one can have an idea and see it instantly published dissipates most of the creative tension that can potentially make good ideas great.

Mind you, this is my own hypothesis, and not all writers and/or bloggers will agree with it. However, over six years of blogging I have seen the above hypothesis proven true more often than not.

A simple diagram representing creative tension,
drawn in crayon by an unknown artist.

Because I know I’m going to get a deluge of angry emails from bloggers about this, let me clarify my position.

First, let’s define creative tension. Simply put, creative tension is the energy created by contemplating the difference between where you are (the current state) and where you want to be (your vision for the creative project or the future). The greater the gap in time or physical manifestation between where you are and where you want to be, the greater the creative tension.

(NOTE: I’ve read dozens and dozens of books on philosophy and personal development, but none of them do as good a job of outlining the basics on creative tension as this little web article for actors.)

Now, for writers (or at least this writer), here’s the trouble with blogs: Because very little time passes between the contemplation of where one is and where one wants to be (the vision), very little creative tension develops. What little creative tension that does build up is quickly dissipated in a 500- to 1,000-word “ditty,” instead of being stored up for a much longer work.

Let’s look at this in terms of another system that works by tension: the bow and arrow. If you put an arrow on a bowstring, pull the string back just a couple of inches and let go, the arrow will fly, but only a few feet. To put more potential energy into the system, you have to increase the tension, and you do that by drawing the bowstring back as far as it will go, and THEN you let go. When you let go at the height of the bow’s tension, WATCH OUT—that arrow will travel far and fast and, if aimed well, will hit its target with tremendous force.

In his book, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, education author Peter Senge illustrates what happens when a writer, artist, thinker or other visionary embraces creative tension:

“People who are convinced that a vision or result is important, who can see clearly that they must change their life in order to reach that result, and who commit themselves to that result nonetheless, do indeed feel compelled. They have assimilated the vision not just consciously, but unconsciously, at a level where it changes more of their behavior. They have a sense of deliberate patience—with themselves and the world—and more attentiveness to what is going on around them. All of this produces a sustained sense of energy and enthusiasm, which (often after a delay) produces some tangible results, which can then make the energy and enthusiasm stronger.”

So, what is my point with all of this?

I need to do less blogging. I need to let the creative tension build in me and not give myself an easy outlet through my websites. At least not as often.

You’ll still hear from me, from time to time, but my entries will probably not be as long or as frequent.

And to all of my fellow writer/bloggers out there, I challenge you to do the same. Cut back on the quantity of your posts, let the creative tension build. You never know…you may have a book in you instead of 100 scattered blog entries.

I have this mysterious ability to open up a new book to the exact page I need to read, and that is exactly what happened yesterday. Right there, in the library, I cracked open the book to the following paragraph:

Let me describe two kinds of novelists. First there are those that preplan. They outline. They know the end before they begin. [...] Then there’s the draft writer, who leads an admirably dismal existence. [...] The draft writer begins a draft for the very purposes I’ve been talking about; he is rightly afraid of being drawn into his mind and his analytical self. [...] So the draft writer feels the necessity of taking the merest hints to start the novel and then plunging in…by any and all means continuing to write and write and write through a great sprawling draft. And the draft writer relishes this. “Ah, I’ve got this mass of stuff, and OK, I’ve got to do the second draft now and the third and the fourth, and the seventeenth, and that’s fine….” —From Where You Dream, p. 86.

Up to now, I have always been a draft writer (see my earlier entry on Polishing). Each of my two detective novels went through 10 drafts before I considered them finished. Now, mind you, only the first five drafts are substantially different from each other; it’s in those early stages that you rethink structural issues, and a lot of scenes that seemed perfect in the beginning don’t make the subsequent cuts. But 10 drafts is still a hell of a lot of work, because regardless how much gets changed from one draft to the next, each one still represents one complete cycle through the book.

As I stated at the beginning of this month when I outlined my writing experiment, my biggest problem with novel-writing has been the GRIND of doing draft after draft. Over and over, while rewriting, I found myself mumbling, “There has to be an easier way.”

Well, there just might be.

On the very next page of Butler’s revelatory book, he discusses an alternative approach to writing the novel. Instead of the outline or draft methods,

You go to your writing space as you would on a day when you’re planning to write words. You go into your trance, just as you would if you were writing your new book sentence to sentence. But that’s not what you’re going to do. Instead, you’re going to do what I call dreamstorming—not brainstorming, dreamstorming. [...] You’re going to dream around in this novel, one level removed from moment-to-moment writing—that is, at the level of scene. You’re going to do this for six or eight or ten or twelve weeks, every day.

You’ll have a [legal pad] in front of you; you’ll make a list. You’re going to write down on this legal pad six or eight or ten words, not many more, that represent a potential scene. Just identifiers of scenes…with some sensual, concrete hook…some sort of sense impression attached to it.

Butler goes on to describe the rest of the process. Basically, at the end of the 6-12 week period of this “dreamstorming,” you, the novelist, write all of these potential scenes onto notecards. At this point, you begin thinking about continuity and organization, but not before.

I realize that to a person who has never written a novel before, all of this talk about lists and sensual impressions, etc. must be pretty dull. But the reason I mention it is that, for someone who has labored through the GRIND of draft after draft after draft after draft after draft after draft after draft after draft after draft after draft (10!), the idea of being able to work out a lot of these structural kinks using the “movie” in one’s mind is very attractive.

Why go through the physical work of typing page after page (many of which may not make the final cut) when you can “read” your book over and over, invent new scenes, move scenes around, and add or eliminate characters before typing word one?

It’s precisely the GRIND that burns me out with novel-writing, which is why, for my next novel project, I’m going to use Butler’s method. So, instead of writing a new “something” today, I’m going to go lie on my bed with a legal pad and record the scenes that occur to me.

So far this magical office supply has eluded me. However, when I dropped into Staples yesterday morning, I did get one pleasant surprise:

I could go into detail about the merits of this new paper from Staples, but why do that when another blogger already wrote a detailed review?

Like most writers with a conscience, I experience periods of self-loathing over all of the trees I am personally responsible for killing to print drafts of my work. Since I also do a lot of first drafts in paper & pencil, I’ve always wanted to find some eco-friendly paper with which to do it.

“Why,” I’ve wondered, “isn’t paper made from a renewable resource–like hemp?”

I never even considered sugarcane.

This piece on Staples’ new bagasse-based line of notepaper products was so timely, and so relevant, that I went out yesterday and bought $10 bucks’ worth. Besides the quality of the paper, I was pleasantly surprised by the comparatively low cost (at least initial cost): 99 cents for two standard-sized legal pads.

We all need to send a message to paper manufacturers that we want to be more environmentally friendly. If all writers went out and purchased some of this stuff, it might be just enough incentive for the entire industry to reconsider using renewable resources for their products.

Normally I don’t go in for comics, but Cronin’s humor is so dry and apt that I had to share it with you. It helps if you’re a writer, yet his stuff is broad enough that just about anybody can find it humorous. I’m including two of my favorite 4-panels below:

The above are copyrighted by Keith Cronin. Sweeeet!

]]> http://www.orcutt.net/weblog/2008/08/15/sweet-the-adventures-of-comma-boy/feed/ 1 http://www.orcutt.net/weblog/2008/08/13/film-noir-love-continues/ http://www.orcutt.net/weblog/2008/08/13/film-noir-love-continues/#comments Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:30:27 +0000 Orcutt http://www.orcutt.net/weblog/?p=75 To demonstrate my love of film noir, I recently created and uploaded to YouTube a “movie” of stills, set to Bernard Herrmann’s CAPE FEAR soundtrack. Hope you like.

]]> http://www.orcutt.net/weblog/2008/08/13/film-noir-love-continues/feed/ 0 http://www.orcutt.net/weblog/2008/08/11/where-am-i-headed/ http://www.orcutt.net/weblog/2008/08/11/where-am-i-headed/#comments Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:45:22 +0000 Orcutt http://www.orcutt.net/weblog/?p=74 For the past couple of months, since I finished the second novel in my detective series, I’ve felt lost. I don’t know where I’m headed.

Part of me wonders if I should put my fiction writing on the back burner and focus on my lucrative commercial/business writing. Another part of me thinks I should just dump writing altogether and get a full-time job in technology again. I’d be making a lot more money, but I know I’d be miserable.

I started a children’s book, got about halfway through, and stalled. I’ll go back to it, but lately I’ve thought, “Why bother?” This attitude of “why bother” also reared up when I got two ideas for screenplays.

 

A photo I found online that depicts how I feel. Here is the full-size version. Warning: It’s a HUGE file, so it could take a while. 

I know I’m at a point of decision in my life. I’ve been headed in a certain direction for a long time, and now I need to decide if I want to continue going in that direction. The view down the tracks is intriguing; it looks like there may be fun and adventure ahead. Then again, it could lead to a bridge over a crevasse, and said bridge was wrecked by an earthquake.

If I’m going to continue writing, I somehow have to get past the idea that it’s only worth doing if I’m going to see a result—a publisher or studio buys the thing. For a long time, I was content to write for its own sake, but something happened in the long, disheartening process of looking for an agent and, for the past year, a publisher. Sadly, I’m a lot more cynical about the whole industry and have very little desire to write something, to put potentially years of my life into a piece of work, only for the powers-that-be to react to it with indifference.

There are probably many answers to this quandary of mine, but the only one I can think of is to write something so important to me that I don’t care if it gets published. Write something that I just want to get written down for my own sense of satisfaction.

At moments like these, there are two quotes I think about. One, which I’ll paraphrase, asks the question, “What would you write if you only had six months to live? What could you say to another terminally ill person that would matter, that wouldn’t offend by its triviality?” The second quote is by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said, “You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you have something to say.”

So what do I want to say? A question much more easily asked than answered.

]]> http://www.orcutt.net/weblog/2008/08/11/where-am-i-headed/feed/ 1 http://www.orcutt.net/weblog/2008/07/29/classmates-blows/ http://www.orcutt.net/weblog/2008/07/29/classmates-blows/#comments Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:00:00 +0000 Orcutt http://www.orcutt.net/weblog/?p=69 In case you can’t tell, this is an opinion piece. If you enjoy Classmates.com or other “let’s reconnect after all these years” websites, this entry is not for you.

This entry is for the rest of us—the Classmates haters.

The annoying ad that’s showing up everywhere. Like I’d link to it.

There’s not much to say except that I hate this stupid “service.” You set up a profile on their site, give them your email address, and then if anyone wants to contact you, they leave you a message on their proprietary system, which, if you don’t pay to have a Classmates.com account, you can’t get access to.

This is basically tantamount to someone sending you a letter to a PO box for which you lost the key. The sh-t just gets crammed in there, and in the meantime your former buds think you’re a prick because you never get back to them.

Instead of stupid reunion or high school class websites, I strongly suggest getting a Facebook page for making contact with old friends.

Thank you for indulging this rant.

Oh, and if you’d like to read a no-holds-barred polemic on Classmates.com, check out this entry by Twisted Princess.

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