Writing, Editing & Journalism

Writing All the Words; Reading All the Words

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Well, NaNoWriMo 2017 is officially, as one of our MLs put it, The Year of the Slog. Painful going, mitigated by the good turnout at my Saturday-morning write-ins and the surreal silence of our Day of Knockout Noveling in Holland.
I managed to eke a narrow “win” this year. I did something different for this project. For example, it’s (literally) only half-done. This novel consists of two parts: The first half is a series of 15 chapters dotted between 1981 and 2017; each chapter consists of two scenes, one each from both of the two point-of-view characters. The second half—next year’s project, perhaps!—will cover just six weeks in the late summer of 2017, again with a two-scene, 15-chapter design. The whole project should clock in somewhere between 100k and 120k completed words, if I elect to finish it.
In a nutshell: Liz Thompson, an FBI agent, is temporarily reassigned home, to the Grand Rapids field office, to hunt a suspected serial killer. That killer actually exists; he’s Tyler Parker, a formerly abused and bullied kid who transforms (in his own mind) into a vigilante dispensing justice to abusive men who cross his path.
The first half of the novel relates the touch points, in a series of brief and disconnected vignettes, that led two normal, middle-class toddlers to become radically different adults. The second half is a more traditional agent-pursues-killer plot.
The point of the exercise wasn’t really to write a novel. The point was to experiment with long and complex conflict arcs. I’ve learned that one weakness in my fiction has been my tendency to use plot as a series of events that just happen, with conflict being relegated to the sidelines. With this project, I focused on making the conflicts—between Liz and Tyler, between Tyler and his father, between Tyler and his childhood abusers, between Liz and her mother, between the main characters and the passage of time—serve as the key drivers of the story.
For you stats kids out there keeping track of all my NaNo’ing, that puts me at:

  • Seven continuous years of participation with “wins” in four of those years (a ~57 percent success rate, making me a better bet than a coin toss).
  • Cumulative total of 255,830 validated words.

With all that writing done, I now pivot to reading. I’ve picked up A War Like No Other, the history of the Peloponnesian War as told by Victor Davis Hanson. It’s rather nice to sit in the cozy microfiber recliner in my office, with a feline on the lap and a glass of wine at hand, with some soft Bach playing in the background and the lights dim except for a subtle reading lamp and the glow from the fireplace.
However, I need your help.
I’m working on one of my long-time bucket-list items: I want to compile (and then begin!) a life-long reading list. Not a list of top 10 books or anything that modest. Rather, a comprehensive list of what books are the most worth reading if you have a lifetime to dedicate to the pursuit.
I already have quite a list prepared, although my earlier research is long on antiquity and short on modernity. I am not limiting the list to Western Civ, nor to any time period. Items on the list begin, for example, with the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Book of the Dead and the I Ching and the Odyssey. Also, no genre restrictions.
Share with me what books you think are worthy of the list, either as comments here or in Facebook comments or tweets.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

Author Updates: "Christ's Body, Christ's Wounds" & Division by Zero

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I’m pleased to share, on this lovely Thanksgiving day, a pair of personal literary updates worth celebrating.
First, I received the soft proofs of Christ’s Body, Christ’s Wounds: Staying Catholic When You’ve Been Hurt in the Church. This volume, edited by Eve Tushnet and with a forward by Elizabeth Scalia, consists of 12 essays (plus and foreword and an introduction) by contributors solicited by Tushnet in 2015. It’s forthcoming from Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers in Eugene, Oregon. I’m not sure of the actual release date—probably not until well into 2018 or early 2019—but it was quite a delight to get the PDFs from Eve last week.
For this volume, I wrote an essay that linked a very specific incident in my spiritual life to the long arc of my years pursuing seminary studies. Eve’s partnership in editing the drafts back-and-forth over early 2016 led to a wonderful final output. I’m honored to be a contributor to this collection.
Second, I was notified (on the same day I received the soft proofs, no less!) that I’ve been accepted into the Division By Zero: Double Take anthology produced by MiFiWriters. Well, technically, I received a notice of preliminary acceptance and solicitation of a bio; contracting and editing are still on the horizon, so it’s theoretically still possible I’ll get a “whoops, we didn’t mean you” note. I expect the book to be released some point in 2018. MifiWriters publish an annual speculative-fiction anthology; this year’s theme, “double take,” governs the content.
My story, “Conversion Therapy,” shares the tale of Connor, a gay vampire nightclub owner whose grandiose plans for world domination hinge upon Nicole, a “ditzy bag of vampire nectar” whose own goals are much more targeted.
In all, a good month for writing. (Says the guy who’s not nearly as far behind as he normally is at this time of the month, for his National Novel Writing Month shenanigans.)

Healthcare Quality & Analytics, Personal, Writing, Editing & Journalism

An October Update

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After a brief stretch of unseasonably warm weather in late September, West Michigan has unambiguously slipped into autumn. I look out my home-office window—the air is nice, with that charming mix of cool and moist that suggests “tailgate season”—and I see more and more orange and red amidst the green. Squirrels scamper with earnestness. Bugs are vanishing. Things slow down.

“Winter is coming,” I’m told. And I hope it does. I’m excited for this year’s holiday season. In my head, it kicks off with my mid-September birthday, which marks for me the end of summer (Labor Day doesn’t do it for me) and the beginning of “winter Lent.” Then October sees the tree transitions and sweater weather and writing prep that culminates in Halloween—holiday season kickoff!—and the beginning of National Novel Writing Month. Thanksgiving re-grounds me with family and marks a pivot point for NaNo. And as soon as the mad-dash of writing is over, I pivot to Christmas and then take two or three weeks off from the day job to recharge, etc. It’s a great time of the year, even in years when I’m not “feelin’ it.”

So today seems like as good of a time as any to offer some updates, offered as usual in no particular order, but as always under the watchful gaze of my feline overlords.

VLO’s Summer Vacation. Tony and I took a half-vacation (i.e., work slowdown) in late July and throughout August; as of September, we were back to a normal weekly podcasting schedule. The upside to VLO now rolling in its sixth year is that we’re stable and mature. And, of course, that we have thousands of downloaders and hundreds of engaged listeners on Twitter, Facebook, the blog, etc. Given that we don’t monetize this program—it’s a hobby and labor of love—the response by people all across the world has been fantastic. And for almost all of the shows for September and October, our alcohol segments came to us free of charge courtesy of gifts from our listeners. It’s a ton of work, but it’s a joyful thing.

NAHQ @ Cincinnati. On my birthday, I flew to Cincinnati for the back-to-back board meeting and educational conference for the National Association for Healthcare Quality. It was a professionally rewarding experience. Being a board member means that the conference is tightly scheduled for us. Six days, five nights. But what made it personally rewarding was the deep camaraderie among the current members of the board and the great cadre of seasoned, senior volunteers who work with us. NAHQ is about to go into a very tight period where the organization pivots from an association-management model (i.e., a separate company “manages” the association, hires the staff, provides the office, etc.) to a fully stand-alone model where the association itself handles all its own operations, leases its own offices, hires its own team, stands up its own I.T., etc. This is a huge deal. We’re bigger than most groups that make the independent pivot and we have only about a quarter of the time the average group enjoys to make the move … but our staff are awesome (almost all are leaving the management company to be hired by NAHQ outright) and our finances are rock-solid. It’ll be a heavy lift, but it’ll be done with finesse and—we expect—utterly transparently to our thousands of dues-paying members.

Jot That Down. I’m pleased to share that Jot That Down: Encouraging Essays for New Writers has been successfully released. I worked with A. L. Rogers, the book’s editor, to get it produced in print. It’s a great resource for new/aspiring writers, covering a variety of topics and genres in an easy-to-digest manner. Currently available for purchase for $14.95 from Caffeinated Press or by special order from your local independent bookseller.

Other CafPress books. And speaking of Jot That Down, I’ve wrapped up Isle Royale from the AIR, an anthology edited by Phillip Sterling that collects stories, poems and art from former artists-in-residence at Isle Royale National Park. I’m also in the production phase of Brewed Awakenings 3, our annual anthology, and Off the Wall: How Art Speaks, a collection of poetry and art co-developed by Elizabeth Kerlikowske and Mary Hatch. And final edits are due from the advance review copy for Ladri, a novel by Andrea Albright. Barring disaster, each of these books should be in-scope for a boost event we’ll host at the end of the month. Two more novels await this year—Kim Bento’s Surviving the Lynch Mob and Barbara David’s A Tale of Therese—plus Jennifer Morrison’s local-history book The Open Mausoleum Door, then I’m caught up with production across all of our lines of business.

NaNoWriMo. NaNo’s coming, so that means that I’ve had to (a) re-curate my author page and (b) think about what I’m going to work on. I think my technical focus will be on sharpening conflict and using that conflict to be the primary driver of the plot (instead of my usual, which is to let the plot drive the conflict). The story itself will be another bite at a Jordan Sanders murder mystery because I’m well-acquainted with the characters in this universe. But I still have three weeks to nail down my idea.

Grand River Writing Tribe. The Tribe has been together for 10 months now, and it’s been going gangbusters. People are participating. Getting published. Supporting each other. Without a regular, focused critique group, a writer stands at a significant disadvantage. GRWT meets twice monthly for three hours, combining critiques, focused education and dedicated writing time. And we still welcome potential new applicants!

Juicing. So this happened. On October 1, a scant week ago, I began a significant diet program. I had purchased a juicer and accessories. For several days, I had nothing but fruit and vegetable juice. Then, on the advice of clinicians at work, I’ve migrated to a part-juice, part-good-food regimen. So it’s been juices with a little bit of, e.g., shredded chicken or sushi or carrot/celery sticks. The thing is, I’m avoiding all processed sugars, alcohol, refined carbs, etc. Not even doing my traditional Lean Cuisines. It’s either juice I prepared myself, or plain shredded chicken or sashimi without the rice. (Tonight, I’m making a salmon fillet with asparagus.) Already down five pounds in a week. And although the diet part isn’t hard—I really like what I’m consuming—what’s been more interesting is the level of planning I’ve had to do. Actually preparing a shopping list (“I need this many swiss chard leaves, this many pears, this many ounces of blueberries …”) and planning my evening schedule around my dinner schedule has been both illustrative and challenging. And now that I bought an elliptical, which just got set up in my living room—whoa! Credit to my friend Tony who did a 30-day juice diet in May (and lost a ton of weight!) and who remains incredibly supportive even when I mock him unfairly for becoming a vegan.

The Great Outdoors. Tomorrow, a half-day kayaking trip beckons, with Jen, Brittany and Steve. Next Saturday, I’m doing a day hike on a section of the North Country Trail in the Manistee National Forest.

Home Shopping Spree. With the annual management bonus we received at the day job, I was able to pay off some bills, pay other bills early and invest a bit in both Caffeinated Press and my own home front. Of note, with the mid-summer swap of my bedroom and my office, I had to buy all new bedroom furniture. That’s done: Dresser, headboard, vanity with bench. Then some odds-and-ends, including the aforementioned elliptical, some knickknacks like candles and new lamps, a full-length mirror and a stool for the bathroom, and a replacement computer. My “normal” all-in-one home computer is very old and has been intermittently hostile, so it’s been retired to be a dedicated writing machine at my dedicated writing desk. The new machine—the first upgradeable tower PC I’ve owned since, I think, 2005—is an iBuyPower box with a quad-core i7-7700 processor, 16 GB of RAM and a 3GB GPU (GeForce GTX 1060). In all, a decent if not bleeding-edge machine. The only real hesitation I had with it is that it appears to have been designed by a 13-year-old boy, with proliferating LED lights (that I covered with electrical tape!) and a keyboard that looked like a l337 toddler toy. Picked up a 27-inch monitor for it; almost got two but I’m glad I didn’t because with it and the 17-inch aux monitor I already had, I’m literally out of room on my desk. I literally cannot fit two 27-inch monitors. Anyway, Duane, if you see this: “SIXTEEN GIGS OF RAM.”

Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters. It’s an exciting time at GLCL. The board has been discussing a very, very robust programming schedule for 2018 as well as rebranding and an expansion of the board. A ton of work, to be sure, but I think it’ll help focus the organization and promote local literary citizenship. More to come.

All for now. May your autumn Winter Lent warm your soul even if it chills your toes!

Writing, Editing & Journalism

On a Book-Makin' Tear!

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Deep, cleansing breath.
Folks, it’s been a crazy two weeks. Crazy in a good way. I took a five-day weekend over Labor Day to focus on Caffeinated Press stuff (as well as this past Friday). I managed to get done:

  • Advance review copy of Ladri, a dark urban fantasy novel.
  • Interim and final copies of Jot That Down: Encouraging Essays for New Writers — an anthology of essays by published writers, about the craft of writing. (Which will be released this coming Friday!)
  • Advance review copy of Isle Royal from the A.I.R. — an anthology of poems, short stories and art by people who have previously served as the artist-in-residence at Isle Royale National Park.
  • Contracting and editing assignments for the third installment of our annual Brewed Awakenings anthology.

These things take time. Lots of details. Lots of cross-checking. Lots of back-and-forth with the author. It’s a double-buttload of work, but it’s great to see such wonderful material being prepared for readers in West Michigan and beyond.
I have a few more projects to wrap up over September and October: An art/poetry collection. My contributions to issue 3.1 of The 3288 Review. Production for the third installment of the Brewed Awakenings anthology. Two other novels need ARCs by October. Fun stuff!

Writing, Editing & Journalism

On a Book-Makin’ Tear!

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Deep, cleansing breath.

Folks, it’s been a crazy two weeks. Crazy in a good way. I took a five-day weekend over Labor Day to focus on Caffeinated Press stuff (as well as this past Friday). I managed to get done:

  • Advance review copy of Ladri, a dark urban fantasy novel.
  • Interim and final copies of Jot That Down: Encouraging Essays for New Writers — an anthology of essays by published writers, about the craft of writing. (Which will be released this coming Friday!)
  • Advance review copy of Isle Royal from the A.I.R. — an anthology of poems, short stories and art by people who have previously served as the artist-in-residence at Isle Royale National Park.
  • Contracting and editing assignments for the third installment of our annual Brewed Awakenings anthology.

These things take time. Lots of details. Lots of cross-checking. Lots of back-and-forth with the author. It’s a double-buttload of work, but it’s great to see such wonderful material being prepared for readers in West Michigan and beyond.

I have a few more projects to wrap up over September and October: An art/poetry collection. My contributions to issue 3.1 of The 3288 Review. Production for the third installment of the Brewed Awakenings anthology. Two other novels need ARCs by October. Fun stuff!

Writing, Editing & Journalism

Gone Writin’

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Last weekend I enjoyed the sublime privilege of spending a few days with the editors of MiFiWriters at their inaugural open-to-the-public writers’ retreat. The event — held at the Transformations Spirituality Center at the campus of the former Nazareth College in Kalamazoo — began around 4 p.m. on Friday and continued until around 4 p.m. on Sunday. A total of eight people attended.

The MifiWriters produce the well-regarded Division By Zero annual anthology series — the oldest speculative-fiction anthology that emphasizes authors native to Michigan.

Activities:

  • I arrived on Friday in time to check into my room and enjoy dinner with the group in the presence of the retired nuns of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph. The facility, besides offering space for events and conferences, also serves as a retirement home for CSJ sisters. Who were, I must say, uniformly charming. We enjoyed an entire wing of the third floor to ourselves, as well as sole access to the beautiful Sun Room. After dinner, from roughly 6:30 until 11 p.m., we engaged in group critiques. Attendees spent more than 45 minutes on my 2,300-word short story Ashes of Another Life, which has already benefitted from one round of peer review. The consensus comments and suggestions were, alone, worth the weekend’s modest registration fee.
  • Saturday was “writing day.” After our strict 7:30-to-9 a.m. breakfast window, we wrote until lunch. Then we ate lunch. Then we wrote until dinner. Then we ate dinner. Then we did critiques from 6 p.m. until almost midnight. Got some great feedback on a middle-of-the-book chapter from my almost-done novel Six Lost Souls. Of note: Vlad the Bat visited us. He flew into the room and terrified most folks, then he left and we couldn’t locate him. Three of us, I among them, elected to write after the critiques, not retiring until around 1 a.m.
  • Sunday after breakfast was free writing. Then lunch. Then critiques from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. I nominated my flash piece, Regret, which has already been workshopped four times. Nevertheless, I still got some valuable comments back from the group. When critiques were over, we disbanded — with a sense of sadness at how quickly the time had passed. Oh, and Vlad made an unexpected daytime cameo.

I must bestow mellifluous and multitudinous accolades upon the MiFiWriters editors — Sue Ann, Matt, Tim, Kirsten and Steve — for their excellent work. They were uniformly welcoming and helpful — no judgmentalism, no snark, just earnestly helpful support and obvious engagement with pieces presented for critique. I’ve worked with them before, for the Get Published! conferences they’ve hosted the last two years, and this retreat solidified just how decent these folks are as human beings, as well as how skilled they are as wordsmiths. Authors intimidated by peer review will find this group to be a gentle yet helpful introduction to how critiquing can be simultaneously in-depth and enjoyable.

Oh and it was great writing with Dani and re-acquainting myself with Kelli.

And — mirable dictu! — I managed to not only get my personal slush pile into order, but I also wrote a complete 8,000-word novelette. Stretching beyond my ordinary comfort zone, I completed the first draft of Conversion Therapy, a dark horror piece about a modern-day gay vampire whose world-domination plot takes a disastrous turn. The story exclusively follows the vampire’s point of view. ‘Twas a lot of fun. Wrapped it up about 20 minutes before lunch on Sunday.

Some take-aways from the weekend:

  • Taking time away to write, if you’re a writer, is essential to both productivity and good mental health.
  • I like the MiFiWriters approach to critiquing — which is to create a shared Google Drive folder and paste a story into a Google Doc. The author reads the entire piece aloud while everyone makes comments (in “suggestion” mode) as they follow along. No matter how long or short the story, the author reads it in its entirety. Then, there’s a round of open discussion about what did and didn’t work about the piece and, where helpful, suggestions about alternatives to improve the story. There’s no time limit; it goes until it’s done. One story had 20 minutes of post-read discussion; another had 90. Everything else fell in the middle. Per story, per day. Their critique approach differs from what we use at the Grand River Writing Tribe, which requires that the piece be submitted in advance and edits completed individually, either on paper or electronically. Then, we read a very short story or a passage from a longer piece before beginning a conversation informed by the notes we each developed in advance.
  • A deep engagement with the writing-in-progress of others is a deliciously intimate and eye-opening experience.
  • I get more done sans feline overlords.
  • The Transformations Spirituality Center offers a great location for retreats both secular and religious — not only was it an ideal location for the writers’ retreat, but I also got the chance to sit in the chapel a bit on Sunday morning. I even brought my breviary and on Friday night, prayed full Compline.
  • The most frequent lesson reinforced by the MiFi editors is that conflict matters. They emphasize a few things — early hooks, an avoidance of data dumps, logical consistency — but the most significant “craft of writing” lesson I learned is to establish the story’s core conflict early on and to allow the conflict to drive the plot instead of letting the plot hint at conflict. It’s a subtle but crucial distinction. I too often look at plot as a timeline of events rather than the scaffolding upon which the conflict’s long-run evolution unfolds.

This past weekend proved a salutary tonic to this bitter writer’s soul. 🙂 I look forward to the next opportunity.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

Gone Writin'

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Last weekend I enjoyed the sublime privilege of spending a few days with the editors of MiFiWriters at their inaugural open-to-the-public writers’ retreat. The event — held at the Transformations Spirituality Center at the campus of the former Nazareth College in Kalamazoo — began around 4 p.m. on Friday and continued until around 4 p.m. on Sunday. A total of eight people attended.
The MifiWriters produce the well-regarded Division By Zero annual anthology series — the oldest speculative-fiction anthology that emphasizes authors native to Michigan.
Activities:

  • I arrived on Friday in time to check into my room and enjoy dinner with the group in the presence of the retired nuns of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph. The facility, besides offering space for events and conferences, also serves as a retirement home for CSJ sisters. Who were, I must say, uniformly charming. We enjoyed an entire wing of the third floor to ourselves, as well as sole access to the beautiful Sun Room. After dinner, from roughly 6:30 until 11 p.m., we engaged in group critiques. Attendees spent more than 45 minutes on my 2,300-word short story Ashes of Another Life, which has already benefitted from one round of peer review. The consensus comments and suggestions were, alone, worth the weekend’s modest registration fee.
  • Saturday was “writing day.” After our strict 7:30-to-9 a.m. breakfast window, we wrote until lunch. Then we ate lunch. Then we wrote until dinner. Then we ate dinner. Then we did critiques from 6 p.m. until almost midnight. Got some great feedback on a middle-of-the-book chapter from my almost-done novel Six Lost Souls. Of note: Vlad the Bat visited us. He flew into the room and terrified most folks, then he left and we couldn’t locate him. Three of us, I among them, elected to write after the critiques, not retiring until around 1 a.m.
  • Sunday after breakfast was free writing. Then lunch. Then critiques from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. I nominated my flash piece, Regret, which has already been workshopped four times. Nevertheless, I still got some valuable comments back from the group. When critiques were over, we disbanded — with a sense of sadness at how quickly the time had passed. Oh, and Vlad made an unexpected daytime cameo.

I must bestow mellifluous and multitudinous accolades upon the MiFiWriters editors — Sue Ann, Matt, Tim, Kirsten and Steve — for their excellent work. They were uniformly welcoming and helpful — no judgmentalism, no snark, just earnestly helpful support and obvious engagement with pieces presented for critique. I’ve worked with them before, for the Get Published! conferences they’ve hosted the last two years, and this retreat solidified just how decent these folks are as human beings, as well as how skilled they are as wordsmiths. Authors intimidated by peer review will find this group to be a gentle yet helpful introduction to how critiquing can be simultaneously in-depth and enjoyable.
Oh and it was great writing with Dani and re-acquainting myself with Kelli.
And — mirable dictu! — I managed to not only get my personal slush pile into order, but I also wrote a complete 8,000-word novelette. Stretching beyond my ordinary comfort zone, I completed the first draft of Conversion Therapy, a dark horror piece about a modern-day gay vampire whose world-domination plot takes a disastrous turn. The story exclusively follows the vampire’s point of view. ‘Twas a lot of fun. Wrapped it up about 20 minutes before lunch on Sunday.
Some take-aways from the weekend:

  • Taking time away to write, if you’re a writer, is essential to both productivity and good mental health.
  • I like the MiFiWriters approach to critiquing — which is to create a shared Google Drive folder and paste a story into a Google Doc. The author reads the entire piece aloud while everyone makes comments (in “suggestion” mode) as they follow along. No matter how long or short the story, the author reads it in its entirety. Then, there’s a round of open discussion about what did and didn’t work about the piece and, where helpful, suggestions about alternatives to improve the story. There’s no time limit; it goes until it’s done. One story had 20 minutes of post-read discussion; another had 90. Everything else fell in the middle. Per story, per day. Their critique approach differs from what we use at the Grand River Writing Tribe, which requires that the piece be submitted in advance and edits completed individually, either on paper or electronically. Then, we read a very short story or a passage from a longer piece before beginning a conversation informed by the notes we each developed in advance.
  • A deep engagement with the writing-in-progress of others is a deliciously intimate and eye-opening experience.
  • I get more done sans feline overlords.
  • The Transformations Spirituality Center offers a great location for retreats both secular and religious — not only was it an ideal location for the writers’ retreat, but I also got the chance to sit in the chapel a bit on Sunday morning. I even brought my breviary and on Friday night, prayed full Compline.
  • The most frequent lesson reinforced by the MiFi editors is that conflict matters. They emphasize a few things — early hooks, an avoidance of data dumps, logical consistency — but the most significant “craft of writing” lesson I learned is to establish the story’s core conflict early on and to allow the conflict to drive the plot instead of letting the plot hint at conflict. It’s a subtle but crucial distinction. I too often look at plot as a timeline of events rather than the scaffolding upon which the conflict’s long-run evolution unfolds.

This past weekend proved a salutary tonic to this bitter writer’s soul. 🙂 I look forward to the next opportunity.

Personal, Photography, Writing, Editing & Journalism

Bidding a (Fond) Farewell to July 2017

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July is about to bow its sayonara. Interesting month. Got a lot accomplished. Moving into August on an upbeat note. Let me talk a bit about photography, then I’ll segue into professional and then personal updates.

Photography

I perambulated yesterday around Kent Trails, near Millennium Park, along a 4.1-mile loop. I brought my trusty Nikon D3100 camera (I know, I know—antique body at this point) with my Nikkor 70-300 mm lens. The goal of the walk wasn’t to hone my technical skills with manual-mode shooting but rather to just work on framing with this lens. Haven’t used it much yet. Had some fun with it — my favorite 29 photos are captured into three Tumblr photoset posts organized by the themes of park, flora and fauna. And it was great to get into the relative peace of the park.

After I left the trail, arms wickedly sunburned, I stopped for an unannounced visit to my mom. That was nice. I’m thrilled that Gunner the German Shepherd is doing well. He’s a whopping 110 lbs now. Yikes.

On my way home from my mom’s house, I visited the new nature walk that used to be The Highlands Golf Club. In the summer of 2000, I worked course maintenance at The Highlands. The Great Lakes Senior Golf Association wrote up the course by saying:

In the early 1900’s Donald Ross, one of the world’s most renowned golf course architects, designed one of the best golf courses in West Michigan. In 2008 we celebrated our centennial year at The Highlands in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Now you too can play and walk the fairways that Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, Lee Trevino, Chi Chi Rodriguez, Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, Sam Snead and hundreds of other PGA, Senior PGA, and LPGA stars have played.

I myself had played there, with my grandfather, in the 1990s and early 2000s. Earlier this year, the 18-hole, 121-acre site was acquired by the Land Conservancy and added to the Blandford Nature Center. So far, they’ve done basically nothing but remove the hardware for the course (flags, cups, ball washers) and mow a few meandering paths through it. Otherwise, it’s being reclaimed by nature. I’ve documented the effect that just one season’s worth of quietude has wrought on what used to be a nationally respected course. See the photoset. Beautiful, but also sad. When you see a place you worked so hard to maintain now overgrown and wild, you cannot help but reflect on the impermanence of things. Even things like a 109-year-old golf course.

And one last photo thing—all this picture-taking impelled me to get my portfolio organized. So my major shoots are up on Tumblr and are accessible, along with my Instagram feed, on this blog’s Photos page. Remember, folks, I make no claim to being a professional photographer! 🙂

Sundry Professional Updates

From the work front:

  • At Priority Health, I have a new boss in the form of my former fellow manager, Sheri. I like her. This should be good. And the major work of the summer—vetting 175 different corporate initiatives totaling more than $80M in cost savings, in time to support the annual budgeting and pricing process—was delivered in full and on time, which is huge given that our VP didn’t think my team would be done until November. I’m rewarding my core and extended team with a kayaking trip next Friday. We’re going to the Double R Ranch for a light lunch, then spend 2 or 2.5 hours on the Flat River, then return to the ranch for dinner and drinks. Folks are excited. Kudos to Jen, one of my senior analysts, for coordinating the kayaking festivities.
  • At Caffeinated Press, our newest board member, Tabitha, is going gangbusters to impose some project-management discipline on projects I was too thinly stretched to manage myself. Our office move is now mostly done, so I can focus on distribution, book production and the third volume of our Brewed Awakenings anthology. With the move (and corresponding rent reduction) and Tabitha’s arrival, I think things are beginning to even out a bit. Which is good. The last nine months or so have been a real drudge at times.
  • Two weeks ago, I hoofed it to the Windy City for our summer Commission Week meetings for the National Association for Healthcare Quality. Professionally rewarding but also exhausting. Spent a fair amount of time on my newest NAHQ project, which is to co-lead the initiative to revise NAHQ’s code of ethics and standards of professional practice, from scratch. A ton of work to be done, but on the bright side, I can put that degree in moral philosophy to use! Next up for NAHQ is the board meeting and annual conference in September, in Cincinnati, but the ethics work will likely occupy the bulk of my NAHQ time for the remainder of 2017.

Sundry Personal Updates

And on the home front:

  • I broke a bone. First time ever. Whacked my foot against the living-room table whilst chasing a fly. Broke my right pinky toe, jammed the next toe in and managed to pull a back muscle as I contorted to break my fall.  And did something to temporarily injure my right wrist. But I got that winged demon. I got it good.
  • I bought a new bed. After nearly 15 years, my Select Comfort dual-chamber queen-sized bed finally had one chamber fail. Which meant that for a few weeks, I slept on half an air bed while the cats just geeked out over their ability to play hide-and-go-stalk in the valleys of the deflated side. Because cats. Anyway, I tossed the Select Comfort and temporarily replaced it with an air mattress from Meijer while I plotted the switcheroo between the bedroom and the office (because of the Caffeinated Press move). Now that the moves are all done, I bought a Casper mattress on the recommendation of my NAHQ colleague Andrew. He was right—I love it. It’s a 10-inch queen mattress with several different foam layers. It came in a box, vacuum packed and rolled up like a sleeping bag. I opened the vacuum bag and *woomph* it almost immediately restored itself to its full shape and size. So far, so happy.
  • Enjoyed a fun cigar night with Tony, Matt and Scott this past Wednesday. I arrived around 7p. Didn’t leave until a quarter to midnight. Long after Tony and Scott left, I sat with Matt and with Rob (the owner) talking politics and enjoying a Nat Sherman 85th Anniversary cigar and sipping a Perrin Black Goat beer.
  • My 4.1-mile expedition to Kent Trails yesterday, plus comments from my colleague John, suggest that the hiking trip to Hodenpyl Dam would make more sense in October, at the height of color season. I cannot find room to disagree, so I’ve rescheduled accordingly. Plus, it’ll give me a chance to actually use the recumbent bike that I own but studiously avoid. Hiking goes better with some degree of cardiopulmonary fitness, I guess.
  • My personal writing has picked up. I’m wrapping up another of my pseudonymous erotica novellas intended solely for Amazon. I recently wrote a short story, Ashes of Another Life, which at 2,350 words was constructed to meet a very specific writing prompt from one of my writing groups. My other writing group is firing on all cylinders. And I’m looking forward to the writers’ retreat next month, a weekend event in Kalamazoo. Also, the essay I wrote that’ll be included in the Catholic anthology won’t be released until late 2018, which is a shame but also, as a small-press guy myself, I totally get it.
  • On the Vice Lounge Online front, Tony and I have again concluded that summer is a real pain to get together given our opposite schedules. So for August, we’re on an every-other-week rotation. Normal programming resumes in September. That said, you’re welcome to catch us on iTunes or listen on the Web if you’d like to check out recent episodes or browse the back catalog. It’s all good stuff, people. All of it.

OK, all for now. Hope you had an equally satisfying July … and here’s to a kick-buttocks August.

Religion, Writing, Editing & Journalism

The Ghosts of Easters Past, Present and Future

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As I write this reflection, it’s late morning on April 15. A fresh pour of coffee sits to my left — as does Queen Fiona, comfortably napping on her pillow — and to my right, an open window admits the hums and chirps of a serene spring Saturday on a quiet side street in the heart of Grand Rapids, Michigan. As if by the product of elven magic, the trees have budded seemingly overnight; in fact, several trees across the street already appear to be mostly leafed. It’s peaceful, which means it’s a good time to write.
Last night was not peaceful. I just couldn’t get comfortable, so I kept waking up and at one point, I even decamped to the couch. Right around 4 a.m., when the thunderstorm rolled past. During the stretches of wakefulness last night, a few thoughts about life, Easter and everything bubbled within the soft grey goo betwixt my earholes.
Allow me to share.

Easter Past

At some point, the “Easter” of my childhood transformed from a family-themed chocolate festival into a religious duty. This ghost of memory asserted itself for the first time about a week ago, after I had mentioned to my friend Patrick that I had written a short essay that will be included in the forthcoming book provisionally titled Staying Catholic When You’ve Been Hurt in the Church, edited by Eve Tushnet and published through Wipf+Stock’s Cascade Press. A central motif in that essay, which addressed my experience in the diocesan vocations program in the early 2000s, focused on one central event: A brief moment of spiritual clarity obtained, interestingly, around noon on Good Friday, 2000, at the Legion of Christ novitiate in Cheshire, Connecticut.
That experience proved to be a pivot point of sorts. Before it, Easter was more of a family event: There’d be a luscious feast and chocolate bunnies and happy memories. And, yes, Easter Mass — but a church service was a small price to pay for all the fun and food.
After Cheshire, and as I got more deeply involved in the religious discipline of the Church, the “family stuff” yielded to spiritual renewal. I actually looked forward to Lent and its period of reflection and rejuvenation. I did retreats. I went to penance services. I prayed the Stations of the Cross. The Triduum presented a busy yet fulfilling experience: Although as chief sacristan and parochial master of ceremonies for my parish I was constantly on the go, I found my centering moments in the little places. Like the period of Eucharistic adoration on Thursday night, or the chance to take a pew with my breviary while the decorators planned where they were going to place the lilies. Or just sitting by the tabernacle after the 11:30 Mass on Easter Sunday, the church empty and everyone gone, to just be.

Easter Present

Yet it barely registered that this week was Holy Week.
The ghost of Easter Present whispers — barely audibly — that a lot of stuff changed in 2008, and over that year, religious discipline took a mighty fall. The nine-year anniversary of that transition draws nigh.
Divide 2008 into thirds. Late winter and early spring saw me twitchy. I wanted a change. That’s the period when I first started thinking about long-term life goals, and even achieved some by earning my open-water dive certification. But it wasn’t enough, so I began to think more actively about my social network. The late-spring-to-late-summer period witnessed a veritable explosion of new friends, new experiences and a wildly chaotic summer-long encounter with love, sex and dating.
The allure of hedonism, the restlessness of my early 30s and a changing portfolio of habits and goals pulled me away from the Church and toward a radically different lifestyle. By the end of the year, I had stopped regular religious observation. It wasn’t deliberate, and it wasn’t even so much a loss of faith — more like a paradigm shifting without a clutch. I drew more and more comfort from the (admittedly misguided) belief that I could have my cake and eat it, too, by simply invoking St. Augustine’s logic of “Lord, make me holy … but not yet.”
So this is the world I currently inhabit: Not faithless, not anti-Church, but largely absent from the public celebrations of the Church. Untethered, perhaps.

Easter Future

The ghost of Easter Future asks: What path may a person take to remain faithful, if that path isn’t perfectly consistent with the disciplinary norms of the Church? I suspect I’m being presented with a trick question, because the orthodox answer is delightfully concise.
It’s partially the Augustine factor, and partially a function of asserting a quasi-gnostic, quasi-individualistic ethos to justify one’s disengagement from the ordinary discipline of the Church. You know the drill: “I’m smarter than the average bear, therefore the rituals that guide the rubes are beneath me; after all, I have access to a higher understanding of Truth.”
The funny thing is, I love ritual. Yet in all of my travels across the diocese, I have yet to find a priest who (a) does ritual well, and (b) offers homilies that aren’t either solipsistic or trite or both. So an essential part of the Mass is missing, and I must supply it for myself. The temptation is to say that I can supply it on my own time.
So the ghost challenges me to think about Easter Future:

  • By putting aside a smarmy over-reliance on Augustinian thinking.
  • By putting aside the arrogance that cleaves a person from the daily life of the Church.
  • By re-orienting life’s burdens to ensure adequate time for spiritual growth.

I will consider this challenge.

Sundry Updates

Enough about Easter. Here are other things of note:

  1. Next weekend I’ll speak at the Get Published! conference in Holland. Attendance is free; the event is coordinated by MiFiWriters. Should be a ton of fun; I’m sitting on one panel and leading another (on query letters). Last year’s event was great.
  2. I’m also privileged to speak at the UntitledTown Book and Author Festival in Green Bay, Wisconsin in a few weeks. I’ll be leading a discussion about how aspiring authors should get started with small presses and literary journals. Lots of fabulous speakers lined up for the three-day event, including Margaret Atwood.
  3. And twice in the next month I’ll be off to the Chicagoland area, once for our quarterly NAHQ board meetings and once to speak about health data analytics to the Illinois Association for Healthcare Quality at that group’s annual educational conference.
  4. Lots going on at the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters, not least of which is a massive renovation to our website. As board treasurer, I’ve been focused on that piece of the adjustment, although many more exciting changes will be announced very soon.
  5. I’ve been plugging away at Caffeinated Press. Working through a handful of manuscripts, which is great, but sweet mother of potatoes it’s been a slog. Partially because my attention has been divided a thousand ways from Sunday.
  6. Looks like another Vegas trip is on the horizon.
  7. I’m pleased to report that Ziggy the Cat — one of the two neighborhood felines who frequent Jason’s outdoor Café de Meowmix — appears to be doing much better. She’s gaining weight and her fur loss has reversed. I think she was abandoned last summer. I’ve been looking out for her. Sweet kitty, although a bit of a bully to the other café patrons.
  8. Got to enjoy a wonderful “day off” a few weeks ago. My friend AmyJo hosted an all-day marathon of the extended edition of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. After 11.5 hours, several cocktails and a revolving-door of guests … it was great.

All for now.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

Regret (A Flash Story)

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I often blog about writing, but I rarely share what I write. So I’ll break the trend by sharing a flash-fiction piece, Regret, that I crafted last summer. The story was substantially improved thanks to the good folks of Phillip Sterling’s flash-fiction roundtable at the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters. I continue to tweak it and to occasionally sent it to various flash contests. Because I want to retool this piece, I’m no longer going to send it elsewhere — so I’m happy to post it here, for your reading pleasure and your opinion.
One note: The constraint from Phillip’s roundtable is that the piece couldn’t exceed 800 words. This one doesn’t, barely.
Anyway — here you go.

Regret

“Kid, ain’t no one ever lay on his deathbed and regret that his credit score weren’t high enough.”
I smile at George—the last patient on my pastoral-care visit list–but mentally I cringe. He’s going to be a talker.
“So, then, what does someone on his deathbed regret?” I ask, without thinking. The question invites superfluous conversation. And, worse, George probably only had a few days left, so my query was insensitive.
He looks up at me, a spark struggling to ignite through the heavy-lidded wetness clouding his eyes. A cannula twists from his nostrils to the oxygen port. Various bits of technology blend into him—a port, IV lines, an oxygen sensor, a pressure cuff—as if he were some sort of elderly cyborg outfitted from parts salvaged from the discount bin at a medical-supply store.
“You have nothing to regret but regret itself!”
“Good point, Mr. Roosevelt,” I joke, positioning myself next to the head of his bed. I raise my pyx and prayerbook. “Would you like to receive Jesus now?”
George’s scowl softens. He chuckles, coughs, swallows, pauses, then mutters, “Look, kid. I know you’re busy. Do what you gotta do, okay?” He gazes toward the ceiling tiles.
I sit next to him, embarrassed that he saw through my impatience. So I say, “George, what do you mean about regretting regret?”
He faces me again, his earlier intensity slipping into a quiet weariness. “Well,” he says, after a moment’s pause, “think of it like this. We all live. Then we die. Along the way, shit happens. Thing is, when you get to the end of the road, and you look back, the more that you regret stuff, the more fuzzy your memories get, ‘til you don’t recognize them no more. It’s like the trip didn’t make no damn difference.”
“So what you’re saying,” I summarize with a nod, “is that people should make good life choices.”
George’s face flashes irritation. “Naw, naw,” he says. “More like, whatever you do, own it. Be okay with what happens, good or bad. Like that serenity prayer.”
“And don’t worry about your credit score?”
He manages a slight smile. “Look at me, kid. All I got with me now is what’s in my head. Not any of the clutter sitting in my house. It’s the life you’ve lived, not the stuff you’ve got, that matters. You know?”
“I get it.”
He raises an eyebrow. “No, you don’t. You’re what? Mid 20s? You don’t get it. Not really. But you will, at some point.”
“So what do you regret, then?”
“Did I say I regretted anything?”
“You’re harping on the subject.”
“Maybe I am.”
I let the silence linger for a moment. “No regrets? Really?”
George rolls his slender frame slightly toward me in a futile attempt to lean up on an elbow. He licks his chapped lips. “Well,” he says, “I ain’t been no angel. But no demon, neither. Been to war and back. Done drugs. Had a kid. All that shit. And none of it bothers me.” He pauses. “But you know what? I’m losing the fight with this damned blood cancer and I know I’m not gonna make it. And the only thing I regret right now is that I can’t say goodbye to Morris.”
“Your son?”
Another flash of irritation. “My cat.”
“So you don’t want to see your kid, but you do want to see your cat?”
“My daughter died in ’76. Idiot girl drove drunk into a tree. Last few years, though, Morris has been my friend. And I didn’t get to say goodbye before the ambulance carted me away. My neighbor will take good care of him when I’m gone. He’ll be okay. But still. It’s hard to focus on remembering the last 81 years while worrying—”
His voice breaks, but I understand. My sister euthanized my cat Pascal just a month before, for feline leukemia, but I was out of town when it happened. No closure. I still miss him, fiercely, and I miss having a feline friend around the house.
After a moment of silence, I begin: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” We launch into the familiar litany of the Rite of Communion. I take my time.
When the service concludes, I leave George, who had already started drifting into sleep. I close the door then lean against the wall. I look at my patient list; I spot his address.
Now I know where to find the cat.
I’d regret missing this opportunity.