Thomas Sullivan

Categories: Writers Tags: authors, books, Entertainment, Fiction, Glenn Frey, inspiration, novels, poetry

Thomas Sullivan: ARE YOU READY FOR FAME & FORTUNE — CROSSLAKE REDUX WITH GLENN & DEACON FREY

September 16th, 2009 Thomas Sullivan 2 comments

8 COMMENTS follow

The trouble with Fame & Fortune is that once you reach that destination, it’s very hard to keep the journey going. You may, in fact, be all through traveling. You may instead be consigned to rest on your laurels, at best returning to places you’ve already been on the road to success to see things you’ve already seen. Not that I would know this from personal experience, you understand. I’ve never reached that rarefied strata where the world seems to love you and money flows in like you’re playing Monopoly. But you don’t have to reach it in order to discover the pitfalls. Each royalty check you cash, each autograph you sign is a foretaste of destination and a sudden unexpected grasp of what that means. It can mean that the plaster cast of who you set out to be is hardening, that you are fixed to a pedestal like a statue, no longer capable of movement, of growth, of being anything but what fans expect and of doing anything except keeping dust, mold and the elements from bringing you down. There are exceptions. But they always involve separating the reality of who you are from recognition and reward ($).

Like I said, that’s never been a huge problem for me, because Fame & Fortune on that scale are just having a helluva time finding my address. Writers in general are blessed with anonymity, and I’m more apt to be recognized in a restaurant for some other notoriety than I am for leaving funny marks on paper. But that’s not all bad. I mean, man, I don’t have to wear shades the size of a DC-7 cockpit windshield when I go out. And I like to remain solitary, picking my moments to soft-shoe through the limelight, then scurrying back to private sanctuaries. Running into fans/critics in public is almost always an anomaly: the chimneysweep who happens to be reading one of my books when he shows up, the interviewer who calls from Australia and discovers that I wrote something cherished in his library, or — ghastly — biking back from Cro-Hassan county park one morning and finding my first novel in a ditch a zillion miles from nowhere. So, a lot of my experience with fame rising comes from looking over the shoulders of people who truly are celebs.

Sometimes those shoulders are very young. The point at which newly-arrived luminaries gain fame is especially telling for me. Perspective is never more under assault then and they are never less equipped to handle it. Some, however, weather the early stages because they understand the danger of becoming a caricature of themselves and shrinking into a cliché as reality slips away by degrees. Still others jealously guard their private inner island and remain anchored firmly in who they really are. I remember that Sutton Foster was ready to hang it up and go teach children’s theater somewhere in Middle America a scant week before she landed the role that won her a Tony for best musical actress in “Thoroughly Modern Millie.” Fame changed her plan, but it didn’t change Sutton. She is still at heart a mentoring person, as she has been since around the age of 11. And another young person perhaps on the verge is Deacon Frey, whose father Glenn (co-founder and driving force of the Eagles) has afforded me many insights through musical venues I could not have expected to experience on my own.

Like pitch-perfect notes coming across an empty lake with sudden clarity, music has focused certain palpable realities for me. Performing is in fact creating, I believe. And creating is in fact performing. Each requires a full soul press, a summoning of all available muses. You cannot simply remember how you “always do it,” because the moment you rely on that, you become a mere derivative of yourself, a knock-off, a hack, a pale shadow and a weak echo of already dead scenes in your life. You are creating/performing by rote at that point. It is too easy to get lost when you create/perform by prescription, to simply forget something in the sequence and to get lost in your own boredom as you sing, play or scroll out words on a screen. Some people call it writer’s block, creative exhaustion, or an empty well, but by any name it is a lack of Imagination and Inspiration.

Those are the two “I’s.” Imagination and Inspiration. Everyone needs two “I’s.” Not necessarily a pair of baby blues, but two types of vision for sure: one to see in, one to see out. And you have to use both kinds of vision if you would be at your best. You see out to gather information from the world around you; you see in to process it and find meaning. The Inspiration comes from the external world; the Imagination dwells within you.

I’ve written extensively in these columns about inspiration, because it seems to be a no-go subject that few writers try to work out systematically. The very idea of systemizing inspiration is a contradiction. How can you be creative by making inspiration into a formula? Isn’t that what I just cautioned against in the previous graph – rote vs. full soul press? It is, and yet you can generalize the circumstances under which you do become inspired, and then you can revisit those inspiring circumstances again and again. Surround yourself with the things you are passionate about, stand next to magic and perfection as much as you can, and you will take on the color of those surroundings. Every hour you spend in the company of what excites you will bring out your best and grow you the most. Unfortunately the reverse is also true. Every hour you spend compromising your passions shrinks you and puts you in a doze. Nothing wrong with dozing, I suppose. Living a sound-soother existence. Unless you want to hear the music of life instead of just the white noise. And if you want to actually MAKE music, you really have to love perfection and dwell on inspiration, it seems to me. Anyway, that’s what I see in my buddy Glenn Frey’s instinctive approach. And what I see now in Deacon Frey.

Whatever the struggles and obstacles ahead of him, Deacon Frey already has a wary instinct for perspective. I got a good look at that during a long weekend at the Manhattan Beach concert in Crosslake, Minnesota, last year. Deacon was debuting solo and also performing live with his old man in a very loose outdoors venue where logistically speaking just about everything that could go wrong with the weather did. The sudden short storms that rolled in across the lakes seemed bent on chaos, designed to keep everyone off balance from crew to audience to band. Promoter/host Jerry Born was understandably apprehensive over the possibility of cancellation, and at one point all the performers (and one shiftless author) fled to an upper room of the lodge to wait out a rain delay. It should have been a nightmare on the nerves for Deacon, but he kept his cool by keeping his perspective.

The indecision over the weather after the concert fired up would have been lethal to a lesser performer. Pressure had been there all day, and chilling out pre-concert with the Family Frey at their residence, I saw the young man deal with it in the context of a laid back family meal on the barbecue, helping set the table, enjoying the conversation, strumming a little on the guitar by himself, and taking in his father’s occasional advice for prepping. The excitement was already building then — you could feel that — but it didn’t change anything outwardly. Deacon sat in back when we drove to the concert and set-up every bit the professional. And when the rains hit and we wound up waiting out the verdict in that closely packed upper room, he really got tested. All those performance-ready musicians sitting there in the heat and humidity with lightning flickering over the lake, and Deacon not knowing whether his solo debut was going to come off or not — that was the moment when a prima donna would crack, blow-up or lose their edge. I joked about the Eagles changing their name to the Seagulls, if the rain didn’t let up, and gave him a discourse about rolling thunder in a Sheryl Crow song in an effort to keep him loose, but I might have saved my breath. Deacon Frey was still outside his own skin. He had the presence to laugh when it suited him and the courtesy to usher me through a couple of halls to find the room with the porcelain acoustics when I had to tap a kidney (this kid is ready for prime time!), and the easy-going sincerity that marks him 24/7 never faltered.

In Deacon’s case, he comes by this honestly. His mother Cindy — herself an accomplished theater alum — is razor sharp about what makes for graciousness and growth. And Glenn has an uncanny grasp of excellence and what it takes to keep mythical perfection in front of you. Because if you ever think you’ve caught up with it — in effect, held it in your grasp — you’re all done achieving. At best you will only repeat yourself after that. There are a lot of things you can recover from in life, but overreaching probably isn’t one of them. It’s like a shadow that reappears every time you step into the light. I’ve seen my share of stage and celebrity disasters, and I’ve come to appreciate that the hardest thing about that level of achievement is keeping a firm hand on who you are while it’s happening. You must reach for and believe in perfection at the same time that you remember you are not and never will be perfect.

Probably sounds very effortful if you haven’t thought about all this before, but really it’s just the opposite. Living with the angst of less than perfection is what is taxing. If you don’t empathize with that, either you’ve never reached your potential for inspiration or you may be in the wrong line of work. I’m always amazed to listen as Glenn and his manager Tommy Nixon (the Lone Star Texan) or Jerry Vaccarino dissect a concert from the night before. What sounded flawless to me at midnight may be the subject of considerable debate the next day, as they parse out every phase of a program. It is always a revelation and a renewal of light on my own creative efforts to realize how nuanced an artist must be in pursuit of perfection.

So the quest for Fame & Fortune without the underlying perspective of what’s truly important ultimately becomes a dead-end (i.e. Is that all there is?). You tell yourself that recognition is your motivation — candidly admit it — but if you aren’t a serious perfection junkie for its own sake, a lover of inspiration, a passion-head at some level, you probably won’t find fulfillment or satisfaction in mere F&F. You can’t farm out your worth to an audience. Just sayin’.

No one knows Deacon Frey’s destination, or his journey. But in or out of creative enterprise, he’s already won something major. He’s kept his perspective under fire. Whatever obstacles, setbacks and challenges await him, you can’t take that away from him. He knows the way. If he ever gets lost in the process of growing up, he won’t have to reinvent himself, he’ll just have to find his way home…

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter? It’s fun and unintrusive. Here’s the link: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan . I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net . Past newsletters are archived at the website below. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

[If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, a new short story, “Case White,” is out in the #60 issue of Cemetery Dance and is already receiving recommendations for a Stoker Award. Here's the link: http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/PROD/_cd060 . And the opening chapter from my novel THE WATER WOLF is on my website.]

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Comments

Comment by Robert Jones on September 16, 2009 @ 9:20 am

You have exposed yet another investment that often pays large dividends, namely, revisiting inspiring circumstances. It doesn’t have to be a merely repetitive exercise. There will always be something different. If one is alert to that fact, s/he can often find new perspectives. Thank you, amigo, for reminding us where there are replenishing springs within a sometimes seemingly arid desert.

Among the fine daguerrotypes accompanying your newsletter, the picture of the snarl of trees at waters edge is most interesting to me because it evokes a different response every time I look at it and triggers changing responses while I’m looking at it. In your unplug, you wrote, “stand next to magic and perfection as much as you can, and you will take on the color of those surroundings.” Your picture is a subtle but exquisite example. I recommend that readers look it for a time and observe the varying thoughts that run through their minds.

Amalgam

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on September 16, 2009 @ 9:31 am

You know, I think you’ve put your finger on the active part of inspiration. It doesn’t depend so much on what’s outside a person as it does on the person’s ability to respond to it. You can’t just sit in front of life and be a spectator. You have to train your mind to see things, associate, analyze… Thanks for that, Amalgam, and for your kind comments.

Yeah, that photo of the gnarled trees was from one of the islands in Burntside Lake. Spooky and spectacular. Anyone who reads my newsletters in formats that don’t replicate the photos can e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll send you the real McCoy each month.

Sully

Comment by Janet on September 16, 2009 @ 4:30 pm

There you go again. Just when I think I’m too tired and too doped up to think, you force it upon me. Thank you for that, Friend.

As a P,S,, This week our buddy Rick suffered his 8th stroke. Incredible that he’s still with us and can talk. Bob calls him daily.

Much love, Janet

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on September 16, 2009 @ 4:39 pm

Very disturbing about Rick, but thanks for the info. I gather that the strokes are minimal. One hopes he hangs onto his ability to think and express. That is essentially the only thing each of us is, not just as people but as writers in particular.

And your own capacities are of such a magnitude that a little fatigue and chemical obstacles don’t stand a chance against the tide of thoughts, ideas, memories and musings. Bestest,

Sully

Comment by anne on September 16, 2009 @ 4:41 pm

Sully,

You’ve hit the jackpot of perfection here. Your 2 “i”s (eyes) thoughts are brilliant. They inspire life whether it is writing or any passionate pursuit of excellence. Your encompassing example of how your surround yourself with magic( the concert and watching a young artist be born) echo back the inspiration and imagination theme. It is reverberating the two “i”s simultaneously and it impossible to see which is on the inside or outside. It’s akin to an imagination tranfusion. Thanks for the energy.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on September 16, 2009 @ 4:50 pm

Well, what goes around comes around, Anne, because I wish I’d written it the way you did. Always gratifying when someone posts back with such total grasp. “Imagination transfusion” is now in my personal dictionary of phrases. Will try to live up to that, and also receive transfusions of my own from whatever enters my life. Thanks, and write on…

Sully

Comment by Trish on September 17, 2009 @ 10:10 pm

Thank-you for taking the time to be a part of Story Tellers. You always manage to inspire.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on September 17, 2009 @ 10:15 pm

Of course, the thing that keeps people going who try to inspire is the inspiration they get from kind readers who take the trouble to let them know. Thanks, Trish…

Sully

Categories: Writers Tags: authors, Crosslake, Deacon Frey, Glenn Frey, Writing

Thomas Sullivan: STAINED GLASS NOTES FROM RINGTONES IN A GOPHER HOLE or I HATE OUTLINES

July 16th, 2009 Thomas Sullivan Comments off

10 COMMENTS follow

Planning is the death of spontaneity. Goodbye magic. Then again, spontaneity is how you end up going the wrong way on a one-way street. When it comes to writing books, I like a lot of both — planning and spontaneity.

Getting the balance right is an acquired skill. Most people get mired in one extreme or another. It’s their whatchamacallit…nature. If you are one of them, congratulations. You are normal. But if you court creativity and like to express it in words, you need a minimal map of where you are going and a maximal amount of daring in order to get there via the scenic route. Zero in on a destination, but get there by your own roads. As long as you know which horizon you’re headed for, you might even blow through a few useless traffic signs.

So which traffic signs do you keep in order to sustain a minimum plan? I like to think of effective expression as having a succinct beginning, middle and end, no matter how simple or complex. “Hello, how are you, goodbye” will work as an entry level example of the simple. You engage attention, deliver the goods, and disengage. It’s the same on the heavy end of size and comprehensiveness, just more elaborate. You have to establish a purpose for the reader’s attention in the beginning (a conflict, a problem to be solved, a set of characters to travel with, a POV), and then you run an obstacle course (the middle) with those elements on the way to a resolution that neatly disengages (the end). But when you think about it, you really only need the beginning and the end, because you can play the middle where it lies, stretching or compressing it like the bellows of an accordion. The beginning has to incorporate and foresee your needs and purpose, however, and the ending must satisfy both those needs and purpose. So those are the two traffic signs that have to be planned. To plan more is to limit the possibilities — which is sometimes desirable, sometimes not. You define yourself and the quality of your work by how open you are on the journey. That’s the savoring part. To be sure, you must pick the right beginning in order to make it work and not have to begin again. But once you have the correct anchor point, imagination and freedom will max out the potential.

As an object lesson in too much spontaneity, I’m reminded of a Sax Rohmer anecdote. This noted author was traveling by ship from London to New York, I believe, and completing the next installment of a novel serialization for a magazine en route. He had created a perfect crime scenario as a premise in the first installment and now found he could not figure a way out of it. He had written himself into a box. In a panic, he turned to a clever friend who pointed out that if he simply went back to his premise and established that a character had lied about a key fact in the beginning, he was home free. In effect, he was starting over with a new anchor for his plan. The original premise was flawed, an illusion. The clever friend’s name? Harry Houdini.

I believe most people err in the other direction, but it isn’t because they over-plan. If they do not plan out well, neither do they exercise their freedom and imagination. Instead, they follow the clichés of life. They move with the herd, doing what others have done and sticking to the map. It isn’t a big dramatic thing, it’s the little things they do and don’t do — how they look at the possibilities, how they interpret them, how energetic they are with their insight and imagination — that lock them into predictable outcomes. They simply cannot think far enough outside the box… or off the map.

And here’s where spontaneity either makes its entrance or misses the cue. For the writer, the world should be full of cues. The writer is not a passive spectator, a sedentary Kool-Aid drinker. The writer looks at what he/she saw yesterday and finds newness, because they themselves are new; they have grown in 24 hours, added to their database and therefore their insight. They have learned to see deeper and make more associations. I’m not kidding about the 24 hours, because even if there were no significant growth in that brief period of time, there is rotation of associations in your mind every day — an infinite variety of ways to engage things if you train your mind and attitudes to be open.

Australian Grant Soosalu researches this stuff and spurred me to think about what motivates life enhancement when he interviewed me recently (http://enhancingmylife.blogspot.com/2009/06/life-enhancing-with-author-thomas.html ). For sure a person’s basic nature plays into it, but a lot of the things that work against a spontaneous mind are conditioned, it seems to me. As a society we are utterly bent on things that stupefy us, mesmerize us, or otherwise discourage original thinking. I am an expert on personal failure, but I count it my one great consolation that Technicolor mice run rampant in my mind. I would have made a lousy NASCAR alcoholic or a lemming or a sedentary anything. Put me on a treadmill and I’ll flip it sideways. Not a convenient way to live, but for me a rewarding one, always interesting and full of inspirations.

Stories happen to me all day long. Friends say I make them happen by what I do. Maybe there’s some truth to that, but mostly I just see them. Hang out with me, and I’ll see the stories in your life too. Technical truth is usually a lie. People build their lives out of appearances rather than realities. They almost always have secret inner lives, and yet they feel they are being honest with the world as long as they don’t live them outwardly. That has always struck me as ludicrous and precisely backward. Why should appearances rule? Yet they do. Less so for me. I like that. True, I conform to many situations because I try not to offend or hurt anyone, but I also seek to live true to myself as many hours of the day as I can. Where and when do you live honestly? Ideally you find a soulmate with whom you can share that inner being, but failing that (as most people do) you choose either to be alone or you live a secret life beneath appearances. Inner honesty is crucial for me as a person, as a writer. I must have that. Every day. It frees me up to a whole lot of things, including making impossibilities into realities.

It might surprise you (or not) to know that stories almost always evolve from spontaneity for me rather than a plan. The plan is a coherent coming together of a pattern from those unexpected and inspiring events. Sort of like an unplanned pregnancy. Here’s one that’s perking in embryo right now:

Early this spring, when the Indian grass was 6 feet high in a place I call the Golden Meadow, I paid a visit to exquisite memories. We’re talking story quality memories and beyond already, so inspiration’s pilot light was already on. Somehow in the wandering breezes of that interlude I leaned over a cup-sized hole in the earth and my cell phone dropped dead center into it. Astonishing. Couldn’t have done it on a bet. Not so amusing, though, when I reached in only to find my hand choked off before it touched the slim phone. A little scrabbling and clawing did nothing in the hard ground, and I withdrew my fingers. The hole was too big to have been made by a snake, two small for a fox, but I imagined carnivorous incisors poised for a lucky lunch of “finger” snacks at my expense.

There were half a dozen holes in close proximity, and so I refined the picture to a burrow of gophers or other meadow munchers celebrating their lucky find while looking up the phone numbers of all their cousins in China. I glanced around for a branch to break into chopsticks, thinking I could leverage the phone out, but I probably had an equal chance of wedging it deeper, so with a nod to karma for its neat practical joke on me I went back to the car for a spade. Did I mention that there were half a dozen of these holes? I thought about that before I went to the car — thought about marking the right one — but I didn’t, of course, and when I got back, confident I’d know which black hole was eating up my cell phone minutes…I didn’t.

Oh, you just have to laugh. You laugh and laugh and laugh. And then you swear.

I didn’t want to decimate a clan of rodents by any name, or explain why I was digging up six holes to the DNR, so that’s when I got the inspiration to chug back to the park nature center and call my son, the boy, the lad, Sean a.k.a. Shane hisself. I would have him call my cell, say, 10 minutes after I hung up, by which time I would be back in position to sort out the hole with the ringtone coming out of it. One problem. Odds of getting the busy lad on the fly like that are less than picking the right hole from a choice of six. And the odds won. But the kind lady overhearing all this from behind the desk offered to make the call, and that’s how a grown man crawling on all fours around six holes in a golden field eventually reached down and plucked a singing cell phone from the earth. Just another quirky episode in my eccentric life. But it would not have happened if I didn’t live in the center of an intricate maze of meaningful cues and romantic associations.

How are all these spontaneous little acts and circumstances going to merge into a plan? Well…I don’t know. Yet. But I know they will. They already have in my life, because it is — after all — the Golden Meadow, and there I was searching in the darkness of the bleeding earth for what I could no longer see, and there were the ringtones playing “It’s only words, and words are all I have to take your heart away…” (Boyzone or Bee Gees, take your pick) and somehow, somewhere this will merge with the mirrors and echoes of my (he)art.

Spontaneous events are like pieces of stained glass, and when you collect enough of them you have a window on a new scene.

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/thomassullivan )? It’s fun and unintrusive. I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for my free newsletter, which includes photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net . Past newsletters are archived at the website below. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, my new short story, “Case White,” is out in the latest issue of Cemetery Dance http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/PROD/_cd060 , and the opening chapter from THE WATER WOLF is on my website. May summer’s horizons be yours.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

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Comments

Comment by Robert Jones on July 17, 2009 @ 12:55 pm

You need never be concerned about anyone ever mistaking you for a spectative, sedentary Kool-Aid drinker. Significant growth and especially a rotation of associations (Technicolor mice running track is a great image) are attributives that define your very being. Your latest unplug is an example. In it, you demonstrate a smooth rotation from planning and spontaneity, through initial and terminal hooks, to the ludicrousness of building lives out of external appearances rather than internal realities. (Why indeed should appearances rule?)

Your next angular displacement quickly brings readers to another illustrative tour of nature as you invite us along while you anticipate the possibility of carnivorous incisors waiting in a classic, Athenian Underworld to receive sacrificial fingers. (I shared that feeling when I used to imagine what might be salivating in dark, underwater caves in reefs as whatever it was watched me swim past.)

In regard to what starts one’s writing engine, when I was regularly writing newspaper columns, they were often an offspring of an overall, basic theme; but they were sometimes developed from an idea for only a beginning or an ending. The central, bellows portion usually seemed to expand almost effortlessly.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on July 17, 2009 @ 2:26 pm

“…the ludicrousness of building lives out of external appearances rather than internal realities.” Amen, Amalgam. Almost everyone knows the truth within their hearts, but living that — even with one person — is the hardest thing in the world. And yet that’s where the greatest reward is. How can one achieve/acquire anything worth having without at least trying to live truth as a foundation? This is why humans just have to be the #1 sitcom/drama for the god/gods/committee that created us and gave us free will. Courage vs. fear/guilt. I don’t think I’ve passed many tests in this life, but I hope I’m passing that one. Was it Jack London said he’d rather be ashes than dust? Yeah. Ashes testify to having lived. Dust never did. Thanks for placing me on that side of risk-taking. Can’t say I’ve reached many successful outcomes by it, but it’s never about the destination, is it? Not many of us will reach a destination, and those who do are often disappointed. It’s about the journey. And if that’s just a romantic ideal, so be it. Living the ideal has made reality magical…

– Sully

Comment by Robert Jones on July 17, 2009 @ 6:17 pm

As with your previous essays, this reader has come away entertained, with more wisdom and with thoughts to carry away and ponder. For what more could one wish?

Thank you, mon ami.

In view of your history with squirrels, kindly be careful of jaywalking with a feisty one. Just yesterday, I had one chomping away at a crack in the corner of my upper deck railing. I had to chase him away repeatedly. A few minutes ago, I had to chase away a large woodpecker that was excavating the same crack. He was replaced almost immediately by a blue jay. I don’t know what’s in that crack, but it must be something tasty in animal terms.

Amalgam

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on July 17, 2009 @ 7:11 pm

Revenge of the animals! Just this week repaired a porch post that a woodpecker made into a penthouse, and last night a cat and a fox got into it in the backyard. Chipmunk ran over my foot while I was playing T-sax in the garage, and a dog fell asleep on me while I was watching a movie at my adoptive family’s house last night. Seems like everything with fur or feathers is getting bolder. New world order? Maybe you’d better finish that dog book you’re working on in order to curry favor…

Sully

Comment by Wayne Allen Sallee on July 19, 2009 @ 10:19 pm

Sully, I overthink things when I’m writing a narrative and get to deep into the character’s mindset. Sometimes the story seems to write itself, the spontaneity is like when every single thing you do during a single day is simply right and effortless. At a certain point, the story carries you. I never outline. I have a title, a first line, and a last line.

Nice comments, Robert. Wow. London Rohmer, Houdini. You name droppers. Wait a minute. Rohmer and Houdini were on a boat that had left…London. Hmnnn. The circle tightens.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on July 19, 2009 @ 10:39 pm

First line…last line. To my mind, you probably have two-thirds of the story right there, Wayne. Doubt that those two sentences would satisfy you unless they contained at least the seeds of a set-up and a resolution. An outline by any name…

You just look at things and see the frames around them, from what I’ve seen. Even your descriptions of Chicago stuff and everyday events carry larger than life messages. Which is why you are a natural writer, say I.

As for Houdini on the high seas, didn’t happen. As I recall, the magazine that was serializing Rohmer was Collier’s, and Sax arrived in New York in a panic because he had not been able to craft a way out of his perfect crime while crossing aboard ship, as he had intended. I think at the heart of it was a sealed room with no clues. Houdini was in New York, and it was his suggestion that if one of the characters lied, the premise could be undone enough to offer a solution. It was an 11th hour salvation for Rohmer, who seized upon it in time for the deadline. Or something like that. Loren Estleman is the one who told me about it, and he later gave me a collector’s copy of a bio of SR one Christmas that I think also had he story. Not sure about that last, though. Cheers.

Sully

Comment by Alan Russell on July 21, 2009 @ 5:14 pm

Let’s face it: Sully was jealous of Alice going down a rabbit hole, prompting him to have his cell phone do a swan dive.

Now how will he make hay out of this story? Maybe his cell phone will take a picture while in the depths . . . The result might be as frightening as that Sully Scarecrow.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on July 21, 2009 @ 6:41 pm

Ooh! Like that plot angle. How about we use the Alice shrink-pill in chapter 2? What if everyone has a scarecrow and comes face to face with it down the hole? And what do the scarecrows scare and why?

Going to dust off my scarecrow story “To Walk the Earth” and redux it… Thanks, west-coast guru.

Sully

Comment by Sam Trend on July 24, 2009 @ 7:17 pm

Hmm, usually when I try to write story, that evolves on its own, I sooner or later come to a dead-end. I really prefer to plan all out before actual work.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on July 24, 2009 @ 7:31 pm

Nothing wrong with going with what works for you. If it was a formula, the act of creativity could be memorized. That said, for me the way to avoid a dead end is to have that initial problem/conflict that begins a story resolved in one’s mind (the ending). Planning to that extent ensures a solution or resolution. And the narrative roads between conflict (beginning) and resolution (ending) can then circle and roam endlessly. Invention is wide open in that part. Dead ends thereafter probably only happen in subplots or character entanglements that are not thought through. Bottom line, if planning it all out doesn’t make your story sounds leaden and mechanical, I say go with it. But if you can only plan out the essential parts, you may find more freedom and inventiveness as you work out the narrative. Thanks, Sam…
Sully

Categories: Writers Tags: authors, books, Writing

Thomas Sullivan: ALICE’S RESTAURANT, THE BATAAN DEATH MARCH, AND FALLING ASLEEP IN AN MRI

June 16th, 2009 Thomas Sullivan Comments off

6 COMMENTS follow

Shhh. Don’t want to disturb the Spirit layers. Okay, let’s hold hands in a circle across the miles. Now dim the lights or just close your baby blues. See the floating trumpet? Make that a floating T-sax (after all this is a séance to get in touch with Sully’s ghost), and let’s hope he doesn’t actually play the damn thing — rock ‘n roll RIP! Brace yourselves… He’s baaa-ack!

Seriously, good folks, I am not a zombie. Go ahead, one pinch. OUCH! See? And I really was grateful and touched by all the expressions of concern as I went through some physical trauma and the sawbones fired up the buzzsaw a time or two. But now I have escaped stitches, gauze, tape, ace bandages, plaster cast, surgical wear, meds, a deflatible rubber boot that allowed me to work out in the pool, and a pitching wedge that did for a cane. My gloriously naked body is better than new (it could only be better) and my odometer is rolled back to — oh, say – 19 or 20…decades.

So now I must apologize profusely if you are one of the many people I kinda blew off with glibness when you were so gracious as to ask after my status. The thing of it is I hate to be a whiner and I’m a pretty stereotypical male in that when I’m injured I just want to be alone. Maybe it’s an evolutionary echo, like a fear that if you expose your vulnerabilities, the sabertooth tiger will get you while you are lying injured under a bush. But it was rude and immature of me. So now in a shameless bid for your sympathy AFTER THE FACT, and hopefully to get an amusing column out of it, I’m whining and coming clean with all the answers and details. Call it another of my Cannibal Essays, geared as an object lesson in converting mundane life into stylized prose. There are no bad experiences for a writer, as they say, just material.

So there I was last January skiing in the dark and pissing off my muse who thought I was altogether too far removed from suffering for my art. This explains the vindictive irony that I simply wiped out on a nothing sweep of snow, falling softly and I thought in a controlled way but somehow tearing my rotator nearly clean off. Don’t you love it when the surgeon calls in his colleagues to look at the MRI all excited about the extent of the injury? Yes, I lied to my friends a little when it happened — lied to myself — actually tried to ski a couple of times sans poles before the sawbones cut.

It is probably not an exaggeration to call me an orthopod junkie. In order to simplify life, I regularly visit the offices of a coven of terrific trauma surgeons who collectively account for my various injured limbs. It is only a slight exaggeration to mention that, due to some overlap, I am able to send broken body parts in separately and on occasion keep simultaneous appointments. When I come to the reception desk the nurses immediately begin laughing, and if I announce my intention to see a veterinarian or a gynecologist, I am pitied but scarcely doubted. Thus, I have a reputation among the “sturgeons” for not taking treatment seriously. “It would be you…” said the state’s leading carpal tunnel doc when just before he retired I became the first patient whose wrist surgeries he had to repeat. But see, this is good, because he said I heal so fast that the nerves didn’t have time to abate. In the postmortem after the rotator cuff repair, that surgeon said the same thing, that my range of motion was better after three days than he had expected in two weeks. True, one of them also told his nurse, “Don’t bother telling him what to do, he’ll just do what he wants anyway,” but let it be known, I was a very good patient this time.

The sawbones made sure of that by scaring me to death with his enthusiastic account of how he had to chase my rotator somewhere south of my derrière and haul it into place with a special technique that sounded like a tractor pull and crucify it with twice the number of pins, stitches, and surgery time as usual. Oh, I was awed and contrite after that. Didn’t protest when he strapped my arm to my chest or insisted I stay in the hospital overnight or wanted to give me fentanyl for pain (the drug that is 80 times more powerful than morphine and that the Russians used to kill terrorists in that opera house a few years back). Hate the stuff on account of I think it shuts down my bladder and I never met a catheter I liked. They always warn you to stay with someone the first 24 hours, but if I feel like I’m in trouble I usually drive over to Wal-Mart and hang out in the pharmacy near the meds. Not this time. When my boy-child drove me home I even asked him to stay a while. Went by the book. Straight arrow. I r a good patient – yessir…mm-hmm.

And things went swimmingly at first — learning how to change a light bulb by letting it drop into a clothes basket and shaving my head with one hand and pouring water from a jug spigot into a glass sitting in an open drawer below, etc. Admittedly boredom drove me to press my luck a little, e.g. snowshoeing or dragging a canoe into the lake while the ice was breaking up (a spring thaw event not to be missed!) and poling one-arm along the zigzag lightning channels. But no harm done.

What’s really dangerous is following the doctor’s orders, and being too cautious, and rehab, and sleeping! Sleeping — totally dangerous! You can crawl into a knot and strangle while sleeping. Last year my bicep ruptured in the middle of the night! It was strained while bailing out a boat with a 5-gallon bucket, but I was just lying in bed and suddenly it felt like warm wax dripping down my arm as it peeled off. That was the right bicep, and after the injury to the left rotator cuff, the doc mentioned that I ruptured that bicep too. I asked him if he reattached it, and he said “nah, you’ll probably never notice the difference,” so now I’ve got matching ruptured biceps.

It got more complicated at rehab. Lisa, who is gifted with the touch, manipulates my arm for half an hour once a week. I was not trying to be macho, but since I didn’t think stretching could cause any damage, I kept telling her to ignore my reflexes as she torqued my arm, and she did, and that was how my elbow suddenly swelled up like a grapefruit. One of the standby sawbones aspirated it and compressed it, but when the Ace bandage came off, it just ballooned up again. X-rays showed zero arthritis, so it had to be a ruptured bursa sac. When the doc drew off fluid this time, he got nothing but a cup full of black blood, and thus I was sentenced to 10 days in an elbow cast.

Are you getting the picture here? The Incredible Mummified Man. I slept in micro bursts swaddled in bloody rags and felt like I was in a Japanese game show where every time I figured out how to wash an armpit, they slapped another cast or ridiculous Velcro wrap on me. Plus, after making fantastic progress in rehab — months ahead of schedule — I now had to stop all exercises. Except that I did a lot of hiking. A LOT.

So why did I opt for toe surgery– don’t ask. Yet another sawbones saber-dancing around a surgical gurney. BTW, I recommend not joking with the nurses as you are about to be anesthetized on the slab. It was, to say the least, impolitic to quote CrackBarbie: “The last nurse I had was four chest hairs short of being a dude!” (har, har). Too late the realization dawned on me that the nurse behind the surgical table was, in fact, a dude. Lights out before I could apologize, and I woke up fearing I would hear people in white discussing my sex change operation (har, har). But they stuck to the script and so far no funny urges.

Now welded into a surgical boot with a pin stuck through the end of my toe to hold it together and using a pitching wedge for a cane, I barely missed not sleeping for the next 30 days, and it dootaleebop didn’t cha-cha-cha affect my sanity at all! Headline: MAN HANGS HIMSELF WITH ACE BANDAGE WHILE LYING IN BED. Shades of David Carradine in a Bangkok closet. Absolutely normal, I suppose, for a wretched writer wearing an elbow cast, shoulder sling, 33 miles of Ace bandage, a surgical slipper and bloody stuffing coming out of all seven orifices.

Did I mention the bath? I am so clever. Figured out how to sit in the freaking tub with a surgical boot braced on the wall and an elbow cast looped over the soap dish while shaving my head with one hand. You probably think my skull looks like hamburger, but nay, the problem was that I never got through a single bath without dipping the cast in the soup. When the itching kept me awake, I tried holding the cast arm over a burner on the stove to dry it out, and that’s how I set an Ace bandage on fire.

This drove me to try the blue rubber deflatable boot. With DryPro not only were showers possible, but as the cast was removed and wrappings rotted off, working out in the pool became socially acceptable. And if a defective squeeze bulb had not messed up the deflating of the rubber boot, I probably would not have hung up like an obscene blue buoy when the thing bobbed out of the water on flip turns.

Out of pity, the surgeon said I could walk all I wanted. “Like all day?” I asked. “I don’t think you’ll feel like doing that, but as much as you want,” he repeated. This led to a reprise of the Bataan death march, during which the bleeding toe became infected. Thank God for my Maple Grove WalMart pharmacy. Just two parking lots and a corner of a lake away, I can walk there…or take the elevator. Like Alice’s Restaurant, you can find anything you want over-the-counter, and it has saved my soul more than once.

Antibiotics were not enough, so the sawbones pulled the pin on me after 20 days instead of 30. You’d think that a pin holding a toe together would match its length, but I was shocked to see 4 inches of it come out as if my foot were shish kebab. “I did some nasty things to your toe,” said the surgeon, “it was basically hanging in three pieces.” Which is why, I suppose, he only used one stitch that ran through the toe like a clothesline. More information than I needed to know.

So there you have it, the unexpurgated skinny. There is more — the Achilles tendinitis, and how I sprained a knee trying to sleep with my foot hanging off the bed, and falling asleep in the middle of an MRI (clunk, clank — zzzzz) — but in the end laughter is the best medicine, and I’m taking the last dose of that now. What’s the old saying? “He who laughs laugh, laughs laughs laughs laughs.” Yeah. Whatever.

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/thomassullivan )? It’s fun and unintrusive. I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for my free newsletter, which includes photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net. Past newsletters are archived at the website below. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, my new short story, “Case White,” is out in the latest issue of Cemetery Dance http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/PROD/_cd060 , and the opening chapter from THE WATER WOLF is on my website. Have a terrific launch into summer.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

Comments

Comment by hypnotherapy on June 16, 2009 @ 4:03 am

Hey wonderful….
does he really mean it

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on June 16, 2009 @ 4:20 am

Is this, by any chance, the hypnotherapist who hypnotized a woman and convinced her that I had stolen her naval? Think State Fair, Michigan, 1980s. I was signing books when this redhead started crawling over me, looking for her belly button…

– Sully

Comment by Robert Jones on June 16, 2009 @ 10:54 am

Your continuing, compounding catastrophes and writing style made for extremely humorous reading – surely much funnier for us to read about than for you to experience. Ow! I couldn’t get very far into your account without hearing Flamingo Frank chuckling. I’m certain I heard a genuine guffaw when I came to your description of attempting to dry your arm cast by holding it over a stove burner and setting an Ace bandage on fire. Overall, it could hold its own in humor when compared even to Jacques Tati’s sequence of catastrophes in his famous film, MR. HULOT’S HOLIDAY.

Seriously, you have my sympathy for all the discomfort and inconvenience you experienced. Also seriously, I hope you take mindful heed of the likely “press on regardless” causes and effects related to your painful experiences before you end up being partially eaten by another squirrel.

Amalgam

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on June 16, 2009 @ 11:14 am

Mercy, you used the dreaded “S” word for brown furry rodent (a.k.a. tree rat). Ever since I wrote that column KY JELLY & THE HEADLESS SQUIRREL in September of ‘06, I have been under surveillance. They are watching me from the yard below, even as I type this. Yea verily, Flamingo Frank would have one of his gentlemanly smiles at my stupidity. I shall be very, very careful, amigo…

And thanks for the comments. Glad the farcical tone came through.

– Sully

Comment by Wayne Allen Sallee on June 18, 2009 @ 8:19 pm

Hey, Sully. Man, I thought I was Frankenstein. I think you (more than me) are Bruce Willis in UNBREAKABLE. You seem to heal as fast as I do, and people kept telling me I was more like Sam Jackson in the film. So, yeah. Bruce Willis=Thomas Sullivan.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on June 18, 2009 @ 8:27 pm

Gives a whole new spin to the phrase “being cast,” doesn’t it? Glad you also heal quickly, my friend. If I take on this new persona of Bruce Willis, do I have to give up being Christopher Walken?

– Sully

Categories: Writers Tags: authors, books, Writing

Thomas Sullivan: CHARLENE THE CHOCOLATE CHEWING CHICKEN, NIPPLES OF VENUS & THE BLACK BUDGIE

May 16th, 2009 Thomas Sullivan Comments off

17 COMMENTS follow

This one’s for the birds. Seriously. They’ve been flopping, flitting, flying and

flapping around in my life for years, but sometimes I can’t see the forest for the trees, or in this case the feathers — white and otherwise. As the old saying goes, there is no one blinder than he who won’t see. Check.

So this column is about themes, and one particular theme, and how writers have to be super keen to the subtle vibes in their lives – ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Oh, I r keen.

I guess the bird theme in my life started with parakeets, like the one whose last flight ended in our swinging kitchen door when I was 12. Extreme — one might even say mindless — loyalty is one of my virtues/vices, and I mourned that loss for decades (guess I still do, since I can’t seem to throw away its pathetic memorial kept in a drawer). A recent Twitter line I posted, “Are parakeets supposed to be black?…maybe I should move the cage away from the stove,” shall go unexplained.

More recently, it was ducks. When I moved to the shore of a lake in Minnesota, a momma duck decided to nest in a barrel planter on my upper deck. 10 eggs later, I found myself nestsitting because she turned out to be the AmyWinehouse of waterfowl, partying off God knows where all night while predators moved in on her minus-29-day-old young. I won’t get into paternity suits for unwed fowl, but I wiled away the hours by writing it all up in an article (A BARREL OF DUCKS) and sent it off to the Minneapolis Star-Trib. When the article proved popular, they asked for more, and so when poly-birthday arrived and the crazy hatchlings followed shameless Wild Mama over an 11-foot drop from my deck (instead of taking the stairs like I showed them), I wrote it all up again as DUCKS REDUX for the Star-Trib. Was not surprised when I saw Wild Mama swimming around a week later with only two chicks in her wake. No “wake” for the rest, so to speak. Sad ending, but what can you say, except AFLAC?

I’ve missed other avian clues to this major theme in my life. There are the Eagles, founded by one of my closest friends Glenn Frey. And white feathers, a major symbol well documented in my columns and newsletters over the past year and more [and for those who have asked, the white feather still endures by the tree in the Golden Meadow as of May 9]. Not to mention, Woody Woodpecker drilled the top of my porch post last week, then got stuck inside at the bottom. To be brutally honest, I might not have been so charitable as to help him out, but I figured he would have made his own doorway anyway. And, of course, I wrote in my newsletter last June about the amazing swallow at Elm Creek, so opposite Wild Mama, who trusted me when I tried to save her eggs: http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/newsletters/06162008.htm

Then there are the love doves. They seemed to show up in tandem with the white feathers. Which is odd, because I believe the white feathers began with a rubber chicken named Charlene — Charlene the Chocolate Chewing Chicken, to be exact, who was especially fond of a confection known as Nipples of Venus and was last seen joyriding on the running board of a Ford Explorer. Anyway, one morning shortly after the love doves showed up, I was eating oatmeal out of a sauce pan in the kitchen when a sudden compulsion to go to the dining room came over me. I almost never enter the dining room, but I was drawn to the curtained window, and just as I reached out to pull back the sheers, there was a deafening impact on the glass. I snatched the curtain away and met my own reflection . . . and then below on the lower deck I saw a male dove, twitching on its side. I rushed down to the lower level, but it was too late and it died of a broken neck in my hands. Or maybe it was a broken heart, because of course it had seen its reflection in the glass too and, thinking it was a rival, dove into it.

A year has passed since then. Four seasons with no love doves and no white feathers, except for the lone one I planted in the Golden Meadow. And then I stepped out my front door one recent dawn and came nose to beak with a lone love dove sitting on a nest in the arbor vita next to my porch. We are sharing the spring and soft conversations (she listens, I coo) while her two chicks grow big enough to make it on their own. (Yes, that’s her in the photo at the beginning of this column.) I don’t know what to make of this.

And now there’s the chicken-swan. For this one you have to go to the Apron Hall of Fame. A terrific new writing talent in Missouri talked me into sending an incriminating photo and also posted my recipe for Shrimp Sully Red. Carole Lanham’s web site is funny and clever — well worth a look. Had to borrow an apron from Teri Norby (mother of Norby Nation, the family that has adopted me and whose photos are in some of my past newsletters), but here are the links to the apron shot: http://horrorhomemaker.com/theapronhalloffame.htm & the recipe: http://horrorhomemaker.com/fromthekitchen.htm

Ask my long-time friends and they’ll probably tell you that squirrels are my avatar, not birds. Well, yeah…lots of squirrel stories, alluded to in past posts by Flamingo Frank among others. I’m really good with squirrel stories, squirrels are good, ask me about squirrels, got squirrels down swell and Aretha Franklin and psychedelic mushrooms all with squirrels, yeah, yeah, doo-dah – save for another column.

How good are you at picking up the themes and patterns in your life? Sometimes the most obvious ones are the hardest to see. I like to think that for a good writer anything that happens twice is a pattern. It may or may not say anything conclusive to you, but there are associations worth exploring anytime something is repeated. Finding meaning in things is how I put the universe together and why I need creativity. Without that final step of thinking I am just a spectator, passive instead of passionate. That’s like getting all your meals through an IV. You just exist and you don’t savor the flavor. Bon appétit!

You can follow me on Twitter now (http://twitter.com/thomassullivan ). It’s fun and unintrusive. I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for my free newsletter, which includes photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net. Past newsletters are archived at the website below, photos included. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, the opening chapter from THE WATER WOLF is on my website.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/

Comments

Comment by Vicki on May 15, 2009 @ 11:46 pm

Poor ducklings. If the surviving two make it through to duckhood, it’ll be no thanks to Wild Mama.

I’d never really thought about themes in life before. It is only now you mention it that I recognise the recurring motif in my life.

Frogs.

The first gift my husband gave me when we were dating was a small wooden frog, which I still have. A photo of a frog in a child’s cupped hands was the inspiration behind my first income-earning short story. I now live on a road with frog in its name. In the last six months, frogs have been regular visitors to my kitchen window.

Yes, definitely frogs.

Thank you for a most interesting and thought-provoking post, Sully.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on May 16, 2009 @ 7:18 am

Glad to hear frogs are in vogue in the land down under (greenbacks in the outback?). They are completely fascinating. In fact, if you’ll permit a slight sachay to include a near cousin, one of my favorite literary characters is the obsessive/compulsive Mr. Toad in “Wind in the Willows.” And there is a “Frog Crossing” flagstone next to my porch and other frog stuff around the house. Good to hear from you, Vicki, and thanks for giving my humble thoughts a global “theme.”

– Sully

Comment by Janet Berliner on May 16, 2009 @ 11:31 am

Nothing short of a death certificate could make me miss one of your essays.
Bob has a client in Australia. She, too, is Vicki, or could they be one and the same?

Could it be that Cem Dance would publish all of CASE WHITE?

Here’s to drunken tree frogs. Yes. There’s a story in that.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on May 16, 2009 @ 12:13 pm

The link attached to Vicki’s name will take you to author page Vicki Tyley. Is that Bob’s client? I wonder if frogs croak with an Aussie verve down under.

Have not explored CASE WHITE, the novel, with Cemetery Dance. It’s a thought.

And thank you as always for your appreciation, Janet. Drunken tree frogs have captured my imagination for the rest of the day. Fermented berries?

– Sully

Comment by Janet Berliner on May 16, 2009 @ 4:23 pm

Yep. Same Vicki.

Tree frog: An oft-intoxicated friend in Carmel Valley talked to tree frogs. She left bits of alcohol for them on a large leaf. Perhaps the liquid dried up; perhaps not…

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on May 16, 2009 @ 6:41 pm

Beats champaigne out of a glass slipper!

Sully

Comment by Robert Jones on May 17, 2009 @ 4:27 pm

You are quite right about the most obvious themes and patterns often being the hardest to see. Since it is so easy to dismiss the obvious while consciously searching for something unique, it might be far more frequent than often the hardest to see. And your comment about there being “no one blinder than he who won’t see” is as true as that other old saying about the most costly thing that one can own being a closed mind.

Thank you for revealing yet another facet of The Sullivan by way of a tour of the personal effects of THE Sullivan by way of your relationships with birds past and present. You related it all in a visual style that embraced both sadness and humor in a just so balance. As usual, you included a lesson in the importance of focusing upon observing, writing and living and whatever one might find lurking in between.

Great stuff, mon ami.

Amalgam

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on May 17, 2009 @ 5:23 pm

You know, ever since I quoted that line about, “no one blinder than me you won’t see,” I haven’t been able to get a song that used it out of my head. Maybe if I could remember the title… It was the flip side of a hit by Bobby Bland. Aaargh! Anyway, thank you most kindly for your sentiments, Amalgam.

Sully

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on May 17, 2009 @ 11:11 pm

Well, of course, I typoed the song line in the previous post. It’s “No one blinder than he who won’t see.” Blame it on voice activation software. Thanks to anonymous in South Africa who emailed the answer, I now have the name of the song: “Share Your Love with Me,” the flip side of “After It’s too Late.”

Sully

Comment by Wayne Allen Sallee on May 24, 2009 @ 10:05 pm

Sorry, Sully. I was going to vote for your title as being most erotic of the month, but John beat you out.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on May 25, 2009 @ 6:02 am

I knew I should have added “Do-dah” at the end, but to tell you the truth, John got my vote too. You can’t beat naked blondes (oops — sex and violence — no pun intended).

Sully

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Comment by Jeanie Ransom on June 7, 2009 @ 9:37 pm

Your way with words never ceases to amaze me. I especially loved your description of you and the lone love dove “sharing the spring and soft conversations.” With two big lakes in our subdivision, ducks and geese abound — if someone could figure out what makes goose poop harden like cement, I’m sure it could be used to solve some world problem. One day, I noticed several cars stopped to watch a mallard duck who was quite visibly upset. His mate had been hit and killed by a car, and the duck would not leave her side. He seemed to either be in in shock or in denial that his loved one was gone from this world, and the depth of his anguish left a lasting impression on my own soul. And then, there are squirrels. I don’t know why I like them, especially since several of them set up house in our attic last summer, but after reading your blog entry, I’m thinking “squirrel theme” for one of my children’s books.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on June 7, 2009 @ 10:27 pm

Squirrels are sitting ducks for children’s books. And I almost feel irreverent for the glib word play, because the mallard in denial strums something poignant for sure. I’m not big on anthropomorphizing, but animal emotions are way played down by stodgy behavioralists, seems to me. Even the existence of emotions isn’t recognized by some. Maybe you should work that duck story into an article somewhere. Thanks for weighing in, Jeanie…

– Sully

Comment by Vicki on June 14, 2009 @ 1:14 am

Ahh, yes, who could forget the inimitable Mr Toad.

Hello, Sully. Apologies for the belated reply. I’m not long home from a month in the South Australian outback. No telephone, no Internet, no computer. And no frogs. Or at least none that I came across.

Where I live is dry, though not arid as Australia’s interior. The frogs at home tend to be nocturnal, emerging in the cool of night to feed. Insects attracted by the kitchen light make for easy pickings. Fast food for amphibians: http://www.vickityley.com/frogs/

– Vicki

P.S. Hi to Janet

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on June 15, 2009 @ 11:38 pm

Australian novelist Vicki Tyley posted a second comment here along with this link, but it has been lost to cyberspace. Apparently it followed up on the first post and referenced the three photos of frogs seen here: http://www.vickityley.com/frogs/

We’ll at least see if this hyperlink stays up…

And, Vicki, if you’re reading this right after it’s posted, know that my outgoing email is jammed and I’ll reply to yours as soon as my server clears. Thanks for the link in the meantime.

Sully

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on June 16, 2009 @ 8:13 am

And there it is. Vicki’s comment mysteriously back (and just before my denying that it’s there). Sigh…

Sully

Categories: Writers Tags: authors, books, Writing

Thomas Sullivan: MAKING LOVE or BETWEEN THE COVERS (of a book)

April 15th, 2009 Thomas Sullivan 8 comments

I think choosing a career or a genre is a little like making love. Well…a lot like making love. You have a certain skill set, and we can call that your power of attraction — your good looks. Good looks (as women always know) grant the power of choice, and so you use your skill set to attract a specific readership. It is a superficial beginning, but you build on it, so that over time you engender a certain loyalty (faithfulness). And in the happily-ever-after — if you’ve chosen the right readership — it morphs into a true butterfly. Like beauty, the initial attraction itself stays in the eyes of the beholder, because it is locked in memory and association. But the sustaining thing is not just that specific beauty or attractiveness, it is the fact that you used it to make the choice you did. You belong to those readers.

That seems to be an increasingly trendy part of our culture: the social pressure to belong to something apart from the substance or lack of it in a relationship. You see it in, for instance, music. Bands like Modest Mouse or The Shins become initially popular among a group of independent fans (“Indies”), but when they cross over into mainstream success they are almost reviled by their original followers for having “left.” So, for better or worse, genre may act more like a benevolent hostage-taker than a fair exchange of loyalty for value at one point in a writer’s life. Or to keep within the metaphor of this column, a jealous lover.

And there’s the rub. Because if you haven’t chosen the right readership — one that fits the full range of who you are — you may be stuck. This is probably the most secret (shhh!) complaint I hear from other writers. They feel like they are suffocating in a confining genre. Often they want to develop more character-driven narratives that would be considered indulgent in the action/tone of category fiction. Sometimes they balk at popular themes and new trends. Sometimes the desire to change simply reflects their own growth and outreach into the real world as they get older. In this sense, either they have outgrown their marriages — their readers — or else the genres have changed or revealed limitations in a way that leaves them stagnating.

It is no one’s fault, and there is no right or wrong. Just the unassailable fact of change or awakening. But now there are complications of time invested, marketability, image and loyalty. Assets may be involved. And yet, the choice for a writer who feels they can no longer grow in a category of fiction is often to die in the traces or to risk rejection all over again in a new direction. In order to keep my focus here, I’m just going to shorthand the philosophical side of it. To my mind, there is no real choice. Not being true to yourself is being untrue to everything else. It disrespects the marriage. The consequences of that may take a long time to become apparent, but eventually who you pretend to be and what you do will ring false and hollow all the way around. If you’re going to try and fool the world full-time, why bother to write at all?

So, if the goal is to be who you are soul deep, then life is too precious and short to procrastinate. In that situation, you put your quality time and passion where it maxes out your potential. Of course, you still want the chrome-plated, bling-encrusted, plastic banana testimonials you may have garnered along the old way, and it’s nice if they come, but if they don’t, you have to be wise enough and real enough to walk the walk wherein the true reward is in the doing…the living. Or in the words of teen rock idol Ricky Nelson in another millennium (after he tried to break out at a Madison Square Garden concert):

“When I got to the Garden party, they all knew my name
But no one recognized me, I didn’t look the same…

If you gotta play at garden parties, I wish you a lotta luck
But if memories were all I sang, I’d rather drive a truck.”

As I said, the number of writers I know who secretly yearn for air beyond what they breathe in their seemingly successful careers is quite arresting. It is almost a cliché (especially for writers who succeed early), like lamenting, “… it’s too bad that youth has to be wasted on the young.” Blessed are those who find a good fit early and never need to change, say I. Loyal cadres of fans should never be disdained. But for those writers who try to segue out of genre, the result is often disappointment from their fans and the perception that they have “lost it.” And the fans are correct, as far as it goes. The writers have lost the genre. I don’t think there is any mending that; any need to, really. It’s apples and oranges. The problem comes when the writer tries to have it both ways by writing hybrids. They usually end up with an “orpple.” The fans aren’t fooled, the writer isn’t satisfied.

Trying to make the genre fit the writer never works. The genre is what it is — what it’s supposed to be. So, if the writer doesn’t want a clean break, then they need a partition within their work. Sometimes that can be done openly, but more often (much, much more often than you might think), it is done with a separate identity. That’s what pseudonyms are for. It really doesn’t matter whether the world knows or not. What matters is whether the writer can handle the dual identity. Does “to thine own self be true” mean 24/7? Or does it mean that you can be true enough to yourself to be fulfilled but still maintain a presence in what you did before? I’ve seen it work out either way, though more often the writer makes an undiluted commitment in their new direction. Those existing assets I mentioned before will still be there, like children. And in the long run, they will reflect a part of the total and true writer, rather than something they tried to micromanage forever. Living your own history is a good way to miss the present and render the future stillborn. But then, if you had a really, really, really good yesterday, maybe living in its memory is the way to go. Sort of like being permanently on drugs, though. Can you make love to the past? That just seems like a colossal waste to me, because it is a fear — fear of losing, fear of never being loved again — that locks writers (and people) into unfulfilling careers. We all have to choose whether courage trumps fear and honesty trumps appearances in our lives. Either you choose life’s grand adventure, risks inclusive, or you bury the active, growing part of yourself now. As Jack London put it:

“I would rather be ashes than dust!

I would rather that my spark should burn out

In a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.

I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom

Of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

The function of man is to live, not to exist…”

Yeah. Use it or lose it. Using it fulfills your purpose and makes life worth living. Anything less is an affront to whatever created you. If you bury your assets in the earth, you are burying yourself — as the parable of the talents teaches. And whether it is God or Shakespeare that gets the last word: “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man…”

Photos in my free monthly newsletter for April include updates on the white feather in last month’s column that many of you have asked about. You can follow me on Twitter now (http://twitter.com/thomassullivan ). I’ll also be happy to put you on my mailing list if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net . Past newsletters are archived at the website below, photos included. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, the opening chapter from THE WATER WOLF is on my website.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/

Categories: Writers Tags: authors, best-sellers, books, Fiction, inspiration, novel, Romance, Thomas Sullivan, Writers, Writing

THIS MONTH AT THE GONGUIN TABLE: A TASTE, A TOAST, AND A TEST

April 13th, 2008 Thomas Sullivan 10 comments

Pinch hitting for Frank Wydra is like stepping in for Babe Ruth. And I wish I could tell you that it’s just an April Fool’s switch and that Frank will be back next month, but it isn’t and for the time being he won’t. Since before Christmas Frank has been soldiering on with a great deal of pain and exhaustion. He had some surgeries and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer, which – in his words – is nasty stuff. He wanted to keep going on his column just as always but has come to feel that he cannot do it justice as he undergoes treatment, including chemo. That’s pretty typical Frank…worried that he can’t do it justice. Anyone who knows Flamingo Frank can think of better justice than what he’s contending with, but he doesn’t want me to go there and I’m honor bound to stick to the script.

I can tell you that his plan was to do one last session of the Gonquin in which he conveyed the pleasure his association with all the posters on StorytellersUnplugged has brought him. He thanks you one and all. You’ll have to forgive my imperfect rendering if this list is incomplete, but he mentioned a number of people who have meant so much to this site and in his personal correspondence on the blog and in e-mails. David Wilson, John Skipp, Richard Steinberg, Janet Berliner and Robert Jones come to mind at the moment.

Maybe a couple of times in my life I’ve met someone like Frank who became an instant brother. We recognized something – a spirit of open-mindedness, for lack of a better phrase – that put us into many adventures together, whether it was in the drawing room atmosphere of The Society of the Black Bull or on a shark-infested remote beach in the Bahamas one island away from where they filmed “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Flamingo Frank all but kidnapped me and forced me out of my shell to drive together to Rhode Island when my novel THE MARTYRING was a finalist for Best Novel at World Fantasy Con. No one sets a better table, throws a better party, or provides a more inspiring evening by the fire than the master host Frank Wydra. Of course, he merely gets credit for what his wife does. Karen Wydra, BTW, is one of America’s preeminent painters, and it is in her shadow that our beloved compatriot labors on his novels and short stories. And columns. The Gonquin table is one of those ready-made, obvious formats it took a genius to recognize and a double genius to pull off with such exacting research, transcendent imagination, grounded philosophy, and spot-on pastiches.

I thought to present my stand-in role here in the Gonquin tradition, but that would be a travesty even if it somehow came off a fraction as good as what you’re used to seeing here. I can tell you that Frank is not one to look backwards and his plan for this month’s column faced his challenges without flinching. He is not a quitter, and he is very savvy about technology and progressive trials in medicine in particular, but he is also pragmatic about covering the bases. Since he has always been the only living person at the Gonquin, it was his thought (“morbid thought,” he called it with a hint of apology) to cross over and become one of the others much as Father Damien on Molokai once acknowledged that he, too, was a leper. As I said, he was keenly aware that this would have to be nuanced in the tradition of the Gonquin to avoid morbidity, and in his present state of exhaustion as he undergoes treatment he wasn’t sure he’d have the energy to do that.

Notwithstanding the daunting honor I now have of filling in for him, I’m glad he didn’t write that column. Even though I’m grateful that Frank faces all possible realities head-on, the bond between us is constructed of what I cited above: a spirit of open-mindedness, a receptivity which allows all things to succeed. Much better to just leave the Gonquin in suspension. That said, Frank has recently written this: “So it be understood, I’ve had a great life and have no regrets. I may get a little more time, but in the scope of things, my bank account is full. For that I have all the wonderful people who I have known and who have supported me to thank. They are legion.” You make everyone’s bank account full, Flamingo.

For the time being, the Gonquin table is adjourned…

– Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

Categories: Writers Tags: Algonquin, books, cancer, cures, frank wydra, Gonquin, medical trials, Writing

Thomas Sullivan: SWALLOWING CHOCOLATE-CHIP FRISBEES, CHARLIE BROWN, & THE ONLY BUS OUT OF TOWN

March 16th, 2008 Thomas Sullivan 10 comments

My mother liked to get things done and hated to impose on anyone. This may be why she never made it to the maternity ward and birthed me in the lobby of a hospital. It was the first of many surprise entrances through the wrong door at the wrong time of life that have dogged me ever since. Now you might think that bad timing would be fatal to a writer or to anyone reaching for high stakes against long odds, and you’d be right. Bad timing can interrupt the flow of routine events, cause missed opportunities, and create challenges that turn people inside out. It is synonymous with bad luck. But it also makes life interesting, and now and then – just every now and then – it flips over the wild card that trumps all other possibilities, wins the jackpot, and redefines the game.

Used to be I focused on the downsides of luck and timing, bitching with the best of the malcontents, and was very imaginative in seeing how a thing could fail or go wrong. Writers especially are great at foreseeing dooms, little and large. They are not good at solving them, however, until they learn how to write endings. My parents thought it was hysterical when they challenged 10-year-old Tommy to write down all the offenses his big sister perpetrated on him and he came up with two pages of Machiavellian psychology. Sadly, I got better at that before I got… uh, better.

Now I’m sad for the good people I see daily whose tender dreams are crippled by cynicism. Include all dreamers and unsung talents who think they are down on their luck. Include lots of entertainers, even A-list successes. The trouble is that negative expectations are another example of bad timing. The word expectations tells it all. This is a preemptive word, an anticipatory term that has the power to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So it is dangerous to use it to rehearse failure. Do not send your expectations into battle with a white flag or otherwise defenseless. Much safer to arm them with all the positive weaponry you can muster. Yes, I understand the psychology. Negative expectations temper disappointment and buffer shock, provide a vacation from stress, and shift blame if blame is important to you. Hope, on the other hand, is hard. It is a risk that taxes the emotions and creates vulnerability. It borrows against a future that may become insolvent, but… are you ready for this?

It is always timely.

It comes exactly when you need to optimize your potential future. It provides motivation, greases the skids, and is the only bus out of town for Disney World. And here is what most people miss:

If it fails to deliver, it can be rolled over to the next hope.

You never need to attend the funeral of a hope. When one expires, it doesn’t leave a mess unless you bleed over it and cry unduly or stomp up and down on the corpse of hope in a tantrum. What you can do is look at the lesser or greater options remaining, stick out your thumb, and hitch a ride on the next best hope. The new one may call for a completely different road and destination. So be it. Start thinking of the dawn’s new wardrobe. What will you wear tomorrow? There is a tomorrow. Always. The day after victory is tomorrow, the day after defeat is tomorrow, aftermath is tomorrow. It’s going to come whether you get pissy about it or not. So why waste a single moment? The only guarantee you’ll ever get is that the heart and soul of you proceed by moving from one hope to another, because…

If a hope does deliver, you will then hope for something else.

Still, if you’re a writer, you spend most of your time waiting at the wrong end of long odds, picking up the pieces of disappointments, or looking for escapes from the stress of putting your creative energy and tender hopes on the line yet again. You suspect that Lady Luck’s real name is Lucy. “Hey, Charlie Brown,” she shouts, “I promise this time I won’t jerk the football away just when you get your hopes up that you’re about to kick a winning field goal.” But she does. Usually. Bad timing can look like a conspiracy.

I guess it was March 17^th that put it in perspective for me. The date itself, I mean. Beware the Ides of March plus two. Starting decades ago, that first infamous March 17^th registered on me as the day I missed my event in the swimming nationals. And every March 17^th thereafter for a few years I noticed something else dire happened. I couldn’t believe it. Bad timing in the extreme. Snake-bit, I thought, a gambler’s mentality – and there was a time when, if you could call me anything, it could only have been a gambler. March 17^th became the annual culmination of the habitual bad timing that defined me. Maybe my dreams were too big, my compromises too small. I seemed forever to have almost succeeded while in reality achieving nothing, and March 17^th was invariably another defeat to wallow in.

And then one year – not on the dreaded date – I had a moment of miraculous timing that revised everything. I have written about it before in another context (http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2007/08/16/thomas-sullivan-24-hour-insects-dusty-dreams-eternal-islands/ ), so I’ll just say that cosmic lightning flashed at precisely the right moment to allow me to save my son from drowning in a chill, dark Canadian lake. The marvel of that timing offsets all the others, of course. He is alive today. The disasters of each and every March 17^th fade to meaningless if that was the compensation. The pendulum swings both ways. Revelation:

You can’t keep the books on destiny or fate.

It’s natural for personal survival to skew our judgments about ourselves, but thinking you’re a perpetual victim is a sure-fire way to become one. That’s just as mindless as being a giddy Pollyanna driven by guilt. The true perspective lies somewhere in between, and if you try to keep score, you’ll likely screw up the proportion or the scope of what happens to you. Sadly, I DO – sort of – still keep score, but I do so more out of wonder than trying to make a case for how deserving I am of anything. And you know, it’s utterly amazing how things can work out. Yeah, I’m still the exception to every rule and out of sync with the human condition, but maybe that’s what I’ve chosen to be. Because when you don’t follow the script, you get to write your own. The most important things in my life have been freak timings. Whether they were good or bad depends on what I did with them.

The March 17^th fateful date has migrated a little over the years. It’s more of a window now. Last year it happened on March 27^th and it was probably the happiest day of my life. Whatever comes, I no longer fear it. I’ll trade all the red stoplights, untimely electric outages, and unforecast rains for the next big swing of the pendulum my way. And the bad timing seems almost necessary to the adventures I live daily. It rescues me from routine, saves me from following the herd, and challenges me to invent bigger-than-life romantic perfection in place of what I used to think I missed.

Bad timing creates unique opportunities.

It also creates material. Like they say, nothing is wasted for a writer. You want I should give you an example? You think I should pay some dues? Okay, okay. A couple of hours ago I was eating a turkey club wrap at the ski chalet when some girl scouts sat down around the table in front of me. Guess that made me think of girl scout cookies because I got up and bought one of those $1.25 chocolate chip jobbies. Red alert – bad timing, bad timing! ‘Cause as soon as I got back to the table I noticed one of the mothers was passing out flyers. Yeah, those flyers. Each girl was receiving her sales sheet, and there I sat with the crumbling evidence of my fondness for the very product they were selling, wondering if I could wing it down my throat like a Frisbee. But it was too late. They descended on me like flies on an outhouse. Hey, if you’re on my Christmas list, you know what you’re getting. Try not to notice come December if they’re a little stale. Think of it as bad timing…for which there will be compensation.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website. My free monthly newsletter is separate from this column and the mailing list is growing by leaps and bounds. I’ll be happy to send it to you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net Past newsletters are being archived at the website below, and the photos are now included! And finally, David Niall Wilson, whose questions are like laser brain surgery, has done a new interview of me at this link: Home [Note: if you don’t get to this link while I’m on the front page, click the word Shadeaux in the box and you’ll find me in the Interview archives for March 11, 2008.] Does anyone ask better questions than DNW? Squirm, squirm. Thanks for reading.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/

Categories: Writers Tags: authors, books, Fiction, inspiration, novel, Romance, Thomas Sullivan, Writers, Writing

THOMAS SULLIVAN: CONFESSIONS FROM THE BULLY PULPIT OR HOW TO GET NAKED IN FRONT OF AN AUDIENCE AND NOT BE NOTICED

September 16th, 2007 Thomas Sullivan 16 comments

Several of my colleagues have written on the specifics of teaching, and I thought I’d address the soul-searching panic that can befall anyone who suddenly finds themselves called upon to give a speech, teach, or advise. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a single person asking you for advice or a trumped-up forum in which the local library has decided you should entertain the patrons at their monthly soiree, the pitfalls are the same. It can come as a shock when you realize that something you’ve done has settled a mantle of presumed wisdom on you – wisdom you don’t have. You may decide to hide, fake laryngitis, or – if you are one of those confident but lonely types – tell your life story…again. If the request comes at you enough times, however, guilt is likely to turn you inside out searching for messages and honest value in your life.

And if you’re kicking around the scene at the pro level, you will face this. The first time you are introduced with shameless adjectives to a friendly audience, you may get a little intoxicated with the attention. But you know, the reality is that YOU are not being adulated and this isn’t perfect justice arriving on Earth for you as you and your mother always knew it would. This is people who are interested in something you represent, and they are willing to give you a hearing. They want to know what you have to say. And you do have something to say. At a minimum, the route you took in your own idiosyncratic life is a path that may offer clues to others. If you have a little pizzazz or can abstract your own “This is what I did” story into abstract components, all the better. And if you can actually start to analyze your audience and customize what you say to who they are – in other words give them the attention you want – you really will come off acquitted in the eyes of God. I don’t care which religious or non-religious handle you give God, or what non de plume, for that matter, there is a survival imperative for all of us to leave the world better than we found it. That’s your own personal ledger, and it can be accomplished in quiet and anonymous ways, but hey, you’re a writer. You already went “splash.” So ride that wave ashore and try not to drown any sand castles.

It may happen spontaneously, so trust yourself to be spontaneous. Scripted works less well. I’m not saying you won’t fall into buzzwords or repeating whole tracts verbatim. If you are called upon to teach enough times, you will. The most important thing, though, is to remember that you are first of all a student. You have to keep learning and adapting to everything around you. You have to value what there is to learn from others, even if it’s simply from observing them. Everyone is a teacher because they are part of life. If you don’t remember that, you WILL become irrelevant, and your irrelevancy will be all you have to teach: dead, static moments that were true for you at one point in your existence but quite possibly no longer are.

Contrary to what you might think, I’m an extremely private person who has lived virtually alone his entire life. I grew used to showing different aspects of myself in different settings, and never my total self to anyone – incredibly, I never let my guard down until this past year when I met someone so natural to me that it just happened. So I didn’t know who to be in front of a large audience. Used to bother me that I’d see a lot of the same people showing up for my stump speeches before widely disparate (or was it desperate) groups. I knew damn well I was saying some of the same things, word for word, same zingers. But kind listeners always swore that it was different, and one time someone told me, “…you’re different.” That stuck with me. I still don’t know exactly what that means, but I’ve come to trust it a little. I think people tune into energy (or lack of same) as well as optimism, and as long as you’re you, energy and optimism will convey as much as specific words. Yeah, I have up days and down. And every day I yearn for solitude, or something shared only with a soulmate, but if you focus on the audience – SINCERELY – you will come up to the task. They will motivate you. So even if you are repeating humongous sermons word for word, those will likely resonate, if you repeat them from the heart and not the head. And if you are focused on the individuals listening, what you say will vary, because you will adapt to them.

The more speaking you do, the easier it gets. In fact, you may find it becomes almost a reflex. Not didactic exactly, but more enthusiastic, sort of cajoling, purposeful though not taking itself too seriously. It can intimidate the hell out of you, if it catches you by surprise. You are holding forth one on one somewhere in public – a ski rental room, a restaurant, waiting in a doctor’s office – and suddenly you realize others are listening, people passing through are staying, or there might be just a hint of theater-like concentration. Either they are thinking, “Who does this asshole think he is?” or they are finding what you say more interesting than the Ranger Rick magazine they are reading while waiting for the sawbones to see them. Take it in stride. Remember, it’s not about you. Not unless you get carried away with yourself. In which case, everyone will know soon enough. So do your thing. Don’t be afraid to give. If you have no value, you’ll have no audience. And if you do have an audience, keep an objective distance from it.

There is a downside to this, I should tell you. It may drain you and – curiously – leave you lonely. Hmm. I should probably stop right here and draw the curtain. Consider this the advanced footnotes the author should have thrown away. But I’ve pondered long and hard as to why I always feel alone after I climb down from a soapbox. Of course, the answer may be as simple as, “Well, dummy, you DID stand on a soapbox – how was the air up there?” But even when the reaction is effusively kind, I feel that way. Maybe it’s an individual thing, but I want to believe it’s because I’m doing it for the right reasons. If I’m pedaling myself, my ego, it never works. Lots of experience with pedaling my ego. But if I’m truly trying to give, I forget myself, and in the aftermath I feel like I wasn’t there. This is absolutely the most valuable thing that could happen to you if you want to honestl
y give – forget yourself, do not be there. But you may pay that price afterward, as I do. Maybe that’s because the ego comes rushing back, all your little fantasies of personal acceptance and fulfillment. Or maybe it’s because you’ve just parsed yourself out, played the prostitute, and now you’re faced with the hard fact that no one knows what you’re really like. That’s what you need a soulmate for. Someone interested in and capable of understanding the unique you. God help the audience if they have to play that role. We’ve all sat through captive classes run by such needy souls, have we not? An audience can give you the delusion that you have recouped the frustrations and compromises of an incomplete life. So maybe that’s the touchstone as far as knowing if you did a good job speaking, i.e., if you don’t feel just a tad lonely and isolated afterward, you were probably wallowing in the rapport instead of the needs of the audience. I’ll take that limitation. I think a lot of entertainers get lost in the interaction. The audience becomes their soulmate. But it only lasts as long as the cameras role, the disks spin, or the footlights remain on. Then they go looking for themselves and are disappointed. It’s a lonely world.

Which brings me full circle to the point I tried to make about remaining a student. I don’t want to reach a destination. Soon after we become adults, most of us seem to anchor on a plateau inside ourselves where life doesn’t expand, and there we resign our futures to the slow ravages of time. It’s as if we get tired of looking for answers and just grab up whatever is in our lives at the moment, declaring, “I’m there.” I guess that’s security for some, but not for me. My security is in not running out of momentum or directions. And I don’t need to move very far to find both. I just have to continue to explore the world wherever I am – rather thoroughly. The universe truly is in a grain of sand. An audience is part of that. It is not a reward conferred upon you, not something permanent, not as meaningful or satisfying as a soulmate. It is more like a resting point, a place to pause and reflect for perspective. So is writing, for that matter. Actual living stops when the words pour out of you. Words are a summation of what you do and know – the long shadows and bright reflections of everything you see and explore. Have you lived today? Open a window and get some air, or come outside and breathe!

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. My web site is below. If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out the free sample chapter from my latest novel, THE WATER WOLF. And if you’d like to receive the monthly newsletter, ask to be added to the list at: mn333mn@earthlink.net

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/

Categories: agents, best-sellers, books, Publishing, reading, soul-mate, speaking, Thomas Sullivan, Writers, Writing Tags:

Thomas Sullivan: NAME THE BABY

June 16th, 2006 Thomas Sullivan 15 comments

I, Thomas Sullivan, being of unsound mind but sound body have dedicated my worldly hours to the pursuit of frivolous recreation and relationships of low character. Now that’s something you can write about. Really. None of this chained to a keyboard 24/7/365 stuff, I need to interact with the world. If you write, which type are you? Have you figured out your resources yet? Some writers sit down halfway through the game and write memories, some have never even peeped through the blinds at the world but rely on living vicariously and letting their imaginations soar, many write on the fly while living the lie as 9 to 5 stiffs raising families, others never come in off the road but live life on the lam, sending out their scribbles to editors like notes in a bottle and moving as often as Osama bin Laden. I prefer to do it all. In phases. Modes. Moods. Variety is the spice of life. Plus, I’m an energy thief. Put me near something giving off vitality and I’ll suck the quantums out of it. Viable people drive me. In fact, the only thing that shuts me down is narrowness, stiffness, frightened and inhibited people, insecure types that hunker down dead behind pride or vanity or illusions or apathy, wasting life and opportunity. And I love them too, but preferably from a distance.

None of this would necessarily be apparent to you if you ran into me. If you ran over me, maybe, but not into me. Depending on the venue, I might strike you as rather conservative, and in truth I’ve been damn near immune to peer pressure all my life. Can hang out in an atmosphere of any taint and constituency and still be me. I think it’s a side effect of terminal eccentricity, but it could be that I’m just obtuse. Either way I believe it’s a plus for a writer. At least it is if life pushes you to be a writer for all seasons. Not that I don’t envy colleagues who know who they are, what they write, and who connect fluidly (non-alcoholic) with their target audience. My targets float around the greater universe like nebulae and on a good day look like 3-D at a drive-in theater when you take the cheap 3-D glasses off. But hey, it’s never boring to hang out in the big sandbox where one day you can get buried by a fastidious cat and the next be reared up like a pyramid.

Anyway, like I said, I’m the type of writer who has to interact with the real world in order to keep my batteries charged and draw inspiration – essentially becoming a plagiarist of life itself. So, that makes me a life-long learner who wants to understand everything. Understanding is power, control. For a writer that’s an aphrodisiac. Writing is a God-power, creation on the cheap. It may be abstract, but it’s no less ambitious than the creation of universes within universes. Trying to figure out who you are and what you want to write is half the battle. That’s why I started a series two columns ago on how language fits into it. Language was an obvious handle that helped me sort out the marketplace and myself. But the trouble with writing a series of columns that build one on the other is that you have to assume people read them all. Is there an “emoticon” for serious doubt? The stump speech I based this series on was always delivered to a captive audience in one sitting, so, let me review:

The first column [http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/04/16/thomas-sullivan-spiders-and-spuds/] introduced the idea that you can divide the purpose of language (and writing) into three areas. I called them the language of emotions, the language of things and events, and the language of ideas. The second column [http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/05/16/thomas-sullivan-horned-owls-other-horny-beasts/] was specifically about the language of emotions – wet, naked baby comes into the world screaming and just gets subtler about it ever after. So now this is the third installment and the second language: the language of things and events.

Let’s check in on that newborn who, in the previous column, was pure emotion. As the sensory panel lights up and the baby begins to process sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, we get modifications of the emotional “talking” the kid is doing. Coos, interrogative lilts – whatever – the baby (let’s have a name the baby contest, but for now I’ll call him Marmaduke) is trying to identify things it likes. As Marmaduke gets a handle on his soft palate, uvula, tongue, teeth, he begins to use repetition. Patterns work. Recognition is its own reward for a while. Monkey see, monkey do. (Monkey-do – yuck.) Lots of “yucks” at this stage. But there are triumphs too, and if the emotional reinforcement is there, baby Marmaduke will segue into the language of things and events: the nouns and verbs of reality. The adults go to work whispering to him in the race for The First Word. “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy”…“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” And so The First Word comes forth: “Uncle Looey!” Shock and awe. Then cheers. The parents throw Marmaduke up in the air, then Marmaduke throws up on them. Language is great. “TV…ice cream…play” – by the time baby M starts school, he’ll have his 35,000 commonly used words, all without benefit of a grammar book.

Along about six months, M learns the world’s most powerful word. Mommy’s coming at him with a spoonful of green slime one day – “open uuuuppp” – and the enfant terrible throws it back at her, right in the eye – WAP! – and says, “NO!” Mommy is shocked: “My flesh, my blood, you deny me, whatdoyoumean no?” “NO! NO! NO!” Aphrodisiac of a word. For a while, it’s a stage. “What’s your name, little boy?” “NO!” If, as I wrote in the last column, some people never get past the negativity of the birth experience and thus becomes literary critics, some people never get past the “no” stage either. They’re called . . . editors. And if the language of emotions is wholly natural, the language of things and events is wholly necessary. Virtually all people get that far – the second language. It’s quite sufficient for getting round the block. If you can say, “telephone, car and sex,” you can make it all the way to age eighteen. As adults, when you go to a foreign country where you can’t speak the language, what do you do? You revert to the rudimentary nouns and verbs of reality. If you can say, “taxi, bathroom and restaurant,” you can get from France to Belgium in two days.

So what happens when you put two languages together? You get a hybrid, of course. Baby M is still going to vent his emotions, but now they can be aimed through things and events. Still, there is a tone, an emphasis, that will tell you whether the purpose of the words is mostly to give literal information (language of things and events) or to address feelings (language of emotions). In the last column I geared my anecdote about the glorious femme blader (one “d” please) in the pink shorts toward feelings. It exploited my passions, frustrations and ego as we played pursuit around Elm Creek’s nature trails on in-line skates. Same function as the nascent “Waaa!” of the newborn in that same column. But I could have milked that setting and encounter for a pure statement of things and events just as easily, as in this description of canoeing I just sent someone in an email:

“…The lake was as glideable as glass but fuzzed with millions of tiny seedpods stirred by the thermals of sundown. When I got to the river they floated together like a carpet of snow through which I carved silently in a crimson canoe. Each bend in the river brought a new floral vista. And when I crossed under a wide bridge I was suddenly in another kind of blizzard, this one of swallows in a frenzy to snap up insects I could not see. It was amazing to actually be in that swarm of birds, a part of their agile chaos. But the peril was underscored, too, because at that moment a hawk shot under the bridge as though it were in a tunnel, skimming past my head from behind in pursuit of a “swallow.” I was staring right through the gun-site as the hawk sees it, and, as blisteringly fast as that predator bird is, it was no match for the swallow in the sharp maneuvers of tight quarters. Close, but the smaller bird veered and the blur of talons grabbed only air….”

Things and events. The emotions might be inferred, but the experience of canoeing under the bridge is literal.

So now we have the great divide. The language of emotions and the language of things and events. This is the heart of choice, the basic tools for communication. But there is a third language, and here we can begin to separate out readers and writers. Keep in mind, if you will, that the final column (probably July’s), will relate this all back to the marketplace and writing. Next up: the language of ideas.

Any takers for naming the baby? Email them to me. Have had a couple of people mention how hard it was for them to find my email address, and most readers do not want to create a user ID and password in order to post. For the record, those little blurry patches in the middle of the authors’ bio pages (which are listed to the right on this page) become authors’ home page links if you happen to move the cursor over them. My email is on my author’s page, but here it is again: mn333mn@earthlink.net

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome and your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan