Jack's Place

Where Does the Love Go?

"Nature fits all her children with something to do. He who would write and can't write can surely review." ~ JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

         Confession time; I'm 76 years old. Well, no crime in that, I guess, though some youngsters would have you believe otherwise, but no, I speak of the things lost over all those long decades, the good, the bad, and the... confusing. Things that no one wants to lose, but no choice is offered.
         Like most of you of mature years, I have gone through many hobbies. I built plastic models; planes, ships, cars, tanks, all were fair game. I still remember my first model. I was about six, and it was a B-52, a fairly new aircraft in the mid-1950s. It probably had less than ten parts — looked like something you might find in a cereal box — and I managed to butcher it in ways you would expect from a six-year-old, but I was hooked. From the fifties well into the eighties, I made hundreds of them. The last was a pretty large scale model of an F-14D from VF-84, the one with the skull & bones emblem on the tail. It was presented on a flight deck waiting for launch, canopy open, pilot and RIO awaiting their turn on the catapult. My son, who loved the Tomcat, was the pilot, and I was the RIO, our names painstakingly emblazoned below the cockpit. I couldn't quite finish it, as I woke up one morning and couldn't stand to look at parts, decals, paints, glue, none of it, for another day. It was over quite unexpectedly, and I've never picked up another one.
         Another big hobby was wargaming. If you aren't familiar, the board is a map of the area where a historical battle took place and the pieces are cardboard chits printed with information that represent the units present at the fight. I received Gettysburg for my 13th birthday, and spent the next thirty years leading armies across every locale on the planet, and a good number of off-world confrontations. I remember it was exactly thirty years, because I was about to begin my fourth decade when the interest turned off like throwing a switch.
         I've collected stamps, I've been an off-roader, a martial artist and a dozen other things, all of which faded from interest and became former hobbies. But there was one love that, through it all, excited, comforted, and uplifted me: writing. I began in grade school. For our non-American friends who use a different system, I was about ten. I wrote the sort of drivel you would expect from a 10-year-old boy, stories of me and my childhood friends defending the neighborhood from a Russian invasion or an infestation of live dinosaurs. Hopeless twaddle, but every journey begins with the first step.
         Over the years, as hobby after hobby came and went, as children, then grandchildren came, grew, and began their own lives, as my career developed, peaked, and slid gracefully into retirement, writing was there, ever-present, ever-exciting, always taking me on journeys to new worlds and new situations. Always, until about five years ago, when it unexpectedly became a chore. I sit down at my desk, spread out my materials, and instead of pitching into the next exciting project, I spend the allotted time like I'm trapped in a dead-end job, watching the clock and wishing it was over. I find that I do that less and less anymore.
         That, in a paragraph, is the reason I came back here. I was a writer for about 60 years, and then I wasn't. I came back in the hope that rubbing shoulders with all you fine writers would reinspire me. I had hopes that reading your stories in sufficient detail to provide the sort of reviews I write would reinspire me. But so far, nothing. I still have what seem to be, at least, "great" ideas. They develop in my mind while I'm doing dishes or vacuuming, but they all fall apart when I sit down to put them on the page. There's suddenly nothing.
         So I write reviews and occasionally blog. Hopefully what I offer in my reviews is helpful to someone. I never mean any harm, and if you don't like what I tell you, don't take it personally; it's never meant that way. As to blogging, that's a question that nags at me. When you look at me, you are looking at sixty years of experience by a writer who has passed through multiple styles and genres, self-published, appeared in anthologies, and developed a small but appreciative following — in a genre I don't write in any more — and has learned a lifetime of lessons about the Craft. This immediately makes me think I can post articles about how to write, and what certain genres look for, that sort of thing. Teaching a writing course for the new writers among us, in other words. But then I have to ask, what can I teach you about writing other than how to labor in obscurity for a lifetime. I've probably sold a couple of hundred books since my first offering in 2013. I just got my W2 from Amazon; I made $23 in royalties last year. So, what am I going to teach you about writing other than what not to do?
         And that brings me to now. I am gradually posting old works, chapter by chapter, and I hope that you enjoy them, but so far no fire has been relighted. So I will continue to review and occasionally offer a blog post about something that has caught my interest, and I hope that will be enough for now. It seems to be enough for me...

Stay inspired,
Taylor...