A BOOK

                                                          

Tonight I am finishing up my thirteenth book. Oh, it won’t be out for a while. The story may be complete but now comes all of the finishing touches. Hopefully while Pat and I are in Arizona there will be time for that. This is something fulfilling and yet sad for me to write-- “The end,”-- to this story. Sad because you see, it might just be the end of my stories. Somehow those creative juices I have enjoyed over the years are drying up and there are just no more stories to write. Only time will tell.

I’d like to think that this was one of my better books. After all time has taught me a lot of lessons about writing and story telling and hopefully I’ve been paying attention. There is something so unique about writing a story. To create all of those characters, name them, bring them to life and flesh them out and make them as real as life itself. As for the story itself, well there are very few stories left to tell that haven’t been told, over and over again. I guess the only difference comes in the signature of the author and how the story is told.

I remember as a young boy reading Hemmingway’s “Old Man and the Sea. I am going to read it again this winter, some sixty years later and this time I probably won’t be as intrigued with the story as I was back then because I know how it ends. No, this time my interest will be with the author and the way he wrote. There is a way to tell a story and there is a way to help you live the story through that writing and old Ernest Hemmingway was one of those, who had you squirming in your chair when he told you that story of Santiago and that big fish.

There is just so much you can do about shaping the world around you in real life. Not that that should stop any of us from trying to make this a better world for all of us. But a fiction author has the ways and means of making life right again, at least in the context of his/her story. Yes, its limited to what is between the covers of that book but sometimes, from that story comes the inspiration to make the story come to life in the real world. We are all dreamers of sorts but some people let those dreams die and some people live their dreams out and miracles happen and it’s all because of something they once dreamed up, believed in and became a doer. You see just dreaming of it isn’t enough. At some point you need to be a doer too. They go hand in hand.

Trying to succeed in life has always been a struggle and not just for writers. It is for any job. No matter the vocation, someone is always doing you one better but that is good for you if your paying attention because it keeps you trying harder if you take the challenge. Then again, maybe you’re right where you want to be in life anyway and you don’t want for anything more and if your happy, isn’t that what life is all about? But back to the book, for every once in a while someone comes along with a story or book that is so unique, so different. Not just a new spin on an old story but truly a new story, no one has ever heard before and I’m hoping this story of mine will be like that. Or at the very least--- I hope you will think so.