The Caterpillar and the Butterfly

It's that odd, magical time of the year when this writer undergoes a sort of reverse chrysalis.  For years now, as the end of December approaches and the First of January looms, I've imagined myself transforming from a very tired, old butterfly exhausted from the demands of twelve months of constant creativity back to a young caterpillar, excited by the prospect of all the adventures that await. Today is the first day of the new year, January 1, 2015.  Last night, our wonderful writers' group here in the frigid North Country enjoyed our second annual New Year's Eve soiree, complete with a sit-down dinner and reading (the theme was 'Homicidal Holiday' -- I shared the opening to my culinary-themed murder mystery, 'Slice and Dice'.). It was more fun, the food even more delicious, than anticipated.  It also ran late into the evening and past the stroke of midnight, which left this old butterfly feeling very old by the time his head hit the pillow. Wonderful guests who overnighted with us, friends from this writers' group and ones from my group to the south, departed after a big breakfast, and I moseyed into my Writing Room to start the first of 2015's adventures.  Exhausted yes, but then I put the nib of my fountain pen to paper, and realized I was the caterpillar again, feeling captivated as I belted out fresh pages and the first of this new year's thousand words.

(paper, designer folders, envelopes, and other office supplies
evicted from storage in one of my file cabinet drawers)

Over the previous days as the old year counted down, I gave the Writing Room a polish, organized, and pondered my plans for 2015. Part of that effort involved doing my end-of-year paperwork, when I print up fresh, updated copies of my 'As-Yet Unwritten' and 'Completed Works' lists, update my big 'Manifest' notebook with newest titles and ideas, and make sure every fresh story idea gets jotted on a note card for filing in my catalog. Another huge undertaking was to shift the order of my archives of first-draft manuscripts -- 1089 completed short stories, novellas, scripts, and novels as of this writing; enough that my life's work has filled one of my two lateral-drawer filing cabinets to capacity. The second, which contains works-in-progress, notebooks, writing journals, and the business files of my career, provided much-needed room to grow.  While reorganizing that w-i-p drawer, I did a headcount -- 80 projects started, stalled, and stored for future completion.  One of my main 2015 goals is to knock that number down considerably.  There are 80 started from a list of unwritten ideas that total 142.

Even so, 2015 was a productive year for my muse and me.  I wrote 55 stories, short and long, to completion, along with a novel and two screenplays -- one of which, Brutal Colors, is presently in post-production and nearing a release date within the first half of the year.  My word count, all tallied, was 266,650 according to my records, with another 60,000 on some of those infamous works-in-progress, which howl at me in the night for their THE ENDs.

(our neighbor's pumpkin patch -- and what I saw staring in at me through the
living room windows in November 2014, recorded for future inspiration)

And so this young caterpillar, who will turn 50 in May, uncapped one of his Shaeffer fountain pens, a relic from his teen years, and began work on the oldest of his unwritten story ideas, deciding this year to start at the very top of the heap.  As part of my commitment to living a literary life in 2015, my goal is to hack that list of unwritten ideas down by half, and to fill up all that free space in the filing cabinets with first drafts. Some will be written for regular editors, others with thoughts of submitting to calls that come up, yet more simply for my enjoyment and no one else's.  I want this to be a banner year. Given the numerous releases I have upcoming just in the month of January alone, 2015 seems geared toward a fantastic start.  Another thousand words went down on that very old story idea, written with a very old fountain pen before I shifted gears to write this post.  And they left me feeling supremely young again.  Such is the power of dreams and writing.

Old Dog, New Tricks

(ten of my 'retired' Sheaffer fountain pens)

Most of the music I love is readily available on the Oldies channels now that songs from the '80s are officially considered 'classics'.  There's very little new that I like on the radio anyway, satellite or FM. Ditto for TV shows.  I'm a creature of habit.  An old dog.  It is what it is and I'm okay with it, mostly.

For thirty-two years, I have written with the same wonderful Scheaffer fountain pens I began collecting in 1980 at the age of fifteen, after a daily sum of fresh story pages that hasn't been repeated since and likely never will -- fifty in total -- transformed my right hand into a claw.  The Sheaffers are elegant, comfortable and, given our long history together, beloved.  They glide across the page. I only get writer's cramps from them when I have the rare thirty-page day.  But as I learned in 1991 while flying to Chicago to attend my very first writing conference, cabin pressure at 30,000 feet tends to force all the ink out of the nib, making for a heck of a mess.  Given current TSA regulations regarding pointy things in carry-on luggage in our post-9/11 world, now they're even more impractical to fly with.  With eight full days far away from home during my recent trip west, I knew I needed to learn a new trick -- and fast. And with the state of publishing ever fluxuating, I also figured it wouldn't hurt to adapt to one or more creative changes.

So at our local $ store, I picked up a pair of thick rollerball pens, black.  As stated, I hadn't written fiction in anything but the Sheaffers, of which I own some three-dozen, in decades.  To my surprise while seated at a restaurant in the Newark, New Jersey airport, my dollar store pen moved with the grace and ease of my beloved fountain pens; during the first of two long layovers, I put down seven pages of "Golden Skull," a story that dates back to 1982 and almost to the start of my passion for writing, a novella starring Jonathan and Grace Martin, the husband and wife supernatural sleuth team who starred in numerous creepy adventures during my teen years.

Upon returning home from the trip, I promptly completed "Golden Skull" and returned to the $ store, where I snagged a healthy supply of the rollerballs.  The price of replacement ink cartridges for the Sheaffers has skyrocketed in recent years -- as high as six bucks for five tubes, each tube delivering roughly twenty pages.  The first of the rollerballs just began to dry up after almost a hundred.  While I still adore my Sheaffers and have used them off and on since World Horror Con, I've gone out of my well-established comfort zone and found something else that worked, which is good business given the economics. Of course, I still get looks of bemusement whenever most people learn that I write first drafts with a pen.  Talk about old school!

The Pen and the Sword

Thirty-one years ago today, I walked into the long-since-vanished The Hampshire Room, a mom and pop stationary store on Broadway in Salem, New Hampshire, in search of the perfect pen.  For the first and only time in my life, from 3 p.m. after racing home from the school bus and until 11 p.m.-ish the previous night, I wrote the opening fifty pages of a novella called "The Night...Like Death" unable to put down the felt-tip I thought would be a good, permanent-ink replacement for the banal ballpoints of my then-young writing life.  I woke the following morning crippled and unable to hold a pen.  While I've had plenty of twenty- and even a good many thirty-page days since (my Friday at the recent North Conway retreat among the latter), I've never repeated the fifty-page day mark, and don't want to.  But what I got out of that singular experience (besides a completed manuscript that still lurks in my file cabinet and my very first case of writer's cramp) was the EUREKA! moment of understanding that a good pen is an absolute must for those of us Luddites who still compose initial drafts longhand.  A great pen, even better.  In The Hampshire Room, where I also bought my first copies of Writers Digest and one or two Barbara Cartland novels (loved those Dowager Marchionesses!), I'd spied lovely Shaeffer fountain pens, a bargain at a buck ninety-nine, and purchased my very first, knowing that if I was going to write long, I'd need a great pen that glided across the page to prevent further paralysis.  I bought another soon after.  And another.  Some forty fountain pens later...

Last year in 2010, while trying to keep our small family above water after my partner of nearly ten years was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, I fell into a pattern of producing pages unlike anything I'd previously experienced.  Writing was a lifeline and, in 2010, I completed 100 fiction projects -- four novels, six novellas, one short script, the rest a mix of flash and short stories, a total surpassing a half-million words.  Of those hundred, I sold fifty-two, including two of the novels and most of the novellas.  Writing saved not only me but my family, though there were a pair of necessary sacrifices along the course.

Two of my Shaeffer fountain pens long-last gave up the ghost and no longer work properly, their nibs damaged in that whirlwind of fresh pages.  The pen presently scribbling across my notepad, belting out "The Ferryman" for submission to Neil Plakcy, its shaft a stunning shade of cobalt blue, is doing a fine job.  I bought it in 1998 in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where I also stocked up on replacement ink cartridges, each one a guaranteed twenty pages of creative freedom.  I'm not sure they'd stand up well against the cold steel Devotchka in a sword fight, but my Shaeffers are still fairly mighty.