Programming Notes

I've really appreciated the feedback and encouragement on what's shaping up to be -- gasp! -- my first novel, The Give and The Take.  I've been writing a lot, much more than I expected, since I got out here in February to take care of my Dad.  The subject matter is, of course, pretty damn obvious.  But I do feel as if the project has arrived at an important point -- a good point -- where it would be best to keep my first drafts more private, less public.  For a while though it really felt good to get something out there, even if this blog doesn't get a whole lot of readers (Quality over Quantity!).  It's funny living in the middle of nowhere -- on the one hand I'm surprised, daily, by something, something the Old Man says or does, or talking to a neighbor.  But it is lonely out here -- there's no other word for it -- and the gates of my memory are more greased-up than usual, and have been for months.  There's no telling what ghosts, friendly or otherwise, will walk out and start yapping at me at any given time.

I was keeping notebooks in South Korea but rarely taking the time to go back and give that material the editorial muscle it really needed to be shaped into something worth sharing.  A few good bits of it have made their way into The Give and The Take, and will continue to do so.  But while I'm going to keep that stuff "private" for now, I am going to start posting some of my short stories on this here blog.  At some point I'll even polish them up and send them out for potential publication, but I know from experience that that whole dance takes work, and you can't half-ass it the way you can popping up an eight page short story online.

For what it's worth, I wrote poetry for many years but basically stopped around the half-way mark of my time in Korea, around 2013 or so.  There were a number of reasons, but none more important than the fact that I haven't really read much poetry since then either, and don't miss it all that much.

So my longer work is going into the garage and I'm lowering the doors for now, but hopefully you'll be entertained by some of my recent efforts in writing stories.  And, for better or worse, they aren't all about my ten years living in South Korea!