TESTICLE DILEMMA
This is not about testicles. It is about my relationship with my editor, Mim Harrison. As a doctor and surgeon I expect my patients to defer to me in important matters of technical know-how, such as what specific surgery fits which illness. Likewise, I have been deferential to Mim in her revisions, choices of words, titles and compositional re-arrangements. It was thus with much dismay that I discovered an obstinate difference of opinion between us and, at first, I dug my heels in. It was with a story entitled Testicle Talk. I loved the catchy title and so did my[...]
READY TO PUBLISH
In keeping with a deadline I sent for my self when the year began, my short stories anthology is ready for publication. It has a tentative name, coined by my editor Mim Harrison. She also recommended a line-up of stories with what she considered stronger ones in the lead and finale. The title story, Appassionata, the strongest one, will be in the center. The lead stories were On The Night Bus To Fethiye, Nightmare and Jarvis in Plastics. The latter began as Circus Plasticus but when I extended my Jarvis stories to a trilogy we changed the name to link[...]
JONATHAN RESPONDS, AT LAST
At last, a reunion with Jonathan Hodes, neurosurgeon in Louisville, Kentucky, and a good friend from my UCSF days in San Francisco, who had a major role in my memoir Dogmeat. We met some sixteen months after the book was published. Until then his silence about my book was deafening. Had I offended him in any way?Writers can't help but aggrieve those closest to them. If you write about what you know -and you should - and if what you write is interesting and edgy, it is inevitable that some acquaintance, friend, relative might be displeased with how they were[...]
JENNY
A strange real life experience with an imaginary person! Her name is Jenny. I realized how intimate I am with her.As I wrote my collection of stories, the scenes I created ran in my head like a movie. I created numerous characters, many based on real life people. They, in my mind's eye, looked like themselves. Other characters were totally fictional, Sadri for instance, the hero in On The Night Bus To Fethiye, or Gita in Appassionnata, two major ones. Jenny was also fictional, entering as support cast into the first of my three Jarvis stories. She was unique in[...]
MUSING ABOUT CLIMAXES
Today I discovered that I am climax oriented. No, it's not what you think.I came to this discovery while driving to work, listening to my latest book on tape, Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. It is yet another treatise on writing, idiosyncratic, highly personal, different than the others. Lamott's advice, delivered in a format she considers more entertaining, is sugar coated and often too cute for my taste. Her writing psychology is different than mine.Somewhere in the middle of her treatise she issued an edict on climaxes that caught me by surprise. She said climaxes should arise from the story[...]
DEADLINE LOOMING, COLLECTION READY
There is nothing like a firm deadline to move a writing project along. In my case it is a self-imposed one: to publish by this autumn. It has sparked the most creative, most productive period of writing in my life.When I first set out to write stories in the 1990's I completed two good ones for a total of less than 15,000 words. Numerous others fizzled, eventually ejected from my computer. Then, after a long hiatus, when I returned to this sort of writing a few years ago it was slow going, just five decent finished stories (26,000 words) and[...]