Having a little trouble picking up my writing computer this morning so I thought I'd write a little about my two dilemmas: first, the one I'm in the middle of writing, and second, the huge idea that has kind of derailed it.

The one I'm writing: a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, set in Thailand. I get a little into it, and what derails me is not having a complete overall plan that would guide my step-by-step progress through the story. In other words, slightly confused about how to proceed. But that's not the issue really.

The issue is that this other idea is somewhat all-encompassing. That idea is this: Write a series of about 45 biographies of American presidents. Actually we are on 47 now, but he was also 45, and there was another one earlier that was two. You get the idea. Eventually hit them all.

Make them all uniform, just biographies, find meaning in their lives if possible and do more than a wikipedia page can do. Of course on some level it's designed after the wikipedia page. Who were they? What did they do? Why were they important? The goal being having about 45 of them. I can do them in any order I wish, and can rewrite or add when when I find things; I'm good at that. I figure writing 45 books might take about 8 years.

The obvious problem would be getting caught in the culture wars. Some people are already very unhappy at the way we teach history and this is not going away or getting any better. Some of us like myself are rewriting history to include the violent and degrading treatement of native Americans by Presidents like Jackson - what do you say about the Trail of Tears? The point is to be blunt, truthful, historically accurate. It was the undoing of the Cherokee and several great empires were reduced to prisoners in a short while. How do you put that in a biography and not make enemies?

Yet Jackson is the one I want to start with. The reason is that he is very much similar to the one we have now. Getting absorbed in the 1830s is one very effective way of dealing with an onslaught of news that basically is difficult to absorb. I know quite a bit about Jackson already, so this will be a kind of first challenge: make a good clear book that shows how he's important, and at the same time does not contain anything inaccurate.

As I think about it I think the process of writing presidential biographies would be a minefield, or rather, 45 minefields, each one with a fair number of mines in it. Careful now! Remember how unhappy everyone is about simply the way things are now!

I kind of want to make them an ongoing history lesson, so that we really get the whole picture of the times, as well as a good view of this guy's life. Each of these people is after all a product of their times.

Now, having stumbled around on all these worms that came out of the can, it's back to my original story, about wayward travelers in Bangkok, and pure magic. Traveling is after all, magic. If I can make someone experience that, I'll have succeeded with my Beauty project.

Writer's Blockade

OK this has become a little more serious than your average writer's block - it's been almost a month now, and I have several projects I could be working on, and I have zip to show for all that time.

It didn't stop me from publishing - if things were finished, ready, on the table, I put them out there. My son's book, a Quaker pamphlet that had already been written, and a set of short stories from the late fall = and I could reasonable be expected to keep myself busy getting them all out there and publicizing them.

Yet I flagged on the publicity arc too. I was into BlueSky, but stopped. Stopped on Twitter. Stopped on Insta and Threads. Only Facebook, my tried and true, where I feel some obligation to my family out there.

Also got a story in an anthology, Furever Friends, over the holidays, and it's doing pretty well I think. in terms of getting my story out there to new audiences. My story was fun to write, because it involved my own puppy who I adore and who keeps me company an awful lot of the time. This also stirred me up to contribute to another anthology which will be a number of retellings of The Beauty and the Beast; mine will be the story about Thailand. In Thailand should the beast be a tiger? elephant? something else? Let me handle it.

So I'm doing ok being a writer but I'm kind of slipping on just writing which in my opinion is more important. And I have a gut-wrenching personal situation to blame (you can scour these weblogs and I probably didn't spell it out anywhere, but that's because of the personal nature of it; let's just say our marriage is fine but things are tough). This kind of keeps me from just sitting down and being free, at night or in the day. It's just not coming, not flowing. In times like this I hit the blogs heavily, and the personal diary which I've relied on a little more lately. But what about these projects? It's not happening on them. In particular there's a novel, one which I like, stopped dead in its tracks.

I actually took some time off of door-dashing, at my wife's suggestion, and it didn't help. You'd think that with a few more hours a day, and being retired and all, I ought to be able to crank something out. On the contrary. My wife was right that I was moping around, limping, feeling old, 'bout had my back broken, etc. But that's partly because of having grown kids who are in pretty bad shape. In some ways I'm lucky and I should know it. Every time I go out I see people with true mobility issues, and at my age (70) many of my friends are meeting cruel fates which on some level they must have deserved, and same goes for me. We're all in a kind of a slump. And a deep, cold, long, dry, unchanging winter isn't helping.

There are issues associated with being a writer, and putting your thoughts out there in the world. Lately I can't even put my pop art on Facebook; I've gotten inward, non-social, reclusive. I want to come straight home, scroll around, see if for some remote possible reason someone somewhere has bought or read my book. I've actually had fun reading other books - escapism is a joy to be had - but though I get a sale once in a while I'm not really enjoying the fruits of all this hard work. It's not really happening. Not quitting the day job, which is "retired." Just carrying on, and hoping my general good spirit will ride me across the sea,