Sorry, Baseball Fans

If you came here hoping to find out about the baseball player Bobby Cramer, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but this isn't his site.  It's the site for a fictional character that I created in 1994 without any knowledge of anyone else with the name.  As they say in the movies, "All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental."

By the way, there are a lot of Bobby Cramers out there besides the one born in Toledo, Ohio, on September 16, 1961 and christened Robert Holland Cramer.  But he's the only one I'm writing about.

On This Date

Here's an excerpt from Bobby Cramer:

I first met Bobby Cramer on Sunday, May 25, 1980, a little over two months before my eighteenth birthday. He was a year older than me. I had heard of him and his family, but it wasn’t until the Memorial Day Tea Dance at the country club that I actually met him in person.

I don't remember why I chose that particular date, and I certainly didn't have any idea that the calendars of 1980 and 2014 would align so that May 25 would fall on a Sunday in each year.  After all, I wrote that passage in 1995.  All I remember was that's where and when I knew that Richard, the narrator, and Bobby first met.

I'm not sure why dates are important to me, but when I began writing the novel, it needed a starting point because I knew where I wanted it to end.  So far, throughout all the years, I've kept that perspective.  I've also had to remind myself that certain things we take for granted thirty-four years later -- the internet, cell phones, social media -- and changes in life views -- the AIDS crisis, political winds and the acceptance of marriage equality -- were not there or were just being thought of.  I was also looking back on recent history in 1995 at the callow age of 42.  Now it seems like antiquity... at least to some.

I've tried to be faithful to the time and to events that were going on in the story's time frame, but they are not big players.  The hostage crisis in Iran is mentioned in passing, as is the eruption of Mount St. Helen's and the presidential election of 1980.  But in the day-to-day lives of the people in Bobby Cramer, they get little more than passing mention because in our own lives, do they really touch us deeply?  Some do, but mostly they are outside of the frame of the daily lives you and I think about, and so it is with my characters.  They are ripples.

Reading Writing

I have been sharing my novel writing -- both Bobby Cramer and The Purer, Brighter Years -- with people by reading them sections and chapters out loud.  It reveals a lot.

I started sharing The Purer, Brighter Years when I joined a little writing group about a year ago.  (By the way, you might recall that I wrote a play of the same name a long, long time ago.  That play was done once in a staged reading in Traverse City, Michigan, and has never been heard from again.  I re-claimed the title.)  The responses to it from my fellow writers was good, both in terms of positive feedback and insights and suggestions.  But it also made me aware of what works and what doesn't, and as I read the pages -- no more than ten -- out loud, I immediately saw things that could be cut, heard what clunked and what sang, and found whole passages that could be thrown out.  I also found places where I needed more exposition, explanation, and insight.

When I started with the group, I purposely avoided sharing Bobby Cramer with them.  For one thing, reading a 1,200 page novel ten pages a week meant it would take two years to get to where I am now, and I'm still writing.  Second, Bobby was never meant to be published.  I just wanted to write the story for myself, explore his character and his life, and leave it as my own private work.

That's how it was going until a couple of months ago when I was having lunch with a colleague at work and we got to talking about my writing.  I boldly offered to read her some of The Purer, Brighter Years, and she took me up on it.  So every day at lunch I would read her a chapter, and we'd discuss it.  Since I was doing it almost every day, within a few weeks I had read her everything I'd written in that story... and left her hanging with a real cliffhanger that I'm still working on.  Now what?

Despite my vow, I started reading her Bobby Cramer.  As I did, I started reading it over and over again, and I started editing, cutting, adding, and now I'm on track to finish it before I finish reading it aloud.  (Not to worry about PBY; there's time to finish it, too.)

What I've learned in the process is that there are things my subconscious writer does that I'm not even aware of in telling the story.  Parallelisms, confluence of moments, contrasts of characters, climaxes and denouements that flow from telling the tale and listening to the inner Bobby and the rest of the cast.  It may not be Chaucer or Fitzgerald, but it amazes me that in hearing the story out loud, in my own voice, how much more I'm learning about the people that I'm writing about.

A Promise

I know... It's been almost a year since I wrote anything on this blog.  If you stopped by here and think I've dropped off the face of the earth, well, I haven't.  I've been spending most of my time over at Bark Bark Woof Woof and haven't had the time to stop by here and catch up.

On the writing front, I've been making a lot of progress on the novel Bobby Cramer.  Seriously.  It is up to 1,206 pages (Courier 12 pitch double space) and I've been sharing it with a friend at work, one section at a time.  More to come, but right now it's like being back from a long break.

I've also been working on the story that started out as "Untitled" and has grown into a novel with a tentative title of The Purer, Brighter Years.  I've been sharing it with the writer's group that I joined last March and they've been very helpful in shaping it.

So... I make this promise.  I will post here at Bobby Cramer at least once a week, and I will be writing about writing.  I'll save the politics for BBWW.

Writing On Writing - Part 13

In 1991 I attended my first William Inge Festival. The honoree that year was Edward Albee. It's no secret that he is gay, but you really can't tell that from the plays that he writes. His best-known play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is about two married couples, and he doesn't throw in any apparent gay theme or subtext. (Scholars and dramaturgs may debate that, but that's not what this discussion is about.) So I asked him at a panel discussion whether he saw himself as a gay writer or a writer who happens to be gay, and what he saw was the difference between gay literature and literature with gay characters. Mr. Albee's answer was typically epigramatic, but he said he really didn't think much about it, but if he had to choose he'd say he was a writer who happens to be gay, and the difference between gay literature and literature with gay characters depended on who was reading it.

It occurs to me that I should ask myself the same question. If I go back and examine the work that I've produced, especially that which has seen the light of day either on the stage or on the screen -- computer screen, that is -- most if not all of them have gay characters or gay subtexts and themes. Does that make it gay literature? I suppose, but I wouldn't want to pigeonhole my writing any more than a black author would want his or her work categorized as being strictly for a black readership or J.K. Rowling would want the Harry Potter series to be considered just for children. I write about gay characters for the obvious reason that I am gay and I write about what I know. I don't see the world strictly in terms of my sexuality, but it does play a part; at times more deeply felt than others. Being gay, though, isn't the end-all and be-all for me, and it isn't for my characters. Bobby Cramer is gay, but he's not the only gay character in the novel; he's surrounded on all sides by straight friends and the straight world. In Small Town Boys, most of the characters are gay but it's not all about the gay world, and there's no overt depiction of sex (sorry, readers of STB; if you're waiting for a graphic description of gay sex, it's not going to happen). There is a lot more to being gay than just who you sleep with.

Apparently I'm not the only author who sees that gay literature isn't just for queers anymore. There was an article several weeks ago in the New York Times Book Review about the demise of gay/lesbian bookstores because gay-themed literature has gone mainstream. I remember one bookstore in particular in Albuquerque called Sisters' and Brothers'. They have a wide selection of books, magazines, gifts, and music. The books were a mix of everything from classic literature with gay characters, like E.M. Forrester's Maurice and Mary Renault's The Charioteer, to more contemporary works like Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown and the Tales of the City series by Armistead Maupin; books you'd find at most mainstream (i.e. Barnes & Noble) bookstores. Their shelves are crammed with many good books of all genres -- mysteries, detective stories, and comedies, and non-fiction topics as well; history, biography, psychology, spirituality; just about every topic you'd see in a mainstream bookstore, but all focused on the gay life. (I hate the term "gay lifestyle." That makes it sound like a decorating choice. It's life, period.) Of course there were also the erotic fare; collections of short stories that were just long enough to inspire the desired reaction, and just plain porn like Saving Ryan's Privates or some such. Hey, it's marketing; the store knows what sells, but you could see that it was suffering the same fate as nearly all small independent bookstores and the only thing keeping the doors open was the stuff that couldn't be sold in a megamall bookstore. They also made a point of welcoming straight customers; one way of getting to know someone is by seeing what it is they read and write about.

It's ironic that a bookstore that set out to be both a resource for a niche audience and a place for educating others is now a victim of its own success: the mainstreaming of gay literature. What was shocking a generation ago is now the stuff of sitcoms, and if I ever attempt to sell Bobby Cramer or Small Town Boys, I hope the publisher will not think of them as gay stories; they're stories with characters who happen to be gay by an author that happens to be gay as well. I'd like to see them on the shelf at Barnes & Noble one day -- and at Sisters' and Brothers' too.

Making It Up As I Go Along

I may have touched on this topic before. To the two or three of you who have read the Writing on Writing series at Bark Bark Woof Woof and repeated way back at the beginning of this blog, I apologize if this is repeating something I've said before. However, the latest chapter of Small Town Boys (see below) made me think about one rather important aspect of my writing process.

It may come as a shock to learn that I do not plan out my writing -- my fiction writing, that is -- before I sit down to write. (Some might say that I don't do that with my blog writing, but neener neener to you too.) I meet the characters, get to know them, and then let them lead me on to tell their stories. That may sound as if it's random and borders on the episodic, but I'm usually able to find a discernible thread in them and I trust the characters to show me how the story comes out. If it leads nowhere, I stop. Actually, I never begin. More often than not I've killed a story idea when there's no there there, and the characters go away. Don't worry; they usually come back with better material the next time.

I don't know exactly when I thought of the idea for Small Town Boys, but it was when I was living in Colorado and working at a cafe in a small town, waiting tables to supplement my income from two other part-time jobs I had, so it had to be sometime around 1990. It was going to be a story about a diner in a little town in New Mexico, and the title was going to be Tucumcari Tonight! That was from the billboards you see along Interstate 40 that runs across New Mexico, advertising the town of Tucumcari and hoping that travellers would stop and spend the night in one of their many motels that stretch along old Route 66. In fact, the first chapter of Small Town Boys and the description of the people and the cafe are from the first draft of the story. The plot was pretty simple: life in the small town is disrupted when the governor shows up to cut the ribbon on the last stretch of the interstate that is opening, and he stops in for a glass of lemonade. (Something like that actually happened when I was working in the cafe in Colorado. Governor Roy Romer stopped in for a take-out meal on his way through town. The governor was in and out in about five minutes. Most of the people in the diner -- all Republicans -- were speechless.)

Well, obviously I never got very far with Tucumcari Tonight! If I had, you'd be reading it here. But about five or six years after I hatched that idea I was toying around with it when Donny Hollenbeck showed up, much like Bobby Cramer had: a fully-formed character right down to the brand of cigarettes he smokes and the way he looks at life. He is not as obsessed with finding the reasons behind things as Bobby is. He is an adult and takes things pretty much as they come. Bobby has yet to achieve that, and from what I get from him, he never will. Donny, as one of my readers pointed out, has a somewhat melancholy yet lighthearted outlook on life. How come?

As J.R.R. Tolkien once said, "the tale grew in the telling." When I picked up the story of Donny Hollenbeck living in a small town in New Mexico when he'd obviously lived someplace else and had a somewhat mysterious past, I wanted to know what it was. Yeah, I know it sounds like I'm playing games -- c'mon, you're thinking: you must know the whole story -- I assure you that while I have a very good idea about the overall story arc and I am sure that I can get the story to a satisfying conclusion that will answer most, if not all, of the the questions, I do not know the little details that will make up the story itself because the characters are still growing as I write. There are things that they know that I don't, and only when I get to where I need to know them will they tell me. I guess it's one form of job security for fictional characters: hold out on the author until the last. Donny is doing just that with me. I know where he is going...but he's taking me back on this journey with him so I can see how he got there. In many ways I am making it up as I go along, but I also feel fully confident that I am being guided by the one person who really knows the story better than I do.

Getting to Know You

Those two or three of you who are a regular visitor to this blog may be wondering why I've been, well, ignoring it. First, I didn't promise I would post every day like I do at Bark Bark Woof Woof. Second, I've been devoting a lot of my writing attention to Small Town Boys while Bobby Cramer takes a well-earned break. After all, I did write nearly one hundred new pages in it and spent a lot of time doing substantial revisions to the earlier pages, rounding out Bobby's life before the story really begins and finding a lot of those little annoying things like anachronisms (it's 1979 and that was a long time ago) and tyops typos. Third, I've been putting some of my writing -- mainly Small Town Boys -- on The Practical Press.

TPP has been running for about two months now, and I have found the experience to be amazing. This is the first time in my writing career where I've participated in a cooperative venture like this -- well, at least since high school when our English class put together a mimeographed literary magazine as a senior project. This time the format is much more forgiving, and we have a little wider audience.

The most impressive thing has been the outpouring of writing. We have at least three serialized novels in progress (and I may have missed one or two), a series of short stories, poetry (and not all of it meeting the criterion of "Bad Poetry Friday" -- it's very good), and one or two pieces of playwriting. Apparently we all had a lot of stuff we were working on just waiting for a place to publish.

If the eyes are the mirror of the soul, then the pen is the voice of it. Through these writings I have gained insight to some of the people who make up the core of this group. I know what they love, what they hate, what frightens them, what awes them, and what touches them. They may not have revealed all their secrets -- writers, after all, must keep something for later -- but they have allowed us as readers into their world for the moment, and through that we have also seen what touches us. While we write alone and I have yet to meet any other members of The Practical Press in person, I feel I know them. Writing, in the end, becomes a collaboration between the writer and the reader... we are connected by the words.

I remember the first time I met a famous playwright whose work I had admired for many years. We became friends and as I learned about him and his life and what mattered to him I began to understand his work more deeply than I did when I just read the scripts or saw the performances. I remember thinking that now it all made sense -- why a particular scene, for example, was crafted a certain way. I felt like I was let in on a secret the rest of the audience would never know. But I think that no matter how well I knew him, it didn't change the the meaning of the play or the impact of the characters and their actions. I'm beginning to feel the same way about my fellow writers, and it is a comfort and an inspiration.

Stealing the Soul

Leonard Pitts is a great writer and columnist for the Miami Herald. He's so good, in fact, that somebody named Chris Cecil decided to copy his style...and everything else.

Dear Chris Cecil:

Here's how you write a newspaper column. First, you find a topic that engages you. Then you spend a few hours banging your head against a computer screen until what you've written there no longer makes you want to hurl.

Or, you could just wait till somebody else writes a column and steal it. That's what you've been doing on a regular basis.

Before Tuesday, I had never heard of you or the Daily Tribune News, in Cartersville, Ga., where you are associate managing editor. Then one of my readers, God bless her, sent me an e-mail noting the similarities between a column of mine and one you had purportedly written.

Intrigued, I did a little research on your paper's website and found that you had ''written'' at least eight columns since March that were taken in whole or in part from my work. The thefts ranged from the pilfering of the lead from a gangsta rap column to the wholesale heist of an entire piece I did about Bill Cosby. In that instance, you essentially took my name off and slapped yours on.

On March 11, I wrote: I like hypocrites. You would, too, if you had this job. A hypocrite is the next best thing to a day off. Some pious moralizer contradicts his words with his deeds and the column all but writes itself. It's different with Bill Cosby.

On May 12, you "wrote:" I like hypocrites. You would, too, if you had this job. A hypocrite is the next best thing to a day off. Some pious moralizer contradicts his words with his deeds and the column all but writes itself. It's different with Bill Cosby.

The one that really got me, though, was your theft of a personal anecdote about the moment I realized my mother was dying of cancer. "The tears surprised me," I wrote. "I pulled over, blinded by them." Seven days later, there you were: "The tears surprised me. I pulled over, blinded by them on central Kentucky's I-75."

Actually, it happened at an on-ramp to the Artesia Freeway in Compton, Calif.

I've been in this business 29 years, Mr. Cecil, and I've been plagiarized before. But I've never seen a plagiarist as industrious and brazen as you. My boss is calling your boss, but I doubt you and I will ever speak. Still, I wanted you to hear from me. I wanted you to understand how this feels.

Put it like this: I had a house burglarized once.

This reminds me of that. Same sense of violation, same apoplectic disbelief that someone has the testicular fortitude to come into your place and take what is yours.

Not being a writer yourself, you won't understand, but I am a worshiper at the First Church of the Written Word, a lover of language, a student of its rhythm, its music, its violence and its power.

My words are important to me. I struggle with them, obsess over them. Show me something I wrote and like a mother recounting a child's birth, I can tell you stories of how it came to be, why this adjective here or that colon there.

See, my life's goal is to learn to write. And you cannot cut and paste your way to that. You can only work your way there, sweating out words, wrestling down prose, hammering together poetry. There are no shortcuts.

You are just the latest in a growing list of people -- in journalism and out -- who don't understand that, who think it's OK to cheat your way across the finish line. I've always wanted to ask one of you: How can you do that? Have you no shame? No honor or pride? How do you face your mirror knowing you are not what you purport to be? Knowing that you are a fraud?

If your boss values his paper's credibility, you will soon have lots of free time to ponder those questions.

But before you go, let me say something on behalf of all of us who are struggling to learn how to write, or just struggling to be honorable human beings:

The dictionary is a big book. Get your own damn words. Leave mine alone.

P.S.: Chris Cecil was fired Thursday by Daily Tribune News Publisher Charles Hurley, immediately after he learned of the plagiarism.

Good for you, Mr. Pitts. And good for Mr. Hurley for kicking Chris Cecil's ass out into the street.

It's gotten so easy to cut-and-paste nowadays; most bloggers would have a tough time without being able to do it, me included. But giving credit where credit is due is fundamental, and ripping off someone else's work and posting it as your own is just plain wrong. That is why I am so careful to note quotes as such with indentations and links. I want my readers to know who wrote what...yeah, like anyone would ever confuse my writing with the works of Leonard Pitts. And I hope that if I ever inadvertantly don't give a proper citation, someone will let me know.

Mr. Pitts is right when he says that writing is hard work. Being original is tough, and trying to come up with a new idea for a post or a column or a novel is one of the hardest things there is about this business. There have been many times when I've seen a great posting at another blog or read a fine book or play and wished I'd written it. But I also respect their creativity and genius and go on, inspired not to copy their work but find the spark and the muse in my own ideas and life. That is one of the things that makes writing -- for me at least -- not just a diversion but a passion. That is why I will spend hours slaving over things like Bobby Cramer or Can't Live Without You that I know people may never read or see on the stage. That's not why I write; it's the sheer joy of doing it. I may be flattering myself to think that someone would steal my writing, but that's another issue. People like Chris Cecil may steal the words, but they will never feel the passion behind them, and that's what makes plagiarism more than just a crime: it's a sin.

Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.

The Economy of Style

One of the reasons I try things like writing exercises like Small Town Boys -- which seems to be taking on a life of its own -- is that I try to push the envelope on my writing style. Whereas Bobby Cramer is long on detail and introspection, in Small Town Boys I am trying for a little more distance and objectivity from the characters and doing it economically.

It's not easy. I have to keep reminding myself that I don't need to account for every moment of the characters' lives and I don't need to know their every thought. Their actions and reactions should be what clues the reader in to what's going on. Give the reader some credit for figuring out what's going on, and allow the characters the space to grow and evolve without the author's fine hand in every move. Sometimes they can surprise you.

That doesn't mean I'm going to go back and revise what I've done in Bobby Cramer. I have purposefully gone into great detail about his life and his thoughts and feelings. That's probably because I feel a lot closer to him than I do to the characters in Small Town Boys. For one thing, Donny Hollenbeck is not a very introspective guy. He takes what comes and doesn't devote a lot of energy to figuring out why things happen. Unlike Bobby, who seems at times to be tossed like a leaf in a river and unable to control his life, Donny sets things in motion and watches what happens, but in the end he will not let someone else control his life, and when he makes up his mind to do something, he does it and never looks back...much.

Donny and Bobby are opposites, then -- but very much alike. It sounds like I'm writing the same characters over again. Probably, but then most writers do that -- look at the women in Tennessee Williams's plays or the men in the plays of William Inge. (Not that I'm comparing myself favorably to them, mind you.) That's a form of economy, too.

Switch Hitting

Last week on The Practical Press I posted the first chapter of a story called Small Town Boys that I started writing back in 2000 or so when I was having a dry spell with Bobby Cramer. I had written about 100 pages or so and was getting pretty involved with it when I suddenly stopped and went back to Bobby, picking up right where I had left off. Small Town Boys is a third person narrative about Donny Hollenbeck, a college-aged guy from Ohio who moved out west in the early 1990's. As in the fashion of most of my writing, it's told in flashback style.

This weekend I picked up Small Town Boys and began working on it again, letting Bobby have a break for a little while and getting back to telling about Donny's adventures in L.A.

One of my friends once asked me how I could keep two story lines and two different casts separate -- and just how different are Donny and Bobby? Actually, it's not that hard; they're two facets of the same gem, actually, as are all of my characters. In fact, Donny shows up as the main character in Can't Live Without You. He's got a different story line in the play, though -- for one thing, in the play he lives in Florida, and he's a writer. In Small Town Boys he has no such ambition. There are a lot of other differences that aren't worth going into, and in the end it's all an exploration of the same character. After all, most writers write the same people over and over again.

The best part is that it's fun.

Bobby Cramer in New Mexico

I'm in Santa Fe, New Mexico, tonight visiting relatives. On the drive up from Albuquerque I was reminded once again of the singular beauty of this desert and mountain landscape, and I thought I would share a snippet from Bobby Cramer when Bobby first goes to summer camp in the mountains of New Mexico. The year is 1971.

When he was nine he was enrolled at a summer camp in the mountains of New Mexico. His father told him he was going to have the time of his life. He would get to ride horses, camp out in the woods, and climb mountains. He would get to meet lots of other boys from all over the country. He told him this one spring day when Magda [his nanny] was off on one of her few trips back to Minnesota, and he told him in such a way that Bobby thought even his own father was afraid to tell Magda. He showed him pictures of the camp and told him stories about the fun he would have. When he left in June for the eight weeks away, Magda dutifully packed his trunk and rode with the Cramers to the airport to see him off. All she said was to be a good boy and watch out for bears.

It was an all-day journey. A flight to Chicago, then to Albuquerque, then on a chartered Greyhound bus proctored by counselors in bright red shirts that took them on the hour-long ride up the interstate to Santa Fe. Bobby stared out the window at the desert landscape; the reddish-brown earth dotted with piñon trees and the vast empty expanses spreading to the distant mountains was like nothing he’d ever seen before. Then the bus got off the interstate and began the slow climb into the mountains. After a half-hour of twisting and bumpy roads, over narrow bridges crossing dry arroyos, past stark rock outcroppings hiding the last vestiges of snow under their shadows, Bobby saw the telltale red shingled roofs of Sun Mountain Ranch poking through the ponderosa pines. Built during the Depression as a two hundred acre training facility for the Civilian Conservation Corps, it became Sun Mountain Ranch Camp For Boys in 1947 when Mac McCormack, a physical education teacher from Santa Fe, bought the property and opened a four-week camp session with ten boys, three counselors, and two horses. One of those counselors had been Holland Cramer. By 1971 the camp had grown to eight weeks for a hundred boys ranging in age from nine to eighteen. It offered riding, hiking, backpacking, and the usual camp activities such as archery and crafts. Mac still ran the place, but he was seventy-five and semi-retired. His son Frank handled most of the director duties, and a woman everyone knew simply as Jeanne handled the administration. Frank was a friendly yet distant man, more interested in the accounting aspects of the operation and the family’s real estate developments, and few campers knew him by sight. The driving spirit of Sun Mountain was Elli McCormack Sanchez, Mac’s daughter. She was in her early forties and had grown up at camp. She had gone off to college, dropped out, bummed around the West Coast doing all the things kids in the sixties did, until she was busted for drug possession at Los Angeles International Airport. She spent a year on probation and drug rehab and returned to Santa Fe with a new appreciation for her family and what camp could do for kids. She gave the weekly vespers service talks, a collection of cheerful, upbeat slogans that were meant to inspire confidence in one’s own abilities, and that your toughest competitor was yourself. Her husband, Gil Sanchez, was a lawyer in Santa Fe, and rarely set foot on camp property.

When the bus pulled up to the playground, Bobby got off and fell into a crowd of laughing and cheering boys and counselors. Mac McCormack came up to Bobby, shook his hand, and said he was glad to meet the son of one of his oldest friends.

At first Bobby didn’t know what to make of the place. The air was crisp and smelled of pine and dust. The rustic buildings were spare but comfortable, and the sky was so impossibly blue that Bobby thought it must be the more than mile-high altitude playing tricks on him. His cabin was called Arapahoe, bunking in with fourteen other boys who were very different than the solemn and well-mannered ones at school. Some were loud and boisterous, some had strange accents, but all of them were friendly, and the first afternoon they showed Bobby and some of the other new campers around, taking them to the barn with stalls of patient horses munching their hay, the archery range set against a hillside with bales of old hay propping up the targets, the ropes course across a dry creek bed, and the chapel area cut into the hillside below the massive log cabin lodge. The older boys in the other cabins further up the hill were bigger and stronger, yet they too welcomed him and treated him like a friend.

His cabin counselor was a college student from Denver named Tom. He was tall, lean, and quiet, and he ran the cabin with a calm and firm hand, never raising his voice. When things got too noisy or the jokes got a little too off-color, Tom would admonish them with a gentle “Hey, guys, that’s enough.” Bobby liked Tom from the minute he met him; he was the first grown-up that didn’t treat him like a child.

Bobby had never slept in any place other than his own room, and at first he wondered how he could sleep with all the other people around, but the first night, after all the traveling, all the new sights, the welcoming dinner and the first night campfire, he found himself nodding off as Mac McCormack led them in Taps. He snuggled in under the warm blanket in his bunk, murmured “goodnight” to Tom, and was asleep in seconds. The next morning Tom led the whole cabin set off for a day of learning how to hike a mountain trail.

For the next eight weeks, Bobby was happier than at any other time he could remember. He learned how to ride a horse, how to hike, and how to build a campfire in the woods. He learned it was okay to get dirty and sleep in his underwear, and he found he liked being around the other boys without having to worry about always minding his manners. He learned jokes that he knew he could never tell at school and even told a few of his own. He wrote letters home to his parents filled with stories of hikes and backpack trips, riding horses, getting caught in a summer snowstorm about the tree line, and spending a night in a mountain meadow listening to the coyotes bark.

Suddenly it was August. At the end of camp everyone joined in the final campfire as the awards were handed out. Bobby got a prize for most improved younger hiker. Then the lights were dimmed as the final award – the Golden Feather – was awarded.

The Golden Feather was the camp’s highest award for citizenship. Winners were chosen by a vote of the campers and staff. Tradition held that only boys who didn’t go out of their way to earn it but just tried their best at everything won the coveted prize, awarded on the last night of camp in a very solemn ceremony. The award was open to any boy, but in all the years it had never been given to someone who hadn’t been at camp for at least five summers. The name of the winner was burned into the Golden Feather plaque over the fireplace, and this year the winner was a boy named Dowd Sullivan. He was a muscular seventeen-year-old giant from Winnetka, Illinois, and he wept like a child when his name was called. Everyone stood and sang Taps and went back to their cabin, calling out their goodnights to everyone. The next day Bobby flew home and began counting the days until camp would start again next summer.

Sun Mountain became his refuge from the life under the watchful eye of Magda and the stifling procession of school and manners. It was the place where he learned about things other boys thought and talked about; things he could never talk about at home, including the mysteries of the male body. It was at camp that he learned about jerking off, and the summer he was twelve on a camp-out in the Pecos wilderness he shared a tent with a boy named Charley who was mature for his age. Charley had no qualms in giving a demonstration on the finer techniques of masturbation and encouraged Bobby to try it himself. Bobby was thrilled that Charley would share such secrets with him. This would never have happened at home; in fact, Bobby couldn’t fathom any of the boys he knew at school being willing to even talk about it, even though he knew they probably did. But Sun Mountain was a world apart, and he came to believe that the true friendship he had with the other boys and his counselors was the way of the world. Home and school was the artificial world; Sun Mountain and New Mexico was real life to him.

Cross-posted at The Practical Press.

Writing Under the Influence

(Writing from Albuquerque, New Mexico)

I am a susceptible writer. I read a novel or a play and I become aware the author's rhythm, speech patterns, and his style. Invariably it leeches into my own writing, and even if I am careful not to plagiarize, I can sense the influence of others. I try to minimize it, and no one -- yet -- has come to me and said, "Wow, you sure did a lousy imitation of ______," filling in the blank with the name of an author I'd recently read. My excuse is that I'm honoring their work, not plundering it.

And then there are authors that stay with me and become a part of me, their influence going so deep that unconsciously I channel them when write, even if it's on a topic or with characters they never imagined. One such author is the late Richard Bradford.

Red Sky at Morning was published in 1968. It is a coming-of-age novel set in the fictional town of Sagrado, New Mexico, during World War II. The adventures of Josh Arnold, a transplanted seventeen-year-old from Mobile, Alabama, and his friends are carefully crafted into a funny and touching story about life and learning in an exotic place. I remember reading the novel when I was about seventeen, and was captivated by the characters and dry, almost deadpan, narration. There was something about the combination that really touched me, and I never forgot the story. (It was well-received by the critics, and true to the fashion of the time, it was turned into a film starring Richard Thomas, Desi Arnaz, Jr., and Claire Bloom. They ruined it.)

In 1978 I moved out to Santa Fe, New Mexico for a year to be a ski bum. I was between grad schools and not ready to start Real Life, and besides, after reading Red Sky at Morning, I wanted to see the magic of the land and the sky that is so well described in the book. When I arrived I learned that the town of Sagrado was a thinly-disguised version of Santa Fe, and I reveled in discovering the places and atmosphere were as true to life as Mr. Bradford described them. I found a paperback copy of the book at a bookstore and re-read it between shifts running a chairlift at the Santa Fe Ski Basin. It was all there: the scent of the pines, the achingly clear skies, the deep rich color of the land, and the laid-back and mellow tempo of the people. I felt a sense of both deep admiration and envy for the author's simple style of bringing it so sharply into focus for a reader who, until then, could only read about it.

Life and circumtances took me away from Santa Fe after that winter, but in 1995 I moved back to New Mexico, partially drawn by the memories of the last time there and the reality of finding a good place to live and work. The first weekend I was back I drove to the hills over Santa Fe and looked west to the mountains in the distance to absorb the sun and the sky. I was already in the first pages of Bobby Cramer. I had already planned to put part of the story in the mountains, and putting it in New Mexico, gently paying homage to the influence of Richard Bradford and my own adventures in the mountains when I was not much older than Josh Arnold, was a natural choice.

I'm heading up to Santa Fe tomorrow. I'm taking Bobby with me. I don't think Mr. Bradford would mind.

The Practical Press

Under the guidance of Kenneth Quinnell (T. Rex's Guide to Life), a new literary blog, The Practical Press, has been launched. It is "the place where bloggers come to be creative -- fiction, poetry, drama, screenplays, art, photos, literary reviews and discussion, we do it all." I'm proud to be a part of this new effort. I encourage you to link to it and stop by to see what we're writing about.

For my part, I'll be contributing some of my work on Bobby Cramer, some of my short plays and short stories, and perhaps some essays on writing along the lines of my Writing on Writing series that started here.

If you'd like to be a part of this new adventure, check out the submission guidelines, and drop us a line.

Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.

Re-Reading

Yesterday I ran off six copies of the revised Can't Live Without You, hole-punched them, and bound them in preparation for my trip to the William Inge Theatre Festival. It occurred to me that even though I'd added about three pages of dialogue, gotten rid of some outdated references (Hertz doesn't rent Ford Contours anymore), and done some other tweaking that I've been wanting to do since the last time I'd read it, I hadn't actually read the whole play since...well, since May 2002 when I finished the final first draft.

So I sat down and read it. And guess what... it works. There were no glaring errors or typos, the new sections fit in seamlessly, and the characters still sound like they did when I first met them almost four years ago. I even laughed at some of the lines that I'd forgotten I'd written. (Believe it or not, I have a tin ear when it comes to knowing what will get a laugh. Many times I've written a line that I think is on a par with Neil Simon and the audience sits there stone-faced, only to have them stop the show on a line that I didn't think was funny enough to get a titter.)

The best part is that this little exercise that I undertook in December 2001 to break a writer's block in the novel stands on its own -- you don't have to read Bobby Cramer to know what's going on in the play. (Good thing, too; it's still being written.) With any luck I'm going to find some people out there who are going to read it and like it enough to want to put on a staged reading of it or even consider producing it.

Book It

T. Rex has an idea.

Inspired by Bobby Cramer, Mustang Bobby's blog about his novel in progress, and by my own unpublished writings, I came up with an idea.

Now, like most of you other bloggers, one of the reasons I blog is so that I have a regular writing gig. Like some of you, I'm sure, I got into writing by writing poetry fiction, not political stuff. And, like many of you, I have a resevoir of unpublished fiction and poetry that is just screaming at me for an audience.

So, here's what I propose. A group of us should get together and create our own online magazine for the purpose of publishing our fiction, poetry, drama and other literary works. Theoretically, we would push it in the direction of becoming a legitimate publication that amateur writers would submit stuff to and the like, maybe we'd even appear in literary market and things like that. We could also include articles and essays on literature, reviews, and stuff about getting published or the art of writing.

As you can probably imagine, I like the idea very much.

Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.

Playing Around

In preparation for my trip to the William Inge Theatre Festival in a couple of weeks, I went back and looked at my play Can't Live Without You. I wrote it very quickly -- about three weeks total writing time -- starting over Christmas break in 2001 and finishing it in March 2002 as a diversion from the writer's block I was having on Bobby Cramer. Other than a quick read-through by some students sitting around in a theatre class, I've never heard it out loud, and I'm hoping to change that at Inge; what better place to gather theatre people together and read through it?

Last night I went in and did some fine-tuning. I added a section that I've been thinking about for a long time, and worked on the end, which is always the toughest part of a play. All of the changes added about two pages to the manuscript, but I think it's an improvement. I'll find out soon, I hope; John Lloyd Young has promised to read it, and I'm going to hold him to it.

What's the play about? Thought you'd never ask. Donny Hollenbeck, a writer, lives in the Florida Keys with his girlfriend. He makes a comfortable income writing slick romance novels under the pen name of "Amanda Longington." Then one morning he is visited -- like Jacob Marley does to Scrooge -- by Bobby Cramer, the main character of the novel he abandoned when he got the job writing the romances. Donny has to choose between Bobby and Amanda.

Sometimes writing about what you're writing about helps break the block. In this case it did, and as an added bonus, I got what I think is a pretty good play out of it.

Bobby at 15

I'm a visual writer. I need an image to help me frame a story, and as I write I often think about the look of the space where the stories take place and what the people look like.

I came across this picture in my old photo files. I remember where I took the picture, but I don't know the kid's name; he was in a group shot that I was asked to take when I went to visit a friend and his family in Colorado back in the summer of 2000.

I cropped it down and fiddled with the contrast, and the result was what I imagined Bobby Cramer looked like when he was about fifteen. He's looking hopeful, but a little wary.

Anyway, that's what I see.

Tangent on Tangents

A few weeks ago I noted that I had gotten off on a tangent in the novel that seemed to be taking me away from the main story line, so I yanked it out and put it in a file called Rough Cuts. It turns out that I am finding I need that tangent after all; it is an integral part of the storyline and that I would be missing an important part of the development of Bobby as both a person and a man if I didn't use it.

So it's going back in but not in the same way I wrote it at first; in fact, nothing in the early version is useable. But the idea works, and that's where I'm going to take it from.

Without getting into massive detail, I realized that at this point in the story Bobby needs to come to some very powerful realizations. The first is that he is about to begin his adulthood; childhood and adolescence are behind him now and he has to come to grips with What Happens Next. Right now he is applying to college not out of any desire to further his education but because that's what's expected of a young man about to graduate from a prestigious New England boarding school; preferably attending some place like Yale, Brown, or Princeton. It has to dawn on him at some point, though, that there is a reason for him to go to college. That all the things he's spent the last twelve years or so learning both in the class room and out are put to use and that he wants to learn more. But about what?

It also is the time for Bobby to begin to see himself in the third person; that the world does not revolve around him alone and that such abstract qualities as empathy and even love are not inwardly directed. He has to realize that the next step in his growing up is becoming aware of his place in other people's lives and that the "Bobby Cramer" he thinks he is may be someone completely different than how others see him. And like some people, he is uncomfortable with that. He seeks to hide that real part of himself - the one that people demand to see when they say to others, "Be Yourself." Does Bobby like himself, or does he feel more comfortable hiding behind a mask, and how long can he do it?

Something has to occur to flip that switch; to engage the gears to bring about the evolution of Bobby from adolescent to adulthood. I know it will be a difficult transition - I speak from experience - but it all starts very simply, and when I thought back to how to make it happen, the answer was already there...in the file under Rough Cuts.

And so it goes forth.

Who's Who

You might want to keep this little guide handy. It's a cast list, so to speak, of the major characters in the novel - so far.

Bobby Cramer - the main character. Born in 1961, the son of a prominent physician in Toledo, Ohio.

Richard Barlow - the narrator. Born in 1962 and raised in the suburbs.

Josh Blanchard - friend of Bobby and Richard and a wise observer of life.

Sandy Fitzhugh - Bobby's first love.

There are a lot of other characters, but these are the ones that have most of the lines right now.

The story takes place in a variety of locales, including the fictional island of St. Edmund in the Caribbean, the mountains near Santa Fe, New Mexico, the suburbs of Boulder, Colorado, and a boarding school outside North Andover, Massachusetts. These guys get around.

Procrastination

I spent two hours last night going back to the beginning of the second section and tweaking and re-writing with the full awareness that I'm not working on the little roadblock in the current narrative. I tell myself that it's better to get it right back in the beginning, but I think I'm just rationalizing.

The novel is in four parts. The first part, called Now and Then, is told in brief sections, jumping between December 1995 and the summer of 1980 when Richard met Bobby, told in the first person by Richard. The second part, Robert Holland Cramer, tells of Bobby's life in the third person yet from his point of view, the idea being that he has told the story to Richard, and Richard is re-counting it. The third part, The Class of 1981, is Richard's senior year of high school and his own life story. It's told in first person, as is the last part, Baker Street, the story of their life together up to 1995. You with me so far? Good...I'll need to refer back to this later, because none of this has been written down as an actual outline.

So where I am now is getting close to the end of the second part in the actual writing, and I've hit a little speedbump: an idea for a plot episode that I had and plowed ahead with for about ten pages is suddenly beginning to bother me. I usually cure these by going back and re-reading and revising a part that has nothing to do with the new stuff, so that's what I've been doing, hoping that the idea will resolve itself when I get back to it. If it doesn't, I'll gut it and start from that point all over again.

I wonder if that's considered as much a part of the writing process as the actual writing.

Page count as of last night: 805 (Courier 10 double space).