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Mea Culpa

9/29/2023

As the timing of this post (intended for yesterday) shows, it’s all too easy for me to let time slip by, right along with my good intentions about getting down to the business of writing. Since I don’t have a fixed schedule to help keep me in line, it’s up to me to figure out how to juggle household needs, personal business, and writing to make sure I don’t fall too far behind in any one area. Most of the time, I think I do pretty well. Yesterday...well, not so much. Granted, I was legit busy with some things that had to be done, but I suspect the biggest reason for my lapse was simply feeling that I was off the leash after finishing copy editing for my upcoming Kentucky Oaks history on Wednesday.

Anyway, it’s time for me to get back on track. So, my apologies to anyone who looked here yesterday and found no update. I don’t have the hubris to say it won’t happen again (I know better), but I hope you’ll continue the writing journey with me even if it gets interrupted at times.

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Looking Back

9/21/2023

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I’m sure most writers have had the experience of coming back to a piece of writing after shelving it for a while. The good news is that rereading after a period of weeks, months, or even a year or more lets you come back to your work with fresh eyes, often leading to some significant improvements. The bad news is that you have to confront what you originally wrote. If you’re lucky, you’ll actually find you did a good, solid job requiring only minor tweaks. If not so lucky, you will find yourself confronting a literary train wreck in all its appalling glory. (This is admittedly more likely if you were drunk, high, seriously sleep-deprived, or otherwise in an altered mental state at the time you wrote it.) Even worse, if anything, you may find your work so sunk in mediocrity that you wonder if there’s anything in it that can be salvaged except as a remedy for insomnia. An outstandingly terrible piece may still contain an image, a conversation, a turn of phrase worth retrieving from the wreckage; a work as colorless as a bad textbook or the minutes of an average town council meeting is probably irredeemable.

That’s the nature of rereading a work in progress, but what about something that has already been in print for years? That was my experience recently when updating The Kingmaker: How Northern Dancer Founded a Racing Dynasty, which is scheduled to be re-released by Lyons Press in May. Seventeen years have gone by since the book was originally published, and since then, a lot of water has gone under the bridge.

Given that the book was initially released to good reviews, I didn’t expect rereading it to be a disconcerting experience. I already knew about a couple of relatively minor errors, which I was glad to have the chance to fix, and I remain reasonably content with the quality of the writing. Not completely satisfied; I’m sure I could do a better job now with nearly two decades’ further practice of my craft if I started from scratch, but that’s not the purpose of a reprint. The bulk of my time was spent on updating the accomplishments of the Dancer’s sons and descendants, which was a predictable issue given that some of his sons and virtually all his major grandsons were still in service at the time of The Kingmaker’s original release.

The moments of strangeness during the revision came when I had to update the tense of passages from present to past, reflecting the deaths of people and horses who had been very much alive at the time of initial publication. It is sobering to reread the words of someone you actually talked with while you were writing a manuscript and realize that they are now the words of the dead, and there is a sense of dislocation in revisiting the memories of events and horses that were fresh then but have now passed on while you continue.

I don’t find such reflections particularly morbid, but they are a kind of memento mori, a reminder that I, too, will pass on in my time and leave whatever wisdom or information or even humor I may impart in the words and memories I leave behind me. When I have gone on to my true home, I would like to think that what I leave behind will give rise to a smile or a moment’s thought or gratitude, just as others have left these things for me to remember when I read their words and remember a little of the life behind them.

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Letdowns

9/14/2023

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Letdowns are an inevitable part of a creative person’s life. You painted the best picture of your life; you sang your dream performance; you starred in the community theater’s play; your YouTube channel is up and running; your book is published … and invariably, that little voice comes up in the back of your mind that says, “So now what?”

I think part of the lost feeling is because you actually have time to stop and think about what you’ve done, but the passion that’s been driving your thinking for months or years is suddenly in the past. Part of it may be anxiety: how is your work being received? Part of it is probably going into an adrenaline slump after running like mad to get this thing done. And part of it is feeling like you need a new passion to latch onto, only you don’t quite know which way to turn.

It’s easy to turn the feeling of letdown into spinning one’s wheels or paralysis, but the fallow periods following a major achievement do have a place and a purpose. If you can keep from being sidetracked into either a hasty search for the next project or a depressed funk, the suddenly empty space is where you can reflect on where you have been and what truly draws you onward. It’s also a good place for discovering the work of others, for reading, for spending time with family and friends and green spaces—renewing your energies and refreshing and refilling the wells from which new ideas can arise. After all, we are not human doings; we are human beings, and it is in our being, not our doing, that God made us to have worth and value. We need the between spaces to come apart from our own busyness, remember who we are, and rest … before we just plain come apart.

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The Emotional Roller Coaster

9/7/2023

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In a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves, C. S. Lewis wrote, “Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills.” Over thirty years later, with fourteen books published in genres ranging from scholarly literary analyses to poetry to science fiction and the first book of his beloved Narnia series (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) just hitting print, Lewis portrayed his relationship to writing in another light: “Ink is a deadly drug. One wants to write. I cannot shake off the addiction.”

I suspect that for most writers, the relationship to the Muses is similarly ambivalent; writing can be a joy, but it is also quite capable of being obsession and sometimes sheer drudgery (as any writer who has plowed through the tasks of completing a major revision or constructing an index can attest). What it is not—at least in my experience—is good therapy, at least not when writing for eventual publication. (Journaling as a therapeutic exercise is a different ball game altogether, and is best left between oneself and one’s therapist.) Perhaps it is different for poets, who (by their own testimonies) often don’t grasp the full import of what they have written until it is reflected back to them by others. And perhaps a fiction writer can take the path of Stephen King, who admitted that he used his childhood phobias as the foundations for his bestselling horror stories. For most of us prosy sorts, though, it’s best to have one’s psychological house somewhat in order before committing ink to paper, for putting a book out in print is more likely to reveal what shape your self-concept is in than to heal it.

The reason that writing for publication generally isn’t therapeutic is simple: it isn’t about you. In writing for an audience, you are putting not just your writing but your investment of yourself on the firing line of others’ judgment. More often than not, the exhilaration of seeing your brainchild in print is followed by the low of realizing that sales aren’t what you hoped. Reviews? If you did your job well, you can expect to see more good than bad ones, but it only takes one scathing opinion—put out in public for all to see—to leave you feeling as if you’d taken a dagger to the gut. Never mind that the critic’s opinion may be based on personal agendas, ideology, or a general dislike of your topic rather than the specific merit of your writing; even the kindest and best-meant of criticism is not easy to take, let alone the sort that is anything but.

With Dream Derby: The Myth and Legend of Black Gold coming out in five days, I am getting reacquainted with the emotional roller coaster that comes with releasing a book. The difference between my experience as a novice author twenty years ago and my experience now is this: back then, the emotions were raw and new, and I really had no realistic idea of what to expect. Now, I know what can happen; I just don’t know what will happen. I am not sure that this is an improvement. Still, as with much of life, all I can do is to prepare myself to accept the worst while hoping for the best.

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Mea Culpa

Looking Back

Letdowns

The Emotional Roller Coaster

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