Matter Gently Touching Anti-Matter

I had a horrible thought the other night. A nightmare, actually. I woke up all wild-eyed and sweaty. What if, the demon in my dream shrieked, What if both vicious Michael Moore and viperish Michelle Malkin are right?

So Here We Go Again

I’ve had five novels and a non-fiction book published in the last three years, and two of them won EPPIE Awards and one was optioned as a screenplay, so some of you are probably thinking, Well, here’s a guy who has found his so-called ‘voice’, so it’s easy for him to blather on about anything.

Maybe, but let’s take a closer look. Two of my books, Devils and The Heart of Desire, are science fiction. Two of them, Hollywood Havoc: The Trouble With Fat Boy, and Hollywood Havoc: The Llama Goes Up, are action/thrillers. The fifth one, Foul, is a murder mystery. All of them have a strong M/F love interest thread, but none of them are what you might call romances. In fact, my wife, who is my dearest fan, will also readily tell you that as a writer I am somewhat of a relationships retard.

So about a year and a half ago, I decided to do a story that aimed to be more relationships driven. I decided to do a war romance, something nostalgic and sad and true, like The English Patient, The War Lover or Brideshead Revisited.
Now, long ago, in my foolish youth, I lived through a brief period in Vietnam that few today realize (or are willing to recognize) ever existed-those few years after the French left and before the Americans took over the war. All was unstable as the colonialism faded, the insurgency was on the rise, and the Stars and Stripes were not yet in evidence across that old land with its moist, warm tropical climate and quaint, harsh, beautiful, and corrupt traditions. It was the most dangerous, colorful, and exciting time of my life, and I decided to write a story about some of the wonder and terror I’d seen and felt and some of the experiences I’d lived through.

And that’s how The Freight Train of Love was born—90,000 words that you might describe as a classic war romance with strong threads of action and a sense of nostalgia.
Now put on your thinking caps: If you were me, who would you send that book to? Well, my current publisher Double Dragon is excellent, but The Freight Train of Love didn’t seem to fit their list of sci-fi, fantasy & horror.
Me being a novice author in the romance biz, and also eager to get on with the next project, I didn’t do my homework and simply e-zapped a query off to one of the bigger romance publishers for what I was convinced would be a certain sale. And here’s the reply that came back a few days later:

Dear John,
I have read FREIGHT TRAIN OF LOVE and am sorry that I must pass on this project.
Although you have a wonderful story-telling style, this story seems more about Claire discovering herself through Jack’s reminiscing rather than a romance. The doomed love affair between Jack and Mia isn’t really a romance, since the definition of romance is “boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl-back” and a Happy Ever After. Jack lost Mia to Joe Bates. If they are to be together at the end, then the story begins there, with their romance, instead of having Claire tell the story.
We have a saying in romance, SHOW, don’t TELL. Because it is assumed the Claire is the heroine, the reader is expecting her to have a romance. Instead, we are drawn into the tortured memories of a man’s past and his doomed wartime love affair. This premise is more of a mainstream novel rather than a romance. I think you would do better to sell it as such since it is intricately woven within Claire’s own observations of her neighbor and friend.
Thank you for considering us in your publishing efforts and good luck with your writing career.
Take care and write on!

So, let me ask you again to put on your thinking caps: If you were me, who would you send that book to? I don’t have a clue. So, don’t you think maybe I should have done all that research before I started tapping out the first glorious page?

Jesus H. Christ, I've got two blogs!

I know, I know, that was cursing. In earlier times, a common fellow like me might exclaim, "Odds Plut and her nails!" Odd's Plut was a corruption of the ancient oath "God's Blood" and the addition of and her nails was meant to confuse the notion the oath speaker was referring to Jesus's hands, nailed to the cross, surely one couldn't be referring to Jesu Christi, who was obviously a he. And thus it is by guile and subterfuge that we common sinners hope to slip unnoticed through the pearly gates of heaven.

But I digress. My other blog is www.johnklawitter'sblog@blogspot.com.

And, frankly, I haven't the foggiest idea why it's there. Or you here,
for that matter.

Okay, the chart, itself

You know, your weekly schedule, the one true way to slowly inch from where you are now to where you want to be in your life:

Take a sheet of 8.5x11 paper

Rule it across 25 times, one line for each of the hours in the day. Save a little space at the top.

Make the lines into blocks with vertical lines, building 8 squares for each line.

The 1st line of squares on the left is for the hours. On top of the other 7 squares, the day of the week.

Distressingly simple, isn't it? How could anything this elementary have any effect whatsoever on your complicated, sophisticated and cluttered life?

Come on now, don't be so impatient. Start filling in the blanks. Big block for
sleep. The morning rituals. Drive-time. Work. Lunch. Work. More drivetime.
Dinner. After dinner. Sleep again.

Wow, you don't have much time for yourself--for you, yourself, the person--do you?!

Aren't you supposed to love yourself? Not even a little bit? If that is true in any sense, why do you spend so little time on the things you really believe are important? Who sucked all the poetry out of your life? Had to be you, yourself, the person, didn't it?

Okay, sorry, I got to preaching there. Let's continue. Get your pastel squeekies out and let's color in the squares. Grey for sleep. Yellow for rituals. Orange for
commuting. Red for work. Green for obligations. Save blue for you.

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to gradually steal time from every other area on your chart and slip it into the blue zone, the you zone, that place where you loving you can grow to where you openly and freely love somebody else.

Hint: For many, the easiest place to start is weekends. Good to do. But for real
growth, it's just as vital to analyze what you're doing with M-T-W-Th-F.

A Way To Get Better

If you want to become a better you, be aware of this moment, this hour, this day--but don't schedule it that way. And don't chart it monthly. There are those convinced the lunar cycle holds the key to their success or failure, but that just isn't so. Others look to New Years resolutions to chart their newer, better path. And long thinkers like to work out where and what they will be with five or ten year plans.

All of this is better than none of it, because it means you are shooting off questing arrows, albeit in every direction. But the real prime key to revolutionizing your life is to think of your weekly pattern. A day doesn't tell you all that much because tomorrow will be different, and a month is okay, but so much useless information that it throws you off the track.

Your week, on the other hand, is the map of your life. You can chart it, hour by hour, on a single notebook page. It takes a bit of valor, as you'll be horrified by how much time flies by without much happening. All that time you waste!

But with a little courage, you might take a closer look, and see where you might take back the life that is rightfully yours. Fifteen minutes less for lunch, spent in a brisk walk in the park while listening to Anne Tyler's Morgan's Passing on your iPod. Half a football game spent teaching your son to catch a fish. Even (gasp) an hour less sleep a day to do something momentous like write that book
you've always wanted to.

Yes, one simple but workable aid to being the you you've always imagined is to
outline your week, take a surprised look at what you're doing, and to make small, significant, but very hard choices.

Defining Failure

N.Y. Senator Chuck Shumer was quoted recently as saying failure is not an option. Actually, he's right about that one. Failure is the natural result of poor planning and bad thinking.

Passing Fancy

Why are you here? Don't you have anything better to do? Go pick some nuts or berries. Hug a tree, save a whale. This isn't one of those soft-headed blogs, you know. I wrote and directed that short ecology film EXTINCTION, about human over-self-estimation, over-ego, over-population. When Robert Browning instructed us that "Man's reach should exceed his grasp*," this current path of ours clearly wasn't what he meant.

*Andrea del Sarto (1855), l. 97