The Fiction Garage (4): Scutwork and Fun
In which my "thing for words" bumps into my "thing for photos"
This past week’s work on my “Webster book” has mostly found me with my eyes on the screen, my fingers a-twitch between the keyboard and mouse, and my rump planted in the office chair. The details would bore even me if I stopped to think about them; but it’s basically been (as expected) a slog of tinkering with formats (margins, line spacing and indents, etc.) from one story to the next to make it look like it somehow magically emerged from the author’s head in a week rather than over the course of thirty years. I’ve also been forcing myself to maniacally eyeball it all for typos and other overlooked gaffes.1
Starting around mid-week, though, I decided to take a break and do something related to the book, yes, but at least sorta-kinda, well, fun. Hence, the image atop this post: the draft version of a cover for the book as it might appear in print.
If my Substack self is my only self you’ve met so far, you can be excused for not knowing of what we might call my, uh, Thing For Photography. I don’t know how to characterize it, exactly (and probably obviously). Can it be “just a hobby” if I started doing it, sorta-kinda seriously, back in the 1960s…? Well, I dunno. Maybe “hobby” is the right word; after all, I pretty much walked away from it entirely sometime in the ’90s, when using a camera camera came to seem pointless — surrounded as we all were by the (mostly silent) clicking of smartphone cameras. I’d seldom taken casual snapshots, and didn’t really care to start.
Careful readers will notice a coincidence here: my decades of taking writing seriously overlapped with my reduced interest in photography. And then in the mid-2010s, when I said, y’know, I’ll never be the professional writer I want to be. I quit — I’m getting too old for that fantasy aspiration, then I suddenly turned to, ta-da!…
…photography!
None of that was obvious to me at the time. And in fact, I resisted the call of smartphone photography for a long time. It was just too easy, I reasoned.2 It could never be, like, art… (What a mook.)
I’m not sure what flicked the switch in my head, but a couple of events in around 2016-18 must’ve somehow converged to lure me into the digital-photo world. By the time The Missus completely surprised me with my first (and still only) digital camera, in June 2018, I’d already plunged back into it with enthusiasm. And when people asked me how I thought I’d spend my retirement, which started in 2020, I told them: I think I’ll try selling some photography, maybe travel around to craft fairs, bring in some extra $$$, yes? (What a mook.)
So then: the book cover.
I took that photo in the fall of 2017, when we were living in North Florida. We’d fled the area in advance of an oncoming hurricane; as part of our regular preparations for such events, especially since we’d be away, we’d tied down all the deck furniture, the grill, and so on, and we’d also covered plants which might’ve gotten damaged by high winds and heavy rainfall.3 By 2018, I wised up and bought a variety of bungee cords to deal with it all. But this year, when we got back, I untied it all… and ended up with a deck’s worth of rope, only some of which appear here. Every one of those pieces had been cut to tie down a particular object, arranged in a particular spot on the deck relative to other objects; there was no way to ensure that exactly the same objects would be in exactly the same spots for the next storm, or the one after that. So all this rope, eventually, would get discarded.
In the meantime, though, I was struck by how it looked against the wood, and took the photo.
Handily, it works as a pretty good metaphor for the book’s subject: for his manner of thinking, his manner of speech, his… all his loose ends. He starts and restarts, sometimes wanders off into the figurative underbrush, gets lost in the woods, surprises himself if and when he again winds up on something like a path (especially a paved one), doubles back and finally re-emerges on the central route — somehow, somehow — to tie off each episode (i.e., story).
As I’ve said, I have zero idea how entertaining anyone else will find his meandering journey. But he still makes me laugh, anyhow.
Few experiences of writing for publication freak me out more than having spent day after day with the same text over and over… only to find that a last-minute “correction” has introduced a keyboard error which I missed simply because I was sick of reading the same old sentences. It happens, though. Oh, does it happen. I sensible person would say, like, “So then I just won’t make any last-minute changes!” Yet a sensible person — a person invested in an orderly, practical world — would on the other hand not be writing fiction in the first place.
Or “reasoned,” in quotes.
You might think, Why not just move the plants indoors to protect them? Trust me: when living in Florida, especially North Florida, you want to keep the indoors and outdoors separate. Think roaches, a.k.a. “palmetto bugs.” Think frogs and toads. Think snakes and lizards…