Do you remember the first email you ever sent? I do.
I was taking a mini course in how to use a computer, and we sent test messages to a bulletin board, because there was no internet yet.
Oh, the giant steps (hello John Coltrane) writers and publishers have taken in how words get out into the world.
My first paid published work was typed by teenage me on a rickety 1920s Underwood typewriter inherited from my father's parents. It may have been my grandmother Edythe's machine from her time at teacher's college. This photo looks exactly like the one we had in the 1960s where I typed teen opinion columns for The Indianapolis News.
I remember that the somewhat-wrinkly ribbon had to be watched as it tended to jump up so that the red portion at the bottom was in reach of the ends of the letter keys. An article or story could easily take on the look of an urgent memo from the office of a junior high school concerning failure to remove locks from school lockers by the end of the school year.
Later, living on my own, I submitted stories and articles, daubed with Liquid Paper, after cranking them out of assorted electric typewriters.
At this point, there were no red-type passages, but the manuscripts looked at those they'd been typed during the San Francisco Earthquake. The letters were high and low, bold and faint. My junior year of high school, I'd taken Typing I & II. I learned to bang out business letters on military-issue manual machines so heavy they could have been launched from catapults in case of sudden attack on Warren Township, Indiana. The result was that Selectrics and similar machines jumped and vibrated as I hammered down the keys.
Well, these days the technology for putting words together and getting them out into the world changes so fast I dare not describe them as this post will be out of date a week later. The days of making a sending my manuscript pages to a Michigan printing house (that's where the trees are) and then getting back boxes and boxes and boxes of trade paperbacks to sell are over.
Besides all the uploading and downloading on various devices, there are personal changes. My poor vision is slowly but steadily deteriorating. I've always said, when asked personal questions,"Well, I'm not getting any younger or thinner," and now I suppose I ought to add "and I'm not seeing any better." As a result I've been using more audio and visual methods to create and distribute my work.
These technical and personal changes are the reason i created Perfect Waffle Media. First, the name: I once had a small press called Big Breakfast Publishing, and recently I'd been pondering what to call the grouping of assorted platforms on which I express myself. During one of these pondering moments, I was using my fabulous Krups waffle maker (thank you Goodwill) and admiring my golden-brown breakfast masterpieces. "I do know how to turn out a perfect waffle," thought I. And my media enterprise was named. Clearly the most important meal of the day is central to my creative life.
For the last few weeks I've been in the process of gathering up all my writing from hither and yon, in order to present it via a Perfect Waffle Media website. It's a lot of work, let me tell you.
Recently, I read the introduction to a collection of Shirley Jackson's work curated by the writer's children. Apparently the new owners of the Jacksons' former home (written about in all those family stories) had sent along a box of Shirley's typescripts, discovered in the attic of the old barn. The Jackson family went through all the drafts, painstakingly, finding new stories and variations on other stories, and they created a new volume of their mother's work from it all.
Even if my own family had time and energy to gather up all my work, I don't know how they'd go about finding it all. I've stashed it here in there on the internet, tossed it into storage boxes, put some of it in plastic sleeves and clipped it into three-ring binders which also contain recipes and the manuals for small appliances.
I accept that the business of hunting it all up is my job. So I'm looking here and there, in real life and on the internet, and I'm gathering and sorting and deciding on what are the best versions and what to do with one story which is missing two or three pages right in the middle.
I'm doing my best to enjoy the process of finding my writing and getting it viewable or listenable. I've located some of the more vintage stuff. Today I'll share some of it with you.
The first book I ever wrote was a comic novel set in the late 1950s.
I began writing Olé Baby after giving up a few pages into a perfectly terrible novel imposed on the world by a major publishing house. I really shouldn't have thrown it across the room (it wasn't damaged) because it was a library book but geez, it was just awful. "I could write a better book than that!" I said aloud, and then I put a piece into an electric typewriter which had a broken carriage return lever) and I began.
The original title was Tutti-Frutti, but many years later, as one of many revisions, I made the new title Olé Baby. It's the story of two musical sisters who do a Lucy-and-Ethel cross-dressing "brother act" one summer and have a regional hit song on the radio. Maybe a better comparison would be the Lenny and Squiggy episodes of "Laverne and Shirley."
This girls-dressed-as-boys plot would now be not only acceptable these days, but perhaps an admired one. In 1981, people thought it was weird that I had the girls seek adventure any way they could, but hey, times have changed so that's good.
If you want to read the book, you can find it for free online, right here.
Rusty is still my most popular book, published in 1991. I'm still attempting to eclipse myself. We'll see how that goes. After working for a while on how to make an e-book novel work for as many kinds of computer or phone, I decided to do it in blog format. Each blog entry is a new chapter.
You can read Rusty: How Me and Her Went to Colorado and Everything, But Not Really, also for free, here.
To read Madame Grumpetta online, just go to this Blogger site.
If you only have time to read on your bus commute to work. you might like my story "If Sousa Had Been Syncopated at the Columbian Exposition," which is very short. I wrote it for a story contest, which I didn't win, alas.
But I am pleased with Syncopated Sousa anyway. Check it out if you like funny stuff that's trying lightly to make a point.
Prefer audio format? I got you covered! This story, "Subtle Order Everywhere, or Success with Upturned Top Hats," is about someone who does not fit in socially and how that affects what they can and can't do for a living. Or what they do or don't want to do; that's also a way to look at it.
All of the stuff listed above has been around for a bit. I do have current projects, including the modern suspense story "Freedom Island." It's in audio format, and appears every other Wednesday on this blog. It can also be found on YouTube. Here's Episode 1 -- the audio quality is a little odd at the start of the episode, but you will soon find out why.
Besides "Freedom Island," I do have plenty of new and ongoing creative work going on, but I'll blog about that another day. You can count on it. :)
Next week: I have something interesting planned, but will have to see if my library book gets here in time. If not, well I have plenty of topics.
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