Writing is great. I love writing. I can't
stop. I have thoughts come into my head and I have to write them
down. I write my parents once a day - the advent of the internet
has made this possible, of course. Maybe I write too much,
I should get out more. The prime reason for this site is writing.
If you haven't already, please visit the site devoted to my written
projects
Caveat Emptor Press contents and
Caveat
Emptor Press contents. Carefully chosen pieces that represent
all of what I have written up until now are all there. There's other
stuff at my brother Ralph's
Intelligent Humor appreciation site and also an essay on my sumo
club's site. Maybe you can also check out Kansai
Time Out, an expat magazine published out of Kobe Japan, that I sometimes
write for.
I have a few writing heroes. I have read plenty of books in my life. I always used to think that my life's interests were defined by travel, film, music, and literature. Lots of people involve those four elements in their lives, but I still believe that writing is the one loose cannon among that bunch. Travel experienced can be affected by outside elements that have nothing to do with the country itself, things such as disease, appetite, weather, etc.; film can be all about special effects and casting; music is about personal taste - people who have a thing for P.J. Harvey will never understand the older generation whose lives changed forever the first time they heard Billy Holliday, and the other way around; but LITERATURE and writing is just about words on a page. Who knows what can make a bunch of words change your life. The placement of words on a page may seem mathematical, but it is nothing of the sort. Criticism is pointless outside of structure, plot, and originality... Look at the words that I have written - what do they mean to you? Look at the mess of words that T.S. Eliot wrote. They are the same words that you and I utter several times a day, yet arranged the way they are, there is something that makes them different...
Read their books: here are some writers I believe are well worth checking out (if you haven't already) are:
Jorge Luis Borges
- from Argentina, the master of the dense short story in any language,
his words created worlds you will live your whole life to understand briefly.
Edgar Allen Poe -
appreciated in scores of other languages than just English, he is the 19th
century equivalent of Borges.
Leonard
Cohen - poet, novelist, songwriter, he knows how to place a word...
just... so...
Mordechai Richler - creator of worlds so real the characters jump right
off of the page, yet never fail to fascinate.
Charles Bukowski
- a poet of the profane, he can make the gutter seem normal and never fails
to call a spade a spade.
Yukio
Mishima - whom I have never read except in translation, a novelist
but a poet of deviation, he has a technical perfection that I marvel at.
Murakami Ryu - similar to
Mishima, yet more human, he creates depraved worlds full of great compassion.
With my informal writing pages, I hope to do two things:
Stories-For-Hire: Offer my freelance
stories on my stories-for-hire page. If you have a story you want
written, send me an email or a letter with you ideas, and I will try to
write it.
Thumbnail Sketches: Offer my ideas
for new stories to you to try. If you like the story you wrote out
of my idea, maybe you won't mind showing me (it's up to you). If
I have written a story with that idea, we can compare and contrast what
we have come up with.
I want to encourage people to write whenever they can - even if you aren't a "gifted writer", it is a fantastic activity because if you do it regularly your mind will really be free. I encourage my students to write whatever they want to, just like the better teachers I had in my youth did to me. "Go forth and write," they said to me. Go forth and write.
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