I'm Backkkkk

Back from Arkansas. As I expected, there was no time to blog or check blogs. I spent the days visiting with mom and family. And doing a fair amount of eating. My favorite pie is lemon, so family members baked me not one, but two lemon pies. I think I’ve had enough lemon pie for a while. I also ate home-grown steak and ground beef, which was nice and lean, and a variety of vegetables from the garden, including green beans, tomatoes, corn on the cob, potatoes, purple hull peas, and spinach. What I didn’t eat, although I was offered them about 100 times, was okra and onions. My mom and brother Paul David just love okra, but they must have gotten all the okra genes in the family because the stuff reminds me of something that might have been edible eons ago but which has been mummified in dry desert air for a few too many millennia.

One thing I didn’t get done in Arkansas is any real writing. I tried a couple of times to sit at the laptop but in a small town where everyone knows everyone there are always visitors dropping over. Besides that, about a quarter of the town of Charleston is related to us, if not by blood then by marriage. That’s a lot of family to see in a short time.

As always when I go home to Charleston, I was overwhelmed by memories. On a couple of afternoons I rode around in the countryside with my brother and it seemed like every field and woods and dirt trail were haunted with the ghosts of the past. I imagine that would settle down if I moved back to the area permanently, which Lana and I have talked about doing after I retire from teaching. We have land there, some of which I’ll eventually inherit, and I wouldn’t mind building a house along the creek where I spent a many hot summer day.

Rita, my sister-in-law, asked how I’d get in and out if I lived back along the creek and I told her I only needed to get in. She asked what Lana thought of that, and I had to tell her that Lana loves the idea. My wife is not a social butterfly. She and I are both pretty intense introverts.

Well, it’s off now to do a little catch up blog visiting, but I’m sure I won’t be able to comment on every post I’ve missed. Seems like most of us here in blog land are pretty prolific posters. Plus, I’ve got to turn up the back-to-school engine big time to get syllabi and other such tasks done before school starts next week. When I got off school in early May it seemed like the days stretched out forever in front of me. Now that the summer escape is over it sure did seem to go fast.

Later

Flashback Corner

I was converting some old REHupa (Robert E. Howard United Press Association) files into new Word and found some commentary that brought back memories from what is now a fairly long attempt at a writing career. Take the following little nuggets, for example. (Modern day comments are in parentheses.)

1. Good news on the writing front. I've sold an SF story called "Floater" to a mag called Radical Infinity. Sounds like an interesting magazine, though their contract was almost as long as my story.

(This magazine folded before publishing the story and although it was submitted several more times the tale has yet to see print. It was written in 1991.)

2. I just got one of the most insulting rejections of my life. This was from Jennifer M. Caudle at The PostModernist's Journal of Horror. I quote: "Mr. Gramlich, You're headed in the right direction. There is potential in your prose, but you should consider concentrating on refining both your basic writing skills and your storytelling skills. Good luck." OUCH! That hurt. And, what's worse, I thought the story was one of my better efforts. Just goes to show what I know.

(This story was "Splatter of Black," and I got this rejection in 1994. A few months later I sold the story to Dark Terrors, a hardback horror anthology that marked my most lucrative sale to that date. One editor's reject is another's buy.)

Maybe I'll post a few more such nuggets next time, just to show the ups and downs, and sometimes the just downright sideways weirdities, that happen in the writing biz.

Memories Part II

Yesterday I talked about keeping a journal of my childhood memories, and later memories, so that I don't forget them and so that I can mine them for details to use in my writing. I thought today I might just give a sample of a few of my entries.

120. Making little holes in persimmons and putting firecrackers through before we lit them and threw them. This would let us throw the firecrackers further, and if the persimmon was ripe it would explode goo all over where it blew up.

186. Pretending weeds were enemy warriors, and sword fighting them with the top part of a broken fishing rod. Or sometimes I used a piece of chrome that had been lost off the side of one of our cars.

207. daddy putting the big metal barrels beneath the eaves of the old house to catch rainwater, and how we would sometimes soak in one in the hot summer, and how salamanders often washed down from the roofs into them. I once hid in one and my parents were desperately trying to find me. I didn’t realize how truly upset they were. I thought it was fun and games. They never thought to look there, until I crawled out.

214. Catching a big water moccasin on my fishing rod once and what a fight it was. This was at the New Pond. Somehow I hooked him through the side underwater and at first I though I had a monster fish. Then he surfaced and I remember him writhing across the water as he fought to get away. Terry and John were with me. Since he was a poisonous one I had to kill him to get him off the hook.

The numbers above correspond to when the entry was made in the journal but are not necessarily age related. I just started writing things down as they occurred to me, and I continue that to this day. In fact, I'm going back to add some more today. I find it enjoyable.