Welcome to JonSay.com

Hi everyone, it’s good to be back on the blog!  I’ve been away for awhile, jumping back into the conventional workforce.  The dream of having my writing become my primary means of financial support isn’t quite there yet – but it is not something that has to be discarded as pie-in-the-sky, either.  Like life, that plan is turning out different than the way I drew it up, but that happens with just about everything.  The good news is that after not writing anything more than notes to myself about story ideas, character ideas, and observations over the last seven months, the desire to write again has risen up strongly enough to overshadow how tired I might be at night, or how much I want to stay in the cozy bed in the morning before work.  I firmly believe that people do what they want to do and then justify it however they need to, and at this point I want to write again.

It’s funny how things work, but shortly after I made that decision and realized I wasn’t going to be satisfied just thinking about writing, my conventional employer decided to send me to the West Coast for a business conference.   Out of the blue, first business trip since I started working there.  That means I’ll have a 4-5 hour plane ride, both ways.  That might draw groans from most people, but to me it is like a big, flashing neon sign saying, “Writing time….Writing time…Writing time…”  The fact is that I haven’t had a 4-5 hour block of undistracted writing time since, well, since I started working again.

Decision to write again regardless of a full-time working schedule, immediately followed by a gift of 8-10 hours of writing time, and probably more at night in the hotel room.  Coincidence?  Believe what you want.  I don’t believe in coincidences.

So here is what to look for – a new short story coming out on Jonsay.com next month, as well as my existing short stories and my novel becoming available on Smashwords.com.  If you are not familiar with Smashwords, it is one of the latest sites to electronically publish work in a format that is compatible with every electronic reader on the market.  It also makes it available in the Apple iBooks store, Barnes & Noble.com, Amazon.com for the Kindle, etc. etc. etc.  Look for the link coming on Jonsay.com next month!

In the meantime, thanks as always for reading!  Keep your emails and questions coming at jon@jonsay.com!

…since I last blogged.  Jumping back into full-time employment has consumed my attention and time, and I’ve written almost nothing.  I’m not surprised by that – when I accepted my current position I sort of figured that was going to happen.  I spent some time annoyed that I was back in the corporate rat race, but then I got paid.  And then I got paid two weeks after that.  And again two weeks after that.  Life is always trade-offs, isn’t it?  And sometimes, they’re hard to argue with.

So my wife and I watched the final three episodes of Oprah.  They were something to see, and after we’d turned the DVR off after the final show, I was brushing my teeth before jumping into bed and the following dialogue ran through my head.  That’s how the process works for me – when I’m concentrating on something else, dialogue will find me.  A lot of times it can lead to short stories, or if I’m writing a novel it will move the story forward.  Anyway, here’s what I “heard” after watching Oprah’s final show:

She glanced over at him behind the wheel, thinking he was unusually quiet this morning.  He wasn’t looking at the car in front of them, he was looking past it into some vision of the future or past that was making him frown.  She looked back at her laptop and started typing before breaking the silence.

“Something on your mind this morning?”

“Hmm?  Oh, I was just thinking that James Bond probably never had to sit on a freeway entrance ramp waiting for a green light to get into his job at MI-6.”

“He never went into the office, did he?  What’s the problem?” she asked.

“Wife and I watched the Oprah finale last night.  You know, the one where Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise and Stevie Wonder showed up to tell her how amazing she was?  It totally depressed me.”

“How can that even be?  Oprah is second only to God in the amount of benevolence shown to mankind.”

“That’s just it.  Compared to her, how can you not feel like you’re just taking up space?”

“Of course you’re just taking up space.  Right now, you’re taking up space on a freeway ramp like everyone else, helping to create this traffic jam.”

“I mean,” he continued, ignoring her, “being employed as a middle manager at an insurance company is exactly nowhere in terms of having an impact on anything.  Oprah came from nothing and created the largest media empire owned and run by a black woman in the history of the free world.  I came from middle class America and am now working my ass off to try and stay there.”

“Maybe you’d have been better off being born in the inner city,” she said absently, reading an email from a colleague.

“That’s another thing.  Unless you’re a victim of a horrible personal tragedy, an uneducated black person in the South or in Africa, or you get tickets to one of her ‘favorite things’ shows, you’re invisible to Oprah.”

“Hey, don’t be hating on Oprah.  The woman has done more to help humanity since we began this conversation than you’ll do in your entire life.”

“My point exactly.  I’m not hating on Oprah.  I can’t help loving her like everyone else on Earth.  But I felt completely irrelevant after seeing everyone she’s helped go to college, how she’s filled libraries with books, inspired parents who’ve lost children, and on and on and on.  What am I doing?  Working a job every day to support my wife and child, and trying to figure out how many push-ups I have to do to stay out of a nursing home in thirty years.  It’s pathetic.”

“Your wife and child may not feel that way.”

He sighed loudly.  ”Of course they don’t.  I just wish, I don’t know, that I was able to do more, be more, somehow.”

“Yeah,” she said vaguely, pressing ‘Enter’ and shaking her head.  Then she looked over at him brightly.  ”Hey, did you see ‘Dancing with the Stars’ last night?”

He gave her a withering look.

“Oh come on, Roger, lighten up.  It’s some people’s job to change the world.  It’s other’s job just to hold it together.”

He looked at her with surprise.  ”Did you make that up?”

“No,” she shook her head, “I heard Bruce Springsteen say it during an interview once.”

He rolled his eyes.  ”Great.”

“Hey, it doesn’t mean it’s not true.  Light’s green.”

And then I went to bed.

If nothing else, it’s good to know the machinery is still working on some level.  Thanks for reading.  -Jon

I’m one of those people who always thought keeping a journal would be a great thing to do, but could never actually do it.  I’d make plenty of attempts to start a journal – usually after some other compelling event had occurred like starting a new job, the calendar changing over to January 1, or even just receiving a nicely bound book filled with blank pages as a birthday gift.  I would write my first entry, admiring the pristine pages and the striking contrast of my handwritten words across them, and vow to return the next day with further insights.  Never did these efforts at recording my current history last more than one week.

Then in January 2008, my wife, daughter, and I relocated from Los Angeles to the Upper Midwest.  I’d been born and raised there, had moved out to LA after meeting my wife on a vacation, and we wound up marrying and living blissfully in the land of endless summer for ten years.  After our daughter was born, we decided to return to the Midwest to raise her around family and friends, a place where childhood lasts longer than in LA. 

So no problem – I found a job, we packed up, and we moved.  My last day at my former job was on a Wednesday, I flew out of LA the next day, and started my new job in Wisconsin the following Monday.  And, after less than one week, I began to write a journal.

Shockingly, 18 months after I started this new job, it was eliminated as my employer blundered its way through the financial crisis.  What was shocking wasn’t that I got laid off; it was that eighteen months later, I was still keeping my journal.

I started a new job this week, 21 months after being shown the door at the last one.  After I was laid off, I also stopped keeping the journal.  Instead, I wrote several short stories, “Flesh Wound”, and this blog. 

In the two weeks after I accepted my current job offer but before my start date, I went back and re-read the journal I kept during my brief tenure at my old employer.

It was fascinating.

There were a lot of things going on in my life at that time.  The relocation from a moderate climate to a winter climate in January; starting a new job after 9+ very successful years at the old one; helping my wife and 2 ½ year old daughter acclimate to the move, and missing very badly the city of Angels which I had come to love, and where so many good things had happened for me.

I drew two conclusions from re-reading my journal.  One, I was amazed by how many things had happened during that time, and what I was thinking and feeling about them, that I’d forgotten.  Things at work, sure, but also what it was like to have a 2 ½ year old.  The lack of sleep, the diaper changes, the general relentlessness of the demands of raising a small child.  Reading the journal brought those things back vividly, and I found myself appreciating my now-5 ¾ year old daughter all over again.

Second, life overall was very challenging for me at that time, and I was having a difficult time personally adjusting to all of the life changes that were happening at once.  And that is why this particular effort at journaling, I think, continued for me for such a long time.

The main purpose the journal served for me was to provide a vent for the sometimes turbulent emotions of adapting to a difficult change in my life.  And you know what?  It helped.

I know that many therapists recommend that their patients keep journals for this very reason.   Presumably, if one is seeing a therapist regularly, one is trying to deal with some issue in one’s life that is bothering them enough to seek help.  I understand that now in a way I didn’t before.  I also think that is why I stopped journaling when my job ended.  I knew I was going to start pursuing something I’d always wanted to do – writing a novel – and I was optimistic and enthusiastic about doing it.  The continuing source of irritation that had led to starting the journal in the first place – my new and ultimately toxic job – was gone. 

Now that I’ve started my new job, I’m surprised at what a difference working for a good company with good people makes to one’s overall satisfaction with life.  Do I miss writing full-time?  Only every day.  But I got paid today, and I must say, that has some very, very attractive qualities.  Will I keep writing?  Sure.  I’m writing right now.  But I don’t think I’ll be writing a journal.  This blog will be the closest I get.  I still have my second novel to finish.

I hope you have a great week!  Thanks for reading. -Jon

After blogging three times per week for most of the last year, it’s been nearly one month since my last blog post.  The main reason is that I’ve been pursuing a traditional career position, and the interview preparation and attendance took up the time I had been spending at the writing desk.  The good news is my career pursuit is nearing it’s climax, and I should hear one way or the other on the position by the end of next week.  So until then, I’m returning to writing mode.

Although I haven’t been writing during the last month, I have been reading at my usual voracious pace.  I’ve noticed something about character development and how it can dictate plot choices during that time, and I think it’s going to make me a better writer.

Drama arises from conflict, which is a powerful story driver.  The best plotting, I think, results from conflict that affects the main character as well as the other protagonists in the book, but in different ways.  Let me give an example.  Let’s say Jill decides to hire Frank to find Mary, who has gone missing.  Jill is Mary’s older sister, and she’s afraid that Mary, who is just 18, has been duped into running off to join a cult.  Frank is a private investigator who hasn’t met Jill or Mary before.  Frank never knew his father, because his father didn’t marry his mother because his father was Catholic and his mother was Protestant, and back in the 1950s, Catholics faced severe religious penalties for marrying outside of their faith.  These penalties were too threatening to Frank’s father, so he refused to marry Frank’s mother.  So, Frank was raised by his mother and aunt.  Once Frank was old enough to understand that it was religious dogma that kept him from knowing his father, he developed both a deep disdain for organized religion and a deep sympathy for any innocent people who suffered as a result of it.

So when Jill tells Frank her story about Mary, Frank is moved and accepts the case.  The point here is that Mary’s running off with the cult affects both Jill and Frank, but for different reasons.  Jill is agonizing over losing her little sister and any harm that may come to her, and Frank is motivated by wanting to liberate Jill from an oppressive religious dogma.  This makes the story much more personal to Frank than if Jill were simply another client who walked through the door, and opens up all sorts of plotting possibilities to play on both Frank and Jill’s emotional vulnerabilities.

I literally made up the previous two paragraphs as I was typing them, and there would have to be a lot of refining done to expand the plot of Frank, Jill, and Mary’s story into a compelling novel.  Objectively, though, I think good plotting and good character development are inextricably tied together by idealism.  The main characters in the story must be idealists, hold strong beliefs according to those ideals, and then have those beliefs challenged early and often by the events in the story.  The goal would be to have the shared circumstances of the story – in this case Mary’s disappearance – threaten the ideals of the main characters in different ways, and the playing out of the plot allow the characters to question and develop their personal beliefs further as a result of events in the story.  This creates an emotional and developmental arc in the story for the main characters, and is what compels the reader to come along for the ride.

Think about your favorite books or stories, the ones that kept you up way past your bedtime because you couldn’t put them down.  Were the main characters idealists?  Did they hold strong beliefs?  Did the plot of the story threaten those beliefs early and often?  I’ll bet they did.  Setting up characters and plot lines this way is a great place to start when you’re thinking about writing your next story.

If the traditional career choice works out, I’ll be blogging less.  If it doesn’t, I’ll be blogging more.  Either way, read a great story today and see if the main character is an idealist whose beliefs are being challenged.  It makes for great drama!  Thanks for reading.  -Jon

Another six days have passed since my last blog, and I am starting to feel guilty about the slowdown in the frequency of my writing sessions.  There are reasons of course – there always are – in this case, they revolve around caring for sick family members and pursuing an especially intriguing employment opportunity.  Valid reasons, no question.  But they still pull me away from the writing desk.

Regardless of the validity of the reasons for writing less often, it is distressing to me to see the momentum built up by knocking out one third of my novel start to dwindle.  However, you have to choose the actions that have the highest priority based on your values, and then be okay with that.  Whenever I get into this sort of position I remember something that John Grisham wrote in his introduction to “A Time To Kill”, his first novel.  This introduction appeared in the paperback edition published three years after ‘Kill’ first came out, and after “The Firm” had made him a household name.

“I approached the writing of this book much like a hobby, an hour here and an hour there, with a somewhat disciplined effort to write at least one page a day.  I never abandoned it.  I remember one four-week period where nothing was written.  I occasionally skipped a day, but for the most part I plowed ahead with blind diligence.”

-Introduction to “A Time to Kill”, by John Grisham, ©1989, Island Books edition published 1992

It wound up taking three years for Grisham to complete the manuscript for “A Time to Kill”.  I’ve read the book, and several more of his, and liked it a lot.  Based on his sales history, I am not alone in this assessment.  For my part, I take great comfort from the deliberate, drawn-out process Grisham went through in completing this work, and how by just keeping at it, he was able to launch a career that is now much better known as a novelist rather than a lawyer.

So the message is to just keep going.  Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.  And never give up.

Read something today that makes you want to write something of your own!  Thanks for reading.  -Jon