I still have a blog here?

 Hi, if you are somehow still reading this blog which has been dormant for many years. Thank you for your support then and now!

I just published an article I wrote for Medium and Substack, and I welcome comments and questions here. Since I published here I did publish another novel, In the Flat Field. I am now working on a new memoir/novel. 

Greetings from...Blogger?

Carry on!

Charles

Zen, meditation, journaling, and how to start, part one....

 Wow I still have a blog here. I am going to post this now, which is also on Substack and Medium:

As a writer, artist, dad, sales person, spiritual seeker, I have done a lot of things I can offer to people are are struggling. I have written novels and poetry, made lots of visual art, but I also like to coach and mentor people, especially young people, people of color, men, people are are struggling with addictions and mental illness, like I did, to help them get better but also go to the next level of success, contentment, and/or happiness. (I am not a therapist).

One thing I would like to do is to publish a book that is a guide to journaling and mindfulness. I am a certified mindfulness life coach. I also started journaling every day and meditating on a pretty regular basis when I was a teenager.

As part of Gen X I am now 54 and so that is now a few decades of these practices. I took a break from meditation from say 1989 to 1995 when I was really into drinking and other things, but I probably wrote every day, in my journal, notebook, or writing fiction and poetry. I would say the writing, partly the journaling, is what kept me alive in those years.

I don’t think you have to be a serious or professional writer to benefit from keeping a journal or notebook. I also don’t think you need to write every day or write more than a few words. Some people don’t have the time or energy to write or meditate every day. Imagine asking a single mom to write a page or more every day in her journal, or someone like me with problems concentrating or PTSD, to meditate every day for 40 minutes. It’s nice to have goals and sometimes we are able to write pages of stuff until our hands hurt. Sometimes I can sit and meditate for 30-40 minutes and that’s great.

But being able to use walking, running, or other stuff related to mindfulness is not only really cool but very much in line with what the Buddha taught as shown in the earliest Pali teachings. Although I started by learning a formal Zen practice from Japan - zazen, which suited me as a teen, it’s not the best start for everyone. (I am not a Buddhist teacher, in any formal or approved sense.)

I love to coach and mentor, I can take on new clients (surprise) and I could invite you to sign up for a horrible email pyramid scheme, watch my free video, download my free ebook etc. But I won’t! You can buy my books, which are novels, or just contact me if you have any questions. I will chat for free and hopefully publish a follow-up to this soon (probably free, no pyramids).

This book could be a good place to start for meditation for you: Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

I would say get a pen or pencil and a notebook to start writing about your feelings, how you feel, or just what you did today. What did you do today that your are proud of? What are you grateful for?

Today I got up and took my daughter to school, came home and worked. I went to the gym. I am grateful for my amazing 10 year old daughter who is thriving in school now. We are very fortunate.

my first novel, blue, on kindle and iphone

After looking into and starting the process a while ago, and then looking again and seeing that Kindle was now a reader available for Iphone and ipod Touch, I gave it a try again and was able to get a new cover, pricing, and text of my first novel, Blue, loaded on the Amazon website without too much trouble. I'm excited for people to be able to read my first novel at a lower price and in a way that is convenient for them. It's easy to upload text and I may try to put a book of poetry on their as well.

Here is the Amazon link: http://tinyurl.com/d6cp6b

Working on the novel

I recently talked to my friend Lou, a poet who has written several novels, and others, and my Creativity Coach, Wickie of Monstre Sacre, about my novel in progress and they both agreed that I need to focus more on the forest and look at the 2nd half of the book, the one I really haven't revised much or even read since I first wrote it.

I have revised the first part, really the first third, many times, since I was going to publish it as a novella, and then changed my mind. Reading the rest of what I've got makes sense.

So far I am surprised and somewhat dismayed at how personal and autobiographical it is. How much will the reader be interested in my life? As if they would know it was my life...but anyway...how interesting is this material? I took a class this weekend from one of my favorite writers, living, dead, or undead, Stephen Elliott, on writing literary fiction or non-fiction using your personal life. It was a good class and is making me think about who my ideal reader is, and how similar they are to me. My friend Anne is probably my ideal reader, currently, as far as I can tell. My friend Simon used to be but my work is not dark or horrific enough for him anymore.

My ideal reader probably likes the following books and authors etc.: Infinite Jest, Ulysses, William S. Burroughs, (my friend Brian comes to mind...), Franz Kafka, The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch, maybe Kundera, Rules of Attraction, Nadja by Andre Breton, Paul Bowles, Samuel Beckett, Bukowski, maybe Natalie Sarraute and other new wave novelists, also maybe Middlemarch and Saffron-Foer. An eclectic mix, for sure.

Even though my style is not that similar, I feel closest to Kafka in some ways, in the sense of saying "yes, everything is fucked up, but so? it can, and will get much worse..." I think this is the world I write about, with characters more cynical or depairing than myself. Writing about hope is not as interesting to me as how people deal with the lack of it.

the joys and pains of writing and editing a novel

so I somehow managed, in the last 8 years or so, to write a rough draft of over 150K words, over 500 pp on word depending on how you slice it. big.

anyway, I have revised certain parts of it, like the first 2 or 3 hundred pages, several times. and I just started what I thought was going to be the last revision, I hoped, and got through 90 pp making significant changes. so...just realized the other day some basic changes I needed to make, starting again from the beginning. feeling that it is an endless, neverending process. endless and neverending.

the truth is that most of the changes I've made are still there so none of my ongoing efforts have been wasted. It is a better novel than it was a few months or years ago. and as I go through the first hundred pages I am establishing a baseline and better understanding for the characters and story then existed before.

writing a revising a novel is easy, just stick your hand in the fire. ow that hurts! good, now do it again. repeat.