sadness of buddy don: still in a fog

tiz a good thang i have such a busy job. i dont leave no time fer thankin bout much of nuthin that dont have to do with the job.

so i had a lil restbit from grief durin the day yesterdy.

but whenever i gut home last nite, thay wudnt nobidy here (miz bd has a reglar committment ever winsdy evenin) n all that grief cum in on me lack a thick fog. i dint do much of nuthin n this mornin, i aint bin much more usefull.

i did try to make contack with a nuther ole friend, but mayhap the old email address i had aint no good no more. or mayhap he dont wont nuthin more to do with me.

life goes on ...

creator of buddy don: More Author

It's me again to give a progress report. I don't think buddy don much likes me usurping his place. For that matter, as I try to write this update, it's all I can do to keep it in standard English. Hillbilly wants to pour out, which shows you just what a habit it's become.

But on to the bad news, which is that the agent I wrote to yesterday is not interested. In fact, that's not the worst possible news since she has never represented anything like Shoot the Devil, and I doubt if there's any profit in it for her to recommend someone else who might not find the work worthy. I'm glad she answered so quickly so I can move on to the next step in the process.

One of the things I plan to do is to attend The Third Annual New York Round Table Writers' Conference this weekend. From all I've read about agents, making contact at a conference is a good way to get a little attention.

I was also very encouraged by some kind comments by readers. It's nice to know some folks believe in my work. IN addition, I got a very nice example of a reader's query letter and novel prospectus, from which I've already learned a lot. I am not certain whether I can mention this person by name, so I'll leave his/her identity secret for the moment.

But I realized something, after so boldly (or stupidly) sharing my struggle to find an agent with buddy don's readers: one thing that kept me going as much as I've gone (1,200 pages so far of the longer novel, life n pinions of buddy don, hillbilly) was having his audience. Knowing that someone was reading kept me wanting to write the next thing (as it does ever single weekday). Maybe sharing this pursuit with you all will help keep me going on this.

I've never been able to convince myself to keep making the next step, largely because any rejection would make me think whatever I'd written was unworthy, leading me to work on the next thing.

But I recently read an amazing novel, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. If you want to read a "sci-fi" work that is truly great literature, this is one to read. It one both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards. Despite its quality, however, the book had its own nine miles of bad road to travel to get published. If you are ever tempted to despair, read this rejection letter.

I remind myself that every rejection is a sign of progress since the worst rejection is one made by the author in giving up.

(ifn ye wonta make a comment, ye gut to click on 'link' below.)

creator of buddy don: The Author Is Back

Hello. I'm the author of this mess, the creator of buddy don and everything he makes up. I created "him" so I could practice his dialect well enough to write a novel. It turned into three or more of them, and there is a long way to go before I get to the last chapter, which I've already written.

In the meantime, what has already been written can be broken down into three distinct novels. Last night I had a dream that has led me to try something that has frustrated me all of my life. I'll get to that in a minute. First to the dream.

Unlike many of the dreams I've had since I began taking Depakote for migraines back in October, this one was a good dream, the opposite of a nightmare. In the dream, I was hiking in the Smoky Mountains with Luther Vandross and Tom Waits. Odd company, I know. During the hike, Luther got way ahead of Tom and me.

I took the opportunity to tell him how much The Heart of Saturday Night had meant to me, which led him to ask me why I had never published anything. He said he'd admired my work and considered me a "pure artist" for not marketing my work, but he pointed out that the result was that I'd died without sharing it with the world. There was more to the dream, but when I awoke, I realized I had been dead in the dream and his words rang in my ears (as did the title song of that great album).

So this morning, I decided it was time to write the hardest thing I know of, a query letter. It should be a little easier for me since the agent I'm writing to is a good friend of "miz bd," but for some reason, marketing my work has been the most disagreeable task I know. But I made myself write one and hope that I continue doing so until I find a publisher.

So here, with the identities "redacted" (indicated by square brackets: []) is the query letter I wrote:

Hi [],

I’m []’s husband []. She’s been urging me to write you regarding a novel I’ve written.

Shoot the Devil is the first part of the “life n pinions of buddy don, hillbilly.” It opens in 1970 as Buddy Don Duncan drops out of his east Tennessee high school and runs away to California. His purpose is to avoid repeating his father’s life, but he soon finds himself back in Tennessee, married to the first girl he’d ever kissed, and living the very life he’d hoped to escape. By the novel’s end, he has divorced, survived his own suicide attempt, confronted many of his and his generation’s demons, and begun understanding how hard his task really is.

One of the things that makes this novel different and fun is that it’s rendered entirely in “hillbilly” dialect. This causes the reader to hear the music of the language and duplicates the story-telling methods my elders used when telling stories after dinner in the hills of east Tennessee. A couple of paragraphs will demonstrate best what I mean (and warn you of what you’d be getting into should you be so kind as to read a sample of the novel):

we made it to texarkana by nex mornin. by then id made friens with sum of them other folk on the bus, n one verr frienly feller bought me a cup of coffee. twuz the furst id ever drunk n i wuz so grateful i dint think to ask fer innythang in it. been a'drankin my coffee black ever since.

i calld mama with my last 80 cents n she cried n wunderd why n all, but twuz the way the worl wurks n she knew it deep down inside so she never yellt nor sed inny discurgin wurds tho she did wunder wuther id stole the moon pies, witch funny thang wuz, i wuz tempted to lie bout it, but i cum clean n had to listn to how that mint my bruthers n sisters wood have to do without n bout then my money run out so the conversayshun ended without us a'sayin good bye n all or even i luv you.

As for me, I’ve been writing as a “writer” since I wrote a poem almost by accident at age eleven. That started a life-long habit that has led to only one “success,” assuming you measure success by publication or production: a play I wrote, [], was produced as a one-act comedy twice and as a musical twelve times, including two off-off Broadway productions.

I have experimented with almost every form (poems, stories, plays, screenplays, songs, essays, and forty years of a journal). The one form I seem to stumble over is the query letter. Though I have completed several novels, when it comes time to write a query letter to sell one, I turn to writing the next chapter instead.

I hope you will allow me to send you a larger sample of the novel, whether in printed or electronic form. I understand from [] that this is not the kind of work you normally handle, but I hope you might be able to steer me to an agent who would be willing to take a chance on it.

Thank you for your time,
[]

(ifn ye wonta make a comment, ye gut to click on 'link' below.)

innerduckshuns of buddy don: the author

i been promissin a feller i wood innerduce im n let im have a say, witch he holds to the mistuck bleef that he runs thangs here. he claims he is the author of this here blog, witch that dont hardly make no cents on a counta tiz clear i have dun writ everthang thats yet been writ on this here blog, ceptn them thangs i quoted.

but hes a verr insistent feller, witch we kin call im stubb on a counta hes so stubborn he wood argue with a fence post n blame it fer not upholdin fer itself. i am sick of his arguin over the keybird, so without futher do-do, here he is, the author:

One of the many odd things about my creation of buddy don duncan, a vehicle I created in order to tell a long story, is how he became an almost independent "person." My original plan was to work out his use of the hillbilly dialect I grew up around. I wanted to make sure it had a fairly consistent grammar and spelling.

My plan was not to do scholarship, to attempt to claim I could speak for all speakers of the dialect. As far as I can tell, there are regional differences between New River and Wartburg, much more between Lake City (once known as Coal Creek) and Oak Ridge. So my plan was simply to codify as well as I could the form of speech used by my family when they gathered for events such as Thanksgiving and Christmas. No matter what the context of the family's gathering, the high point was the telling of tales from the family history.

Though my grandparents' generation and my father's were educated, when it came time to tell tales, they always slipped into the folksy dialect of the hills. In some cases, this was deliberate, but there were several non-standard usages that were believed to be correct: Vick's Vapor Rub was always called "Vicks Save," meaning "Vicks Salve" with "salve" pronounced as "Save." As a sickly child, I believed that it was something meant to "save" the patient, and it helped me breathe through many sick nights. That's a small example, but there were many: "Vie-eenna" sausages, "putt" for "put," "tuck" for "took," "skillet" for "pan," "vittles" for "food," "uphold for yourself" for "defend your position," use of double-negatives to increase the degree of negativity (not to negate it) among others.

When I studied the philosophy of language in West Germany in the 1970s, I learned that English usage in the mountains of East Tennessee more closely resembles that of the English used during Shakespeare's time than English usage anywhere else in the world. Because of its isolation, East Tennessee's moutain communities continued such usage long past the time that English elsewhere in America was becoming more homogenized.

Once I began practicing this dialect using buddy don as my mouthpiece, I was surprised to find I'd begun a novel. I'd originally planned the writing of such a novel, but I always thought of it as something I would turn to someday. My habit of writing was well-established, and I figured once I had a better handle on life and truth and beauty, I would be able to take the raw material of my life and the stories I learned from other people and the stories from their lives and mix them all into a huge cauldron of the life and times of our country during the latter quarter of the 20th century.

But instead, the novel was what happened to me while I was busy practicing the language of the novel I was someday planning to write: the novel you write is what happens to you while you're busy making plans to write a different novel.

Once the novel broke out, it amazed me, the author, as much as it could have amazed anyone else. A lot of that had to do with the dialect I hoped to have buddy don use to tell his tale.

I have been fortunate enough in my life to learn two languages in addition to English: German and Spanish. I learned the former the "proper" way by studying at the university and then spending time living in a German-speaking country. I learned the latter the better way (but not "proper" way, according to language experts at universities) by meeting someone who spoke Spanish and learning it by using it as often as possible.

In each case, as I did so, I began to feel as if I had dug new deep ruts in my mind, ruts where German is spoken and where Spanish is spoken, both of them off the beaten track of English. When I say ruts, I am referring to the kind of ruts that develop in the backwoods, where there are deep tire tracks for the road and it's hard to drive anywhere but in the ruts. Once in the rut of Spanish, it's very difficult to steer the verbal vehicle out of the Spanish rut to speak German: all of the common terms want to come out in Spanish.

What most amazed me from this exercise was that I discovered a rut for buddy don's dialect that was as deep as any I'd dug for either of the non-English languages I had learned (not mastered, but I can "uphold for myself" in each of them fairly well).

And that led to a different and very pleasant surprise: writing as buddy don, using the rut I'd run through the wilderness of my creative mind to move my story along, led to better writing. When writing as buddy don, I don't have have the luxury of over-explaining things, which is a tendency I fight unsuccessfully in my usual writing.

It got to the point that I almost felt – Strike that, I should be more honest: I almost feel as if buddy don is a separate creature from me. My wife (buddy don's "miz bd") and I often speculate about what buddy don will write on a given morning.

But I also discovered more than that. Through the vehicle of buddy don and his dialect rut, I found myself reliving much of my life, looking at it as if through the eyes of a stranger, even though I am myself that stranger, or at least his "creator" or "author." Still, it has led to a lot of work on myself and re-evaluation of what I have done with my life and what I believe.

In addition, it's taken its toll in health matters. I haven't written a chapter on life n pinions of buddy don, hillbilly since life of buddy don, chaptur 145: puzzles of the hart. The day after posting that chapter I got a migraine attack and remained under its spell for 17 days. That led to a period of two and a half months of short-term disability, during which some of my doctors suggested I face reality and prepare to accept long-term disability. (I am much too young to consider that!)

But I have since found myself a little gun shy about picking up the story again. I have written the final chapter of the entire thing, have it all "outlined" in my mind, know what I have left to do with the novel, but I greatly fear the possibility that messing with such topics as honestly as I have been trying to do via the voice of buddy don, I am risking further misery. I truly don't know if there is a relation between my writing and my migraines, but every time I prepare to write the next chapter, I find myself flinching, as if to avoid the blow I know is likely to follow.

Despite that, I know I have to continue if I am to do what I am on this earth to do (insofar as any of us can know what we are here to accomplish, I know that writing this huge novel is part of my reason for being). It would be easy if I had lived the life of a saint, but I haven't even come close to that. The next chapters begin taking me through a long and shameful part of my life, which though fictionalized and changed to make a better story, to get closer to "truth" than I believe "non-fiction" can do, will still be hard for me to confront as honestly as I need to do to reach my goal for this work.

In addition to that, as the story gets closer to the present (and it's still 24 years in the past at the moment), more and more of the characters can be mistaken by readers for historical people. I am taking the grist of history and using the mill of creativity to make something new. Any resemlance to the originals is pure luck on my part, if not lack of talent or just lazy writing. Even so, some of the people I know might mot realize what I am doing and want to "correct the record," as it were. But there is no record to correct: I am not trying to record the history of my world but to create a new world to illustrate the truths and morals that do not come from an accurate accounting of the non-fictional record.

So there are many risks involved with writing the next chapter, and for that reason, it has been almost a year since I attempted one (the draft of the last being completed on January 27, 2006). Despite those risks, for me the greater risks are in not completing what I have begun, in not having the courage to face all my demons, living and dead, real and imagined, threats to personal health or not.

To do that, I have to be able to quit chasing the will o'the wisp of politics. The little poems I write on topical subjects have very temporary worth, going out of date almost as soon as they are written. Commentary on politics only gives the amen chorus what they need to continue shouting "Amen!" But I truly do not believe anyone has a change of belief or viewpoint on the basis of reading what buddy don duncan has to say about any issue.

Enough of that! I hope from now on to devote myself to that, giving myself days off to do politics and such since I can't write a chapter every single day. But I must get back to writing that. I'm about to be on the planet for the 55th time it has circled the sun since I was born: there is no time to waste!

(ifn ye wonta make a comment, ye gut to click on 'link' below.)

wake up call of buddy don: a lil robert service

i been readin a wunderful book name of Collected Poems of Robert Service that wuz give me by eric over at straight white guy.

tiz the kinda book ye caint rush thru. fack is, i sumtimes git stopped a'readin a pome over n over n over agin. them pomes is that good.

not only do ye find yerself unable to speed thru such a book, but the closer ye git to the end – n i only gut 80 pages out of 728 lef! – the more ye tend to slow down sos ye dont half to end it.

most folks woodnt thank a book of pomes could be so engagin, but them pomes of robert service is differnt. they rime n tell stories. sum of em sets up thar own meldies in yer hed. twood be easy to cunvert a minny of em to musick.

i wonta share one of them pomes with ye, witch taint the bestn, but it hit me lack a left hook i wuznt eggspecktin. it duz whut the best literchur duz, witch it makes ye questchun whut ye wuz a'doon with yer life, makes ye wunder ifn taint time to recunsidder thangs n try to git back on the rite corse.

whenever i wuz a'wurkin reglar in thee-ater produckshuns over in man hattan, i herd a feller eggsplain purty well whut good literchur duz:

good literchur calms the distrubed n disturbs the calm.

turns out one of the smallest lil pomes in all of them colleckted pomes of robert service is a'doon that to me. here tiz:

My Masterpiece

It's slim and trim and bound in blue;
Its leaves are crisp and edged with gold;
Its words are simple, stalwart too;
Its thoughts are tender, wise and bold.
Its pages scintillate with wit;
Its pathos clutches at my throat:
Oh, how I love each line of it!
That Little Book I Never Wrote.

In dreams I see it praised and prized
By all, from plowman unto peer;
It's pencil-marked and memorized
It's loaned (and not returned, I fear);
It's worn and torn and travel-tossed,
And even dusky natives quote
That classic that the world has lost,
The Little Book I Never Wrote.

Poor ghost! For homes you've failed to cheer,
For grieving hearts uncomforted,
Don't haunt me now…. Alas! I fear
The fire of Inspiration's dead.
A humdrum way I go to-night,
From all I hoped and dreamed remote:
Too late… a better man must write
The Little Book I Never Wrote.

i hope to git back to the real reason i dun started this here blog, witch i wonted to practiss establishin a bleevabull hillbilly dialeck sos i could tell a huge tale usin stories i dun lived thru or seen otherns live thru.

thang is, all my brayin bout pall ticks n such is jes lack ice skulpchur: twont last long. but ifn or when i finish ritin life n pinions of buddy don, hillbilly (furst draft of the furst 101 chapturs is here; furst draft of chapturs 102 to 140 here), then i wood have sumthin that wood always be wurthy of readin since twont be deependent on the news of the day. it mite not be red by too minny folks, mite not even git published. i caint cuntrol nun of that.

but i kin cuntrol this, at lease till death innerupts: twont be the book i never rote!