Michael Jackman, Writer

It seems with the update to WordPress 3.0, the theme I’ve been tweaking carefully the last couple of years has expired. So I’ve thrown this one in for now. I hope you like it.

I also have new sunglasses, which I is a new look too.

Pages are going blank when I edit, so it may be a problem with the upgrade. Wish me luck.

This post is “postdated”. End of June found me in Iowa City, attending the Iowa Summer Writing Festival for a quick weekend workshop in Creative Non Fiction. Had a good class with a good teacher, and considered myself lucky to be in a workshop with mature, helpful people - In fact, we’re still e-mailing each other and I feel I made a connection with a couple of the writers there. Got a little slideshow on the home page.

That makes all the difference.

Once I attended a conference where I met some cool people and teachers, had a terrific teacher, but my workshop was full of arrogant and marginal writers. (I’m okay with arrogance if it comes with brilliance.) If it weren’t for the general coolness of the rest of the workshop I would have left.

Also got a neat cap as swag.

If you’ve never been to the Iowa Summer Writing Festival I recommend it. There’s the weekend for the budget challenged, or a full week for when you have some extra cash. I had to opt for the weekend this year, since my IUS travel funds got cut due to the state of the economy. Iowa City itself was a surprise – a delightful oasis in the corn. One morning I practiced Tai Chi by the Iowa River and just felt as contented as I had in a long time. I immediately looked for a lecturer position at the University of Iowa, but alas, there wasn’t anything.

I suppose the best part though was that thanks to taking the class, I came up with three new draft essays.

I just realized I’ve been working on my novel for about three years. This isn’t as dedicated as it sounds. I write in fits. But I just started it over again, and when I see what utter crap the concept started as, I’m amazed I’m still working on it. This time, though, it’s actually working. Jack and Melinda still fall in love, to complicated consequences, but Jack is a different character, more central to the setting – and that has made a big difference. Wish me luck!

Had a nice rejection from the Crab Creek Review the other day – a good close call. The note reads:

Dear Micheal,

Thank you so much for sending us your work. Your poems were in my “Seriously Contemplating” folder. I hope you will send to us again.

All best,

These things keep me going, and I don’t mind my name is misspelled.

One of the things I find pretty cool about being on a faculty is access to tech. Right now I’m evaluating a Sony e-reader, touchscreen edition Sony sent me, and I just installed Word 2010, thanks to IU Southeast making it available already. The dept. even bought me some nifty mind mapping software and a Hebrew word processor I requested.

But tech for a writer is dangerous – it really needs to be looked at deeply and suspiciously. My years as an editor for desktop computing at techrepublic.com gave me a healthy suspicion riding on the shoulders of geekcitement over new possibilities and new toys.

I think tech makes writing easier when it works. But it also makes it slower sometimes and harder when it doesn’t – especially if you’re easily distracted by the fear of the blank page. I can get out a pencil and paper and just get to work. Or I can wait for the computer to boot up, check e-mail and Facebook, write a blog, and update Windows before getting started. I feel like I’m doing something, but I’m doing nothing for my creative future.

What’s more likely to crash and burn: paper, or all your data at once, when a hard drive crashes, or a flash drive goes down?

Is it safer and more secure to store your data in a file drawer or online at Google? I was shocked recently when Google calendar went down for a day and I couldn’t access my appointments (I now write them down on paper, perhaps doing TWICE the work.) It was a reminder that the Internet is a data highway, and just like any highway there can be traffic jams, accidents, construction, and detours (and maybe cops who pull you over)…

Tech makes editing and formatting so easy. Yet we’re just one power surge or lightning strike or network failure away from losing ever larger collections of our creative works, or being prevented from accessing them, so the only good solution is to always print and file paper copies, which is one thing tech is supposed to save us from.

Yet I like tech. I like it a lot during the narrow, serene windows of time when it works, even if I have to sync my Google calendar with Outlook so I can sync it to my Blackberry, and then still write each appointment on paper. Even if the narrow window gets broken suddenly, like when I decide to print new drafts for safekeeping and the fucking printer jams or the toner runs out, or like two days ago when I opened my chapbook to revise it, and suddenly Word couldn’t read the file, saved it to an unusable tmp format with warning messages for miles, and caused a two-day search for a solution, and the scary upgrade to Word 2010 that started this blog entry.

The last couple of months have been like going to the disco when I was a twenty-nothing: working up the nerve to ask women to dance, earning a good share of rejections for every hustle. The only difference is I like writing so much more than I ever liked the relentless music, line dances,  shiny polyester, and silly heels.

Recently the Silk Road Review rejected poetry, Zoetrope rejected a short story with a great example of a laser-printed rejection form on cardstock, complete with smudged ink and my name and the title of my short story penned in at the proper line, and Collaboraction of Chicago rejected my short play – but with an encouraging note to please resubmit again.

Now I ask you, who could have resisted adorable me in polyester and platforms? And who can resist my adorable writing?

I thought I’d share with you some of my writing implements. People who know me well know I have this thing for fountain pens. I started buying some decent but relatively cheap ones. Then my wife bought me a retro brown Pelican fine fountain pen for our anniversary, helped by my serious pen collector friend Bob Sachs. It’s still my favorite pen, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

Recently I’ve gotten into dip pens. Rather than fill a reservoir or pop in a cartridge, you dip the nib into the ink, write a few words, maybe a sentence, and dip again.

They’re cheaper than fine fountain pens, more sensitive, but more fun to use for composing. The metal nibs are springy and you can really feel the scratch of the ink on the paper. You are one with the paper, with the flow of ideas. I find the stops and starts of dipping the pen actually help concentration – giving little breaks to gather thoughts. And what a relief to have the computer off!

I thought I’d share a photo of a couple of the dip pens I’ve been using. On the bottom  is a simple wooden handle with interchangeable nibs I bought from pendemonium.com, my favorite supplier. I also bought an assortment of vintage steel nibs.

The top model is brand new. It’s a glass dip pen from J. Herbin, a maker of fine inks. I’d read about glass dip pens and was curious to try one. The groves in the nib hold more ink, so you can write a sentence or two before refilling. If the nib gets dull you can use 400 grade sandpaper to smooth it again. It’s more of a ball point, not flexible, and so the writing doesn’t have the thick/thin lines you can draw with a steel nib. But as you can see, glass pens are gorgeous.

I got this one at the writing pen store. By the time I got around to trying this, pendemonium had none in stock. I’m more than satisfied with this pen. Some may think it an idiosyncracy, an affectation, maybe even a pretension (like my preference for dark brown and dark blue archival inks), but all I can say is, it’s one of the great pleasures of writing to be so intimate with the medium in the traditional way: pen, ink, paper = manuscript.

You know how sometimes you worry the writing just won’t come any more? It’s every writer’s greatest fear, only seconded by having the writing flow, but suck. I was very worried about being blocked after I turned in grades and collapsed exhausted for about a week. Finally, my brain lock loosened up and I started to work on the novel. Fourteen handwritten manuscript pages and I’m enjoying the process now – back to not worrying how crappy the draft might be.

This is the same novel I started a couple of years ago. I felt like I forced eight chapters out and then it wasn’t any fun any more. Why the drudgery? I finally had to ask myself, “Who is narrating this story, anyway, and why?” That was the pre-writing I did during the brain lock. And then I had to admit to myself, honestly, “Isn’t this just another boring character-based novel? Where’s the juice?” Other select few people who have seen or heard some of the draft have liked the writing – but to me it just seemed like it was a novel searching for a reason to be. Despite a well worked out plot and characters, needs, desires, all that.

The other question I had to ask myself before I could start with fresh enthusiasm was, “What is the mystery that’s present in the beginning of this story?” On several walks/drives I got answers to these questions and with hesitation (because who knows how it will work once it flows from concept to paper), risked the blank page. So far, it seems to be working. A new narrator, a new mystery to solve, a fresh perspective, and the ink is flowing and I write with a smile.

It may all turn out to be crap and a dead end, but at least I’m enjoying myself.

[Note: In honor of New Year's, here's one of my seasonal radio pieces from the archives - it first aired Friday 12/28/01 on WFPL Louisville, KY.]

As you know, New Year’s is coming, and with it, the dreaded resolution cycle.The cycle works like this: Two months of resolve are followed by a month of guilt and shame for failing to keep said resolve. By April Fools’ Day, we’re steeped in failure.

Shortly thereafter follows nine months of blissful amnesia until we start the cycle over again next January 1st.

I learned about the resolution cycle last year when I joined a gym. The first time I arrived to work out after New Year’s Day, there were no parking spaces.

Inside, every treadmill, elliptical trainer, stair climber and reclining cycle was occupied by a sweating body in some rainbow color. It was like an explosion in a paint factory, with the sprinklers on. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Woke up, not with visions of sugar plums dancing in my head, but with the first two sentences of the novel. Good writing session this morning. Well, okay really – filled a couple of pages of a scene where Mindy (formerly Melinda) meets Jack. Probably have to throw out the first two sentences. But it was nice to feel the words moving again.