Reading and Writing

After last weeks post a friend of mine said that maybe it is time I write a novel. I have been thinking about this for the last week or so. I have started short stories, written poems and posted to this blog over 70 times but a novel. That is a vast undertaking. Just for information sake a post to this blog usually on a good night I will spend an hour on it. I will read it through multiple times before spell checking and reading it to Brian aloud and then posting it. I then promptly turn off the computer and do not think about it until the next day when I will re-read what I wrote the previous night and grin or cry or whatever I was trying to get out of it the night before. One thing about the words I write, they are the voice in my head. That to me is like the talking to your best friend. Sometimes it is the only voice that understands me and that is usually the voice of reason except for when it is ridiculous. Anxiety always makes me wonder how I can know something is in my head and yet I still believe it to be true. But that is for another night. Tonight it is about reading and writing.

I have ideas for a novel in my head. It has to be fiction because I could not just write the facts. But I love fiction that is about real people. Some of my favorite books have Beatrix Potter and her animals as characters. The Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter by Susan Wittig Albert. There have been at least 8 of these novels and I have loved them all. Murder mystery with a twist of pixies and fairies and animals that talk like the cat named Tabbitha Twitchet and an owl they call the Professor. These are some great fantasy novels with a bit of history in them.

Any book that includes a map is for me. I love to know where we are going and how we are going to get there. By train or bus or horse and buggy. Books that were written before all of our modern conveniences are great. You know that people went to bed at dark to save the candles for when they needed them. And got up with the sun to start a new day. I have recently finished a book called Blue Highways which was written about 1980 about a trip on the small roads of the US around the perimeter and the people the author William Least Heat-Moon met along the way. I loved the view from his windshield and the people he met and picked up.

Another book I recently finished was by Bill Bryson A Walk in the Woods. This story took me on a trip hiking part of the Appalachian Trail. Something that I have decided that the next time we are in North Carolina we are going to go to Hot Springs where the trail cuts through town and walk a bit of it. Just so I can say I walked it. I would love to have the ambition to walk more than a few miles but I don't think I do. At least not right now. But today I saw the movie by the same name and it is as funny as the book. In the book as I read I found the character Bill took along on his trip to be funny and pretty much he is what he is matter of fact. Not in any shape to make the trip east from Iowa let alone to hike the AT as they refer to it on the trail. I loved the views in the movie and I loved some of the human drama that would come along with just such a trip but I missed what I thought was one of the funniest parts of the book. Towards the beginning of their hike Bill would get ahead of his friend Katz and at times wait for up to an hour for him to catch up. He also sometimes would go back looking for him to make sure he had not died. There is a bit that was in the book but not the movie about Katz flinging his food off of a cliff to lighten the load he was carrying. The description in the book was laugh out loud funny. Nick Nolte as Katz an unlikely person played the perfect character. I found him to remind me a lot of my father which I don't know if either would find it to be a compliment but is true. I thought after the movie I wonder if Bill Bryson picked Robert Redford to play him? I mean how often do you get to pick who plays you? And his wife thought man I could of had Robert Redford.  Maybe not.

So I have talked a lot about books I have read and like to read but none about the one I want to write. Let's not say want but must write. Here is my biggest stumbling block. What I want to write or need to write is not a trip down a trail I truly want to walk all the way through. I have walked a section here or there through this story in my head but there are parts I am not ready to go through and I have to take others along and I don't know if they are ready for the trip either.  The weather is a source of concern because it can be very hot and sometimes very cold where we are going. Parts that I have already completed not the book but the sections of the trail were hard. Not all the characters experienced the same things on their sections of the trail. Some will not even recognize the trail to be the same one they walked but I promise it is. Even the ending is different for each of the characters. Some will go back to Iowa and go to the state fair as they have for the last 39 years but others... Well they are my concern. I must take into account the lives of the other characters on the trail. So in the mean time I have projects that I am working on my kids travel book which takes them on family trips to places they may not find interesting but will find all kinds of real history and fun along the way. I also have a children's book that the illustrations are being worked on now and I hope will be published in the not to distant future.

So until we meet again. Walk softly and carry a big stick. Or just stand back and enjoy the view from where you are. But either way. Open a book they are full of adventures.