The Thursday! Newsletter 1-11: Launch Your Dynamite
Volume 1, Issue 11
My writing career has suddenly become a Road Runner cartoon.
Specifically, my writing career has become the 1961 masterpiece Lickety-Splat, directed by Chuck Jones. In that cartoon, which always makes me laugh, Wile. E Coyote gets his hands (paws?) on a bunch of sticks of dynamite with wings and a hot air balloon. He steps the flying dynamite sticks in a sling on the side of the balloon, gets aloft, lights them, then turns them loose. His plan is for one of them -- any one of them -- to find the Road Runner, who is zooming along the highway below, stick in him, and turn him into a platter of well-cooked Road Runner nuggets. Mmm....nuggets.
Of course, that doesn't work. The flying dynamite sticks make a perfect loop up and over his balloon, except for one, which sticks in the top and explodes. No more balloon. No more airborne coyote. Splat, as per the title of the cartoon. Except that not the end of the joke. Over the rest of the cartoon, every time Wile E. Coyote gets a good scheme going, one of those flying explosives comes along to blow it and him up in some entertaining but non-fatal fashion. At the end, two of them land on either side of him and, instead of exploding, scroll out a banner that says "The End".
I can almost hear you now. "Jimmie," you ask while reaching behind you for a large butterfly net, "are you telling me you had some sort of unfortunate accident with dynamite or...you blew up...a...I don't know, man. Did you buy a balloon? I'm lost and you're nuts."
Right. Let me explain.
No. There is too much. Let me sum up. I had originally intended to write about how the word "accident" doesn't always mean something bad happened or even something completely inexplicable happened, as in the phrase "a happy accident". Except I remembered this cartoon and those flying sticks of dynamite seemed absolutely perfect to describe what I've done with my writing career.
Here's what I mean. As you know, my first book will be out at the end of the month. Two months ago, I very much doubted I would ever publish a book. It got kind of bad. I was not in a great place, creatively. Not long after that, during one of Sarah Werner's delightful create-alongs, I decided to write a poem. I had no plan for it except to write it in the 45 minutes I had to write that evening. I didn't even know what the poem would be about, whether it would rhyme, whether it would be scary or funny or even make sense at all. I just wrote a poem because I needed to write something. I didn't even plan on typing it up, but the poem seemed kind of cute and I figured I'd keep it. What the heck. I called it "One Hungry Werewolf", typed it into a Google Doc and pretty much forgot it for a little while. Think of that poem as the first flying stick of dynamite (FSD for short) in this cartoon. A couple of weeks later, I was talking to another writer I know who had just finished a clever and lovely book she made in a month purely as a labor of love called The Cute Moose. I had written a goofy little four-line nonsense poem because she was looking for words to rhyme with "moose" (FSD #2). She liked it and asked if she could use it as an end piece. Of course, I agreed and asked her if she was going to do more books like that. She was open to it, so I mentioned I happened to have a poem that might work (FSD #3, which was also FSD #1. Remember it?). She read it and loved it. She wanted more. I had more -- the Six Spooky Stanzas I had done after Halloween on a whim (FSD #4).
See how this went? I launched a bunch of FSDs and they all came around to blow up in a single project. They weren't the only ones. I have a couple more poems I wrote to read when I did a live Facebook Video show last summer and two of those are going to be in our next collaboration. FSDs 5 and 6. There are more FSDs out there. I learned, thanks to some very good advice, to launch these things whenever I got a chance. I'm still launching them, though not always as often as I'd like nor with as much abandon, but I do get them out there. And I'll launch a bunch more.
Some of the FSDs are exploding now and that's pretty much the end of the analogy. What I'm really trying to say is that a bunch of things I did with no real plan that they should be anything but what they were right then, right at that time, have become more. They're merged with other things I put out into the world, also without much of a plan. I did not expect my first book to be a creepy and adorable poetry picture book for kids both little and grown-up yet here we are. It's a real thing that happened because I launched a bunch of little hissing time bombs of creative delight and let them land wherever they fit best.
So how does this help you? Well, you have to launch your own FSDs. You have to do some creative things just because they're fun, just because you want to do them, just because they are things you've never done and you want to see how they turn out. You can not know what things you create today will become amazing parts of your career tomorrow. And the ones that don't work out? Assuming you didn't launch truly noxious things, and I'm sure you haven't because you are not noxious trolls who love to make people miserable, most folks won't ever care about them. No big deal, really. You write a silly poem and it doesn't go anywhere. Okay. Fine. Write another one. For fun. Or draw a picture. For fun. Color a coloring page. Fold origami. Knit a scarf. Sing a song. To fuel your creative heart. To see if you can. Launch stuff then move on to another thing. Just keep making stuff and sharing stuff and doing stuff. That's all any creative person can really do. You can not predict the future. You can not read minds. I know you want to. So do I. But you can't.
All you can do is create and create and create some more. Make something. Turn it loose. Make something else a little bit better and different from the last thing you created. Turn that loose too. Repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat.
Launch your flying sticks of creative dynamite. Some of them will come back around and do wonderful and unexpected things. Give them time. Enjoy what you're doing right now. Learn a little and grow a little and have a little more faith. Those are all good things, too.
See all the good you're doing? Look at you. I'm proud of you. I mean that.
Boom.
BOOK UPDATE: Assuming no last-minute road bumps, One Hungry Werewolf and Other Monstrous Rhymes will leap out at the world on January 31, 2021. That's not quite two weeks from RIGHT NOW!
We have a pre-order link for the Kindle version. It is right here. This is the link. This link, right here. If you want the print version, keep this link handy so you can order it then! Or, if you like, order the e-book version now and the print version when the e-book version hits your e-reader! Why not?
If you want an autographed version, I'm pretty sure I can make that happen, but I'll have to get my hands on a few copies and mail them to you from here. I'll likely have to ask for a buck more than what you'll pay directly from Amazon. I will let you know next week, as I get answers to a question or two. In the meantime, how about a peek at the back cover blurb?
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Here Are the Arts and/or Letters I Promised...
She Looked Down, an illustration by Charles Dana Gibson, who created the style we know today as he Gibson Girl. I found this picture while eating a cold hamburger from the fridge and I'm pretty sure she judged me until the very last bite.
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Here Are Links, either Useful or Fun!
I'm not saying that bringing back trial by combat would solve a few societal problems but I'm not not saying it either.
Might this cave in South Africa have once been a concert hall or even a type of cathedral? It does seem the folks who lived there in the Stone Age were pretty familiar with rock music.
The name Wilson Bentley should probably be more familiar to us, especially this time of year. He is the man who, through incredible patience and cleverness, proved that snowflakes are unique.
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One Last Thing
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