John Russell Dunn

Entertaining and encouraging through the written and spoken word.

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Why Did I Bother?

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Why did I bother?

You know the question if you’ve attended enough critique group meetings.

On rare- oh so rare- occasions, your writing soars and transports. Your critique partners sigh or laugh or scowl at all the right places.

Other times nothing works. The piece you brought might as well have been written in Sanskrit.

None of them ever actually voice the ‘Why did you bother?’ question. It’s something a frightened and cowering part of our own psyches ask. If this is all I can squeeze out after a month or a week away, why do I even show up?

But I’m starting to see the reasons now. Without the prototyping, without the scrutiny, without the prove-every-rivet stress testing, my writing would never improve.

Then one day, you have something worth saying and the words come when they’re called. You swing your axe and find the words sharp and the writing solid. You yank it out and swing again and it bites deep and true into the mind, into the heart.

Then you know why you endured a thousand nights of ‘Why did I bother?’

When I am King

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When I am King (don’t hold your breath) libraries will be open on holidays.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Just check out the nearest quality book store on any holiday and you’ll see how obvious this connection is. The smell of ink on bound paper is always therapeutic. What could be more refreshing then a leisurely stroll through stacks of books? And think of all the holiday-related activities that occur so naturally in the library. You can take a journey with a fantasy novel, plan your next vacation, or maybe even learn about – or teach your children about – the holiday your community is celebrating. If you’re traveling on your vacation, what better way to encounter the authentic flavor, to take the measure of another locale, than to breathe in the hallowed air of their library.

This is not to devalue our hard-working librarians. On the contrary, it should illustrate my profound appreciation for their important work. After all, hospitals and police stations remain open. No one closes the parks or theaters on holidays. Or the beaches, or the stadiums, all of which require the services of diligent caretakers. Why should the library be any different?

And this doesn’t imply that librarians should work for free, either. Communities pay multiples of their employees’ regular wages to keep essential service providers on duty during a holiday. No one balks at paying a premium to keep our first responders available during these crucial times.

Join me in my campaign to make libraries open and available on holidays for future generations.

If that sounds too unlikely, you can always work to make me king and I’ll take care of the rest.

Autotext

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I have a love-hate relationship with the autotext feature that scrolls above any email or message I peck out on my cell phone. Half the time it displays words that are so improbable that I wonder what the programmers were thinking. The other half, it predicts my words with frightening accuracy. But it also has a tendency to draw (imho) too strongly on popular culture. ‘Johansson’ isn’t the only word likely to follow ‘Scarlett,’ especially if you love to read. I guess the worst part is when I start to enter a word that I’m sure the program will autocomplete for me. Letter by letter, I glance up to see if the goofy device has figured out where I’m going with all this. I finally finish the entire word (like it’s some daunting task, right?) and I’m disappointed that it doesn’t understand me better by now.

What’s the funniest or most embarrassing autocomplete experience your machine has put you through? Add a comment below.

Jumping the Shark

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The phrase ‘jumping the shark’ was coined by Jon Hein to describe a television series or a celebrity that does something far enough out of their brand to damage their future prospects. It came from an episode of the television show Happy Days in which the character Fonzi water ski-jumped over an aquarium tank with a shark in it. (I happened to see the episode, not realizing it would become a byword for bread-and-circuses desperation. I remember thinking that hitting a piling or the wharf with all those spectators posed a greater risk than a half-minute (or less) swim with a startled shark.) Anyway, the ridiculous act was so far out of character and setting that is sounded the death knell for the series.

I bring this up because some novelists seem to outgrow their editors. I say ‘outgrow’ in the sense of “too big for their britches.” There comes a time when authors, gravid with self-significance, believe their advertising copy to the extent that they become impervious to editorial advice.

Traditionally, the editor served a gatekeeper role to control what comes to the publishing house and what goes out to the public. Even before e-publishing, writers could amass a strong enough platform that they could ditch their publishing house. That reduced the editor’s ability to have a heart-to-heart with their colleagues. This is even more likely now when people can push several buttons and make their musings available to the world.

The editor still serves a necessary pressure-cooker role in the publishing process, keeping undercooked or unpalatable dishes away from the consumer.

[I considered calling this blog post ‘Jumping the Editor,’ but didn’t want to be misunderstood.]

Voter Registration

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The other day, I got my new voter registration card, a perforated section of a larger piece of card stock. It looked like it had been printed with a dot-matrix printer.  The difference between the driver’s license I recently received and the voter registration card was pretty striking. Our driver’s licenses do heavy identification duty. Yes, I know you need something like a driver’s license to even register to vote, but every year we hear people gripe about low voter turn-out. Maybe if our voter registration cards were more substantial, more impressive maybe, we might see people take voting more seriously.