Lessons from The Outer Reaches

Alice T. Kat started as a marketing gimmick for a pizza place that never opened.

The idea was to write up a little adventure—or part of an adventure—every week and send it home on a coupon sheet that also included a space to draw and color a scene from that week's installment. When you turned in the drawing the next week, you'd get a bigger discount or a free 2-liter or something like that. The pictures would be posted in the store and eventually printed in an informal book, which would also be available for sale.

Like I said, the shop never opened, but Alice wouldn't go away. I decided to try to keep up a regular serial story to practice things like themes, settings, dialogue, characterization—all the essentials of good story-telling. The concept was that if those things are perfected, then the medium didn't matter. A good interesting story about a bunch of, say, space-faring cats, could be just as compelling as a tale where humans are the central characters.

Did it succeed? I'm not sure; you'll have to tell me.

I have learned a few things along the way, and enjoyed myself enough to continue it, anyway.

First, I was surprised to tally up the words in her first adventure and find that I had written nearly 16,000 of them. That reinforces a simple truth about writing: keep it up. Do something every day, even if it's just a few paragraphs or pages. Those paragraphs and pages add up and, even if the story itself doesn't amount to anything, the skills eventually will.

It is a bit disjointed in some places and the wording is a bit terse and awkward in others, but it's just a first draft. A draft is something you can fix, and a draft is something you can fix. In her book, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott talks about the necessity—if not the virtues—of the sh*tty first draft. Simply put, you have to start somewhere and if writing about space cats and nationalistic (or should that be planetalistic?) Plutorian renegades gets you down at the desk every day, then so be it.

Finally, whatever you decide to write, make sure you get some kind of enjoyment out of it. Find a way to have fun. You'd think that would be the easy part, but it's not. Sitting down to write is not fun, not always, it is a job like any other and all the more difficult sometimes because there is often no paycheck—or even a chance of a paycheck—at the end of it.

Ultimately, if you don't have fun writing it, nobody will have fun reading it. So perhaps I'm a bit chagrinned because, out of all the concepts I've identified and thought about over the past several years the one I've chosen to make the most public probably has no defined market. There were still bits that I liked about it, some passages of dialogue, a couple of the titles (such as 'the mosquito and the porcupine') that may appear in some other form somewhere down the line. It's all practice, after all. Writing is one of those skills where quantity will ultimately bring quality.

Alice's first tale was about the dangers of pride and the way the labels we so callously put on other people—or beings—can cause a lot of damage. Her next, which exists only in the scrap of a few sentences in my mind right now, is a little broader, about how we look at and take comfort in things that most others either ignore or take for granted.

Thanks for reading and, especially for letting me know what you think so far. I'll see you in the Outer Reaches, and beyond.

 

"You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille...."

My last conversation with Congressman Thad McCotter was one of my favorites.

I was still in the newspaper business back then and we were discussing the difficulties the U.S. automakers were having in getting loans from the federal government, compared to the blank checks that had simply been given to the banking industry. We had similar thoughts on the issue—it was basically Main Street vs. Wall Street—although his opinions were more well-informed and articulate.

"You know," I said, "maybe I should get a bunch of newspaper guys to come to Washington and ask for a bailout or a loan, too."

His answer: we'd have to ride in on bikes, bundle up the plan, and throw it in everyone's bushes at four in the morning.

I always thought that was a good joke; and his sense of humor was one of the things I always liked about him. That and he always struck me as a voice of reason within the Republican Party which, in my humble opinion, wasn't always easy to find.

I still liked the guy and respected what he's done in office, even as I watched the apparent end of his political career with a growing sense of unease and disbelief. Already strange, it crossed over into the truly bizarre when he abruptly resigned from his office rather than serve out the few remaining months of his term. I don't know if we'll ever know the true reason for that and I might not believe it even if I did.

The end result is that has left Republican voters in his district with not only one conundrum, but two. First, the choice on primary election day, between Kerry Bentivolio and Nancy Cassis, a write-in candidate. I personally can't get behind either of them. I am all for getting more 'regular people' involved in politics, but I don't think congress is an entry-level position--although Bentivolio may get a sympathetic vote or two for having the temerity to run against the Republican machine.

The second conundrum is the post-primary-pre-November election to find someone to fill out the few remaining weeks of McCotter's term. I wonder if that's what McCotter meant when he referred to 'striking a match' in his resignation email—because that aspect of this certainly stinks.

It'll all be over in a few short hours and my mailbox will probably appreciate the rest. Then, it's on to November. What a weird year; politics as unusual.