Book Authoring Trial Run
Mood:  not sure
Now Playing: S T E N D H A L H A R O L D S by R. V. Reyes
Topic: Author Inventions


This is the story of an idea, one which was ahead of its time in the era the story was written but which is now behind the times. Mostly because of all the new technologies which, when this was written, were no more than pipe dreams in the heads of whichever of today's geeks had already been born. We're talking nineteen-
sixties here -- and scarcely a man (beg pardon) person who is anybody in today's computer-generated generation
was around at the time.

In the year 1964, when the author was out of work and nothing seemed to be coming along in the way of something worthwhile, he thought, why not write something fiction, a story, something of which said author, I, had nothing to do with or to have been a part of, with all these dangling participles, it's difficult to make headway among all the accepted cliches of today.

Anyway, without the non-fiction daily grind of having to turn out newspaper articles and features, I thought I would turn my back on anything real and do something in the unreal world for a change, in utter defiance of my main thrust in life, which was, to do something completely opposite what my mother, who died in 2001 at the age of 89, was constantly doing, which was writing fiction. And yet, to write something which was not at all autobiographical -- you're just going to take my word for it-- based on some white guys and girls -- already there's a difference -- who go off and do all sorts of weird activities the like of which I never dared to do, given the circumstances of undergraduating in the University of Hawaii and the University of California
at Berkeley (!) from which I was diploma-ed in 1953.

So, that's how old I am, a '53 grad of Cal Berkeley who never raised hell, except with the Cal Band of sainted memory. Sainted memory because although they might exist today, I daresay the band does not have the ne'er-do-well lifestyle of OUR wild old days, and I don't care who thinks otherwise.

But, and this is going far afield, I thought I would write about some mid-Westerners who eventually come to California and hatch a scheme to make something come out right and legal, overcoming certain adventures and other misadventures along the way.

If At First...
Mood:  cool
You don't succeed, why try at all? Why, indeed?
Reason is, there's no point not trying if all one has to do is perfect the attitude of nothing in this life will succeed. However, there is much to be said for the other point of view, that is, one must try, mustn't one, to get hold of one's life if only to stop it skittering off, away in the horizon, with you merely looking on like some spectator. Spectators do have some rights, but in this case, one must forego those rights in order to admit responsibility for one's actions or inaction, as the case might be.

Nothing gets accomplished for nothing, it's been said, by whom, nobody knows. But something can certainly be accomplished if one puts one's mind to it, or rather, sits down and decides to go ahead and do it, whatever IT is. Information technology notwithstanding, the IT in most people's lives amounts to certain actions, like waking, breakfasting
lunching, dining, viewing the small screen, washing up and sleeping, in that order. If you have a different way of doing things, or a different order to the things that need to get done in one day, then by all means, try your way, see if it flies.

When one is homeless and hungry, there is no such procedure or no luxury of ordering one's life, because, such as it is, one's life has already been disordered by the abuse of drugs, alcohol, sexual prowess or other abusable matters. Really, when one thinks about it, the homeless and the hungry are no more than stand-ins for ourselves, such as we are, when we feel that nothing in life is worth doing anymore, or accomplishing, same thing.