Words to Live By

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."

– Jack London

Photo and quote from here:

So, did you ever want to write a book? If so, what kind of book? Fiction, how-to, children's? What do you need to write the great American novel beyond "It was a dark and stormy night"? I wrote a book and edited a book. Both were short little things. The one I wrote was a short history of a little railroad that ran through the county. The other dealt with the little Harley Sprint/Aermacchi racers. I didn't write anything much but I compiled things from others into a handy little ditty everyone with a racing Sprint should have in his collection.

That being said, I've been thinking about what it would take for me to write a book. I'm going to be retired soon, so I should have plenty of time. I can type something like twenty words per minute now that I'm using almost all of my fingers. I have a fairly good vocabulary. I know enough about sentence structure to string some words together, even though it might not always make sense to anyone but me. I read Stephen King's On Writing a few years back and I've got a copy of The Elements of Style by E. B. White and W. Strunk. I took a couple of courses on writing in college but looking back, I don't think that's much of an asset.

So do I take the advice of Jack London and go after inspiration and club it like a baby Harp seal? There's a writer's group in the county and they publish a collection of their works annually. Maybe start there? Start jotting down things now as I think of them and put it all together after I retire? I read a book about twenty-five years ago a buddy loaned me about the Detroit school system. It appealed to me because of the similarities between the Detroit schools and Washington High School in East Chicago where I started my career. I wish I could find another copy of that one. Every day at E. C. "Dub" was kind of like the movie Cooley High. Or, I could write a "I'll tell you what's wrong with education" scorcher. Actually it's not too hard to describe what's wrong with education. It's fixing it that's the problem. If I take that route I might have to get a PhD. You have to have the credentials, you know.

As you can surmise, I've had a lot of time for thinking lately due to the snow. If I knew I was going to have all that time to lounge around, I would have planned a little bit. When you don't know what the weather or the school corporation is going to do, that's a little tough. Plus, when I got done shoveling I was too tired to do much more than think anyway. It should be back to work as normal this week. I'll hopefully finish the apple grinder and get back to stamping out ignorance like Smokey the Bear does wildfires.

Claudia Cardinale

(Technically Tunisian)

Think Italy

Think Spring