Writerly Stuff

Ahh, the business of writing - driving authors to alcoholism and suicide since papyrus.

I enjoy reading about the struggles and triumphs of other writers, so I decided I would start relating some of my own…

Struggles-

In the last two months I’ve written two publications into obscurity: The Hub Weekly of Champaign Illinois, and Glucose Magazine.

I contributed Travelin’ Light to the Hub for about a year and the column was well received. In fact, one Hub reader who has a winter home in New Zealand, after reading a piece I wrote about New Zealand, even offered me a place to stay on NZ’s South Island. He seemed like a nice enough fella, but I think he was looking for a house/pool boy…(wink, wink)… if you get what I mean. He even sent me pics - an awesome place on a cliff above a beach with perfect kayaking and sailing below. The place is almost on the level of coolness that I would consider life as house/pool boy. Almost.

Glucose Magazine was the most regular paying writing gig that I’ve ever had. They paid me to explore Ohio. The one thing that surprised me most was that there are actually places in Ohio worth exploring. For Glucose, I interviewed people about Bigfoot in southern Ohio, climbed a 90’ mast on a tall ship while sailing on Lake Huron, hiked, kayaked, and other things of this sort. I am a believer that adventure is a state of mind that is not limited to individuals that live in cool States (CA, CO, WA). I thought the idea of Glucose could be replicated in other boring states such as, Indiana, Delaware, Illinois, Kansas, etc., and maybe it could have been, if anyone would have ever sold any ads.

You know a magazine is not doing well when most of the ads in the magazine are ads about the magazine. I’m not sure Glucose had one salesperson out beating the bushes. Glucose was a good idea poorly executed.

The writing was excellent, of course.

Triumph-

I really don’t have a voice for the radio; some have told me that I sound like Matthew McConaughey and others Joe Dirt. I’ve got a bit of a nasal draw. But this weekend I recorded a piece for the World Vision Report radio program about playing soccer in a remote Honduran village (I'll post a link when there is one).

I think it went well, but I never thought I would need to do so many other things besides talk into a microphone. The engineer bailed on the appointment and I was left with a nice lady who didn’t know jack about recording. The World Vision editor called to listen and the “nice lady” wasn’t able to tap my editor into the microphone so I had to hold a phone to my ear as I talked. She couldn’t even find a stand to set my story on, so with my other hand I had to hold up my story to read. Apparently, if I looked down to talk my voice would sound even worse.

I don’t want to come across as a radio diva, but the next studio is going to have to meet some of my demands to have the pleasure of taping my nasal twang. Things like: 5 bowls of Skittles sorted by color – the purple ones to be individually hand washed and wrapped in Hershey Kiss foil; which leads us to…unwrapped Hershey Kisses; 4 bottles of FlavorSplash bottled water; two jugglers; one sword swallower; a reading stand; a nice lady that knows what the heck she is doing; and James Earl Jones to read my story.

What can I say? Me and my posse have needs.