Writers
Writing
Blog category about writing
Shirl Sazynski: Writer and Illustrator
014 years
If you’re interested in genius, you will love Shirl Sazynski’s work! I met her about a year ago through our professional writer’s group in Albuquerque, and find myself very drawn to not only her writing but her art also. You’ll love her blog on her upcoming comic Mistral as well as the rest of the lovely content on her Web site: ShirlSazynski.com.
Writer’s Resource: Miriam’s Well of Current Literary Events and Calls for Submissions
014 years
Shirl Sazynski recommended this resource for current literary events and for writers looking to submit their work. It looks like it is a great blog to keep an eye toward…
Cheers and may the pen be with you!
Meet Ahmed Akbar
014 years
Ahmed Akbar is a character in Savage Investigations, the novel I’ve been writing for 500 years (or so it seems).
This is his origin story…
Ahmed Akbar awoke early that morning. Today would begin the most important day of his young life.
It all began on a normal day like any other. Ahmed was a brilliant young man, going off to the school where he was the youngest teacher on staff. He slung the worn messenger bag over his shoulder that contained his lunch and the test results from his students. He kissed his wife, Sanaa, on the cheek and their infant son, Raheem, on the top of his head and went to the front door of their modest two room house on the outskirts of the Iraqi city of Al-Awja.
The door wouldn’t open.
Since the bombings and the American invasion, the door frame had shifted.
Too proud to leave his house by the back door, it had been the same comical story every morning for months now because Ahmed felt it was, “too insignificant a thing to bother with.”
“Ahmed, I swear, you must fix that door,” Sanaa laughed. “It embarrasses me to have to tell our friends to go around back to enter our house.”
“Sanaa, my love, we are lucky to even have a door after what has happened around here,” he reminded her but then added, “I will fix it on our next national day of rest. I promise.”
She looked down at Raheem in her arms. “Do you hear that, Raheem? Your father will fix the door on Friday. He promised. We will see.”
Ahmed pushed up hard on the latch and to the left and the door opened.
“See? I told you I could open the door,” he smiled. “Friday,” he promised and left the house, slamming the door behind him to close it. It shook the china on the shelves and the baby started to cry.
Later that morning, a squad of American contract soldiers were patrolling the neighborhood. This had become a common sight and there didn’t seem to be any cause for alarm.
They came to Ahmed’s house.
Sanaa was sitting in her chair and reading with Raheem asleep in her lap.
The soldiers knocked on the door with their rifle butts and Raheem woke up crying.
Sanaa got up to answer the door but she couldn’t get the door open.
The soldiers, hearing the baby crying on the other side, knocked louder and demanded that it be opened.
Sanaa tried to open the door but couldn’t with Raheem in her arms.
“I can’t get it open. Please go around to the back!” she cried in her native tongue, which the Americans could not understand.
“You hear that? Sounds like a baby’s crying,” said the leader of the squad. “We got reports of insurgents in the area and it looks like somebody doesn’t want us to come in. Kick down the door!”
Two men kicked in the door, knocking Sanaa backwards. She dropped the baby and struck her head on the corner of a table, killing her instantly. Raheem died in the fall and Ahmed Akbar’s little family lay lifeless on the floor.
“Now what?” exclaimed one of the American contractors.
“Well, she seems to be the only one home. No terrorist insurgents here,” said the leader. “Let’s get the hell outta here!”
“Yeah,” said one of the men, “the corporation’s not payin’ me enough to get involved in a murder investigation, even if was an accident!”
Rather than trying to offer assistance, they left Sanaa and Raheem on the floor where they lay and ran.
A few blocks away, the leader said, “Okay, that never happened. Am I clear?”
The rest of the squad agreed and nothing more was said or done about it.
After school, Ahmed came home and seeing the door open, ran inside and found that life as he knew it was over.
He screamed as he sat on the floor in the pool of his wife’s blood, holding his lifeless family in his arms until the neighbors came.
“Murdered at the hands of the American infidels!” he said quietly at the funeral. “I hate the Western dogs that brought war to my peaceful world. I will strike back!” he hissed between his teeth.
After he said his final goodbyes to his little family, his wife’s uncle approached him.
“I know of a man who can help you to avenge the death of my brother’s daughter and grandson. If you wish, I can have him contact you. Not now, but when your head and your heart are clearer.”
Ahmed looked at the man through enraged eyes and said, “Please. I cannot let this travesty go unpunished.”
A week later he was visited by a man from a secret organization that was so secret, it had no name, nor seemingly any members that knew about each other. He recruited Ahmed to join the fight, and told him he would be able to get his revenge against the capitalist mongrels that were ruining the world with vile arrogance, spreading hatred wherever they went. The mild mannered schoolteacher was transformed into a terrible angel whose only mission was to avenge the death of his family.
His handler, known to him only as Kadin, the confidant, had told Ahmed to go to a clinic on the other side of town to see a doctor for the tests and then he would be spirited away to begin the transformation. He had an eight-thirty appointment. He already knew that he had the right blood type, AB positive, and the correct bone structure, so the physical alterations Ahmed was about to undertake would only be changes to his eyes and other facial features, along with a slight modification to his voice box so he would sound like his doppelganger. Kadin told him the entire transformation would take six weeks and when he looked in the mirror afterwards he would no longer see himself staring back. He would see the American he was going to replace.
After the operations, during the recovery and orientation period, he would learn to speak flawless English and undergo intense speech therapy. His body would be trained to move the way the American did and to affect all the mannerisms and other physical traits that until now were the American’s alone. His physical size and body type, even his shoe size, was already a perfect match. Once the transformation was complete, if they were to stand side by side, they would appear to be the same person.
Unbeknownst to the American, he was continually being monitored and videotaped so that Ahmed could study the American’s every movement and facial expression until, with the help of a team of coaches, Ahmed would be able to walk and talk and move through the world exactly like him.
He stood in the doorway to his little house, tears in his eyes as he remembered the joy and laughter that had echoed off the walls. Walking out for the last time, he slammed the door.
He heard the sound of breaking china as he stalked away to begin his new life.
What do you think? Feel free to let me know…
Thanks,
Be Well,
Chuck
Market Research Diamond-In-The-Rough: Hire People Before You Meet Them
0Contrary to the social pressures we read about when job hunting or looking to market ourselves, I was delighted to read the following on the Advertising Principles Web site today:
“After summarizing decades of research on personnel selection, Meehl (1956) advised that when deciding whom to hire, one should make a decision before meeting a candidate. Another half century of research supported Meehl’s advice (Grove et al. 2000). This advice leads one to focus on information about a candidate’s ability to perform the job. When you meet a person, you are distracted by features that might be irrelevant to the job, such as height, accent, looks, weight, and gender. Thus, some orchestras have applicants play behind a curtain when auditioning, a procedure that has enabled more women to get these jobs.”
To see the full article, visit advertisingprinciples.com
The Advertising Principles Web site focuses on academic research into advertising, and that can apply to our individual lives today as we worry about our abilities to sustain ourselves as writers and creative people—whether we are employees or independent contractors—as corporations shut the doors of the future in our faces. Behind their closed doors, they hoard their capital and profit. Can you picture them with all their dollar bills stacked up to their necks, like hoarders with trash towers interspersed with narrow pathways?
About a decade ago, I sensed there were some rules to the game. There seemed a tacit acknowledgement that if you worked at the jobs that were in demand, like graphic design and programming, you could be included in the corporate world. Now, however, corporate America’s decision making is rife with the constant excuse of the addict: I can’t because I don’t believe I have enough.
So only the most political of human animals tends to have a voice today in our media and in our meeting rooms. It’s disconcerting to those of us who don’t fit that hyper-attractive model, and I admit a point of glee when I realized that, in advertising, the research showed the best way to hire someone creative is to do it sight-unseen, based upon their work—not based upon their statuesque beauty or their charm.
If we were to follow all the rules of job acquisition as per our American job hunting sites, we would wear a navy suit, visit the hair stylist and, if female (as I am), apply copious amounts of makeup. We’d find some new shoes and painfully (for me) attend to building a face and appearance that some corporate manager will find acceptable. We would practice the answers to questions that we can anticipate. We would make flash cards of our three “bullet-points” to convey about ourselves to leave the interviewer with a clear and lasting impression of our fit for the organization. Don’t forget that first impressions are everything!
I would so much prefer to live in a world that judged us by our creative ability rather than our ability to be uber-human and good looking and sexy and also have time to study anything of value beyond personal hygiene. There are some things I will never be able to achieve, and media good-looks is one of them.
What if everything we think we know is wrong? What if, all along, team work and positioning ourselves were not the end-all-be-all things to focus on in life? What if we acknowledge to ourselves that our own creative personalities make us difficult sometimes, and our lack of focus on politics—be they office politics or any other politics—is one of the most beautiful things about us?
(By the way, I think those invested in being ‘politically incorrect’ are as focused on politics as those who commit that purportedly most repulsive of acts—caring about others.)
This article opened up a lot of thoughts about what work means, and what I should be looking for in myself and other whom I hire in the future.
Writer in Albuquerque
0Today I find myself wishing I were more and more consistent in my ability to share my thoughts through the written word. I think I’ll provide a few local resources in the spirit of sharing!
As a writer in Albuquerque, one of the best groups to keep an eye on is Southwest Writers. They have been established for a long, long time. Their meetings are monthly on The first Saturday of the month, and they are a stable resource. See their web site for more information about them.
Also, I have just entered an annual poetry contest at the Harwood Arts Center.
Another resource I use a lot is the online Writer’s Market although that is not local to New Mexico.
Chuck is also president of 7000 B.C. this year, a non-profit collective of writers and artists in the comic and graphic novel arena / genre.
The Writer’s Mind
0I always know Chuck needs to write when he begins to tell complicated stories about the other drivers while we are on our way to Santa Fe. If a lady is traveling at 85 MPH in a 45 MPH zone, her daughter has just been brought to the hospital with a broken elbow and she is trying to get there as quickly as she can. If a young man forgets to use his blinker or his tail light is out, he has been handed down an American car and is in the process of learning about all the electrical problems American cars experience over time.
Having a poet’s mind, and not a fiction writer’s mind, I used to wonder why he wasted his time making things up. Didn’t he realize he was making assumptions? Couldn’t he see he could not possibly understand why another driver did what they did? Did he not know his job was to avoid their erratic behavior on the road and keep plenty of space between us and the other cars? Not sidle up to them and look at them in order to create characters in a new tale.
Then, one day at lunch in a small office cafe on Kirtland Air Force Base when we were both government contractors, I broached the question.
“What would you do if you could do anything?”
He chewed pastrami for a long moment.
“I would write books and movies.”
Now we were moving! I suddenly understood his motivation in making up all the stories about our daily lives. Chuck is a writer. He needs to make up stories about the situations we experience in even our most mundane moments because that is the way he is wired and the story is his primary communication tool.
Since then, he has delved ever more deeply into his craft and has revealed himself a fantastic storyteller. And he doesn’t bring his unwritten stories into our conversations nearly so often.
If you have a writer’s mind, how did you discover it? Did you compensate for your unwritten works in another area of life? We welcome your comments!