Category: inspiration

Song of the Sea

Published by Crawford on September 7, 2026

Happy Labor Day and greetings from the Oregon Coast! We’re holed up at our most favorite beachside getaway: a small, well-furnished cottage just south of Lincoln City. It’s perched on a cliff about fifty feet above a beautiful, sandy beach. We love it here; it’s our happy place.

And, yes, I have done some writing – but not a lot. It is a lovely place to write – the image above shows the deck overlooking the sea. Of course, it’s a great place to write, but it’s an even better place to read. That’s what I typically spend my time doing on these battery-recharging trips to the beach. And after the last few months – or years , really – we all could use some time to simply unplug and refresh ourselves. I feel thankful that’s we’re able to get away from the stress and insanity of American life, 2026 edition.

So, I write a little and read a lot – and dream of what it would be like to be able to spend more than few days at a stretch down here. The Oregon Coast is wild and beautiful and inspiring – Ken Kesey had a coastal getaway outside of Florence Kesey’s all over this part of the coast. The movie version of Sometimes a Great Notion, was filmed on the Siletz River close by, and of course Kesey’s masterpiece was set close to Florence, which is just a little ways south of here.

While Brother Ken may have holed up at his seaside getaway and written up a storm, I’m only renting, so I’ll stick with reading. I managed to get through Larry McMurtry’s Comanche Moon in about three days, then went scavenging the local antique malls and used book stores for a replacement. Finding none, I delved into a copy of Simon Mawer’s The Gospel of Judas. (The bookshelf in this house has a number of other books by yours truly, with the latest edition addition being Fester Descent.)

Basically, at the core of things, I’m just lazy – and doing a lot of writing seems to much like work to do a great deal of it while on vacation. But if I lived here, well, that would be another story, wouldn’t it. Alas, unless I hit the next big Powerball drawing, it’s not going to happen especially soon. That’s quite all right – it’s very fine just knowing that this getaway exists and will be here for future inspiration and relaxation.

Cover for Fester Descent — Not too late for a great beach read!

Limited Omnipotent

Published by Crawford on July 27, 2026

Once again, the sheer joy of pantsing is manifesting itself. The manuscript for my latest project, working title Gemini 13. This is a sequel to Laughingstock, and features good ol’ Duckie Dunne hunting for the tape of a legendary lost rock ‘n’ roll track.

Again, I am amazed at how things never go according to plan – not that there really is any sort of plan – that’s what pantsing is all about. Characters appear out of nowhere – or to serve what is ostensibly a minor role – and suddenly become main characters. Paul Plummer in Fester was like that = and he even made it into Fester Descent. I’ve got a new one like that – her name’s Karen. Originally, she was a random roommate, contrived to give someone a ride to the club. Now she’s shaping up to be a major character. Go figure.

I’ve long since given up trying to figure. The mystery is part of the fun. Writers are sometimes spoken of as having an almost Godlike power over the worlds they create and the characters who inhabit them. That might be true for those plotters, but for us pantsers, it’s another story.

I have come to look at the writing process in this regard as being limited omnipotent. I have created a world (I think), and can open up windows into this world and try to affect the behavior of the people who are running around in there. It’s harder than it sounds, sometimes. Those people definitely have minds of their own – and sometimes it’s really hard to change them! Like I said, however, it’s a lot of fun trying!

Sneak Preview!

A’ight, this post is running pretty short, and I doubt anyone but my Aunt Gail is gonna read it anyway, so I’ll throw in some random crap from the new MS:

Duckie went into a bit that ended with Trump getting a handjob from Jeffrey Epstein in the middle of the Reflecting Pool. From the corner of his eye, he could see Pig Hat passing through a whole Sherwin-Williams sample book of shades of red, going from Medium Rare through Beet to Fire Engine. The guy stood up and pointed at him and shouted, “You show some repsect for the President of the United States, you libtard freak!”

“I bet I’m showing the exact same amount of respect to Trump that you did to Obama, Jethro! Don’t try to tell me that you stood up and saluted and wiped a patriotic tear from your eye whenever President Obama came on the TV. Riddle me this, Fatman – did you ever call Obama the n-word?”

Pig Hat’s mouth dropped open for half a second, then snapped shut. “N-no!” he exclaimed. “Of course not!”

“Yeah, nice little pause there, man. You’re lying! I’m saying that right to your face!” Duckie knew that this was about to spiral out of control unless he did something to cool it down. He wasn’t sure if he could. He saw Candy slide out from behind the sound board and move towards the trouble spot. A couple of other ushers were converging there as well.

Pig Hat was sputtering now. “You … you stupid libtard! Donald Trump is the greatest president in the history of forever, and you’re too stupid to know! He’s made this country great again!”

“Oh yeah?” said Duckie, realizing that the chance of his de-escalating the sitation was rapidly diminishing. He didn’t care. He didn’t hate this guys politics so much as the willful ignorance he showed. “Tell me one thing – one – that bloated orange freak has done to make your life materially better. Just one!”

Pig Hat huffed and puffed, sweat beading on his face. He looked towards his table companions, but they looked away. Finally, Pig Hat said, “He got all of the trans freaks out of women’s sports!”

“Womens’s sports?” said Duckie. The remainder of his self-control slipped away. “Don’t tell me that you’re worried about women’s sports all of a sudden! What, you got big money riding on the field hockey match? Bullshit! You’re just afraid of someone else’s sexuality because you’ve never been able to figure out your own li’l needle dick, you loser!”

With an incoherent bellow of rage, Pig Hat lunged to his feet and charged the stage. His buddies stood up, but looked around, bewildered. They knew the crowd was against him. Duckie t ook a step back, so he could aim a kick at his assailant if he climbed up on stage. Before he could, Candy and an usher grabbed him from behind and pulled him, struggling, to the exit. Two more ushers materialized and grabbed Pig Hat’s companions by the upper arm and moved them along. They went without protest while the crowd hooted and jeered

A Knotty Problem of Timing

Published by Crawford on July 27, 2025

After getting off to a slow start, I finally got up a bit of momentum on the second draft of my latest project. After re-writing one of the early chapters, it was pretty much just picking up the redlines I had marked up the Shitty First Draft – easy stuff. Then my timeline came back to haunt me.

I had learned about the importance of having an accurate timeline from Paula Guran, who edited Fester. She was merciless in addressing the timeline, among other things. (Shame she wasn’t available for Laughingstock, which was an editing nightmare.) I hope she’ll be available to edit Fester Descent.

But just in case, I’ve been keeping a tight timeline as I’m working through the second draft. This is where I pay for the sins of the SFD. Timing issues are just one of many sins, but arguably the most problematic. And as I learned with Fester, you don’t want these problems to linger too long or they, um, fester.

So I’m jumping on it right now, at my earliest convenience. (No point in worrying about it during the SFD; that’s all about getting words on paper.) When cranking on the SFD, I was only worried about the sequence, not the timing. I just knew that event A came before event B, and to hell with the details. Now I’m dealing with situations where a character gets shot, but his wife doesn’t visit him in the hospital for five days. Oops! Gotta fix that.

It’s a knot, I think – and it pays to un-knot the story as quickly as possible. You can sometimes shove the knot down the rope a bit, but you sure don’t want to shove it all the way to the end – because it gets begger the further you shove it.

I think I’ve worked the knot metaphor for about as much as I can. Best to call it good right here. More news to follow as I finish up Draft 2 and start to think about showing it to an editor. I can hardly wait.

The Thing

Published by Crawford on February 28, 2025

One of the things I’ve done this winter in lieu of writing, was to do something I haven’t done in about 45 years: build a model tank.

However, I wasn’t just acting like a 14-year-old, lurking in the basement, blasting Black Sabbath and gluing together squidgy little plastic parts of a tank replica. No, I was doing research.

This was in aid of the current work-in-progress, a sequel to Fester now using the working title Fester Descent. One of the initial mental images I had for this book was a column of tanks rolling through downtown Fester. (Pretty sure I copped this idea from the Book of the SubGenius, of which you should own several copies.)

Further consideration rendered the idea of a column of tanks too complicated, but a single tank should be much more manageable. And I already had a character to command that tank: Billy Snyder, the disgraced former Chief Constable of Fester. It had already been established that Billy had served with the Marines in Vietnam and that he was adept at procuring classified military hardware.

Then it became a matter of research: what type of tanks did the U.S. Marines use in Vietnam? There weren’t many choices, as that war did not see much in the way of armor battles. Then I hit upon the beauty seen at the top of the page: the M50 Ontos. The Ontos was used in Vietnam, and it was small, so it could conceivably be operated but just one whacked-out ex-cop. Best of all, it was weird.

The Ontos – Greek for thing – isn’t so much a tank as a mobile platform for a half-dozen recoilless rifles, with some sheet metal over top. That made the Ontos maneuverable and powerful – but also very vulnerable. It could go places other armored vehicles couldn’t, but was also vulnerable to any weapon more powerful than an assault rifle.

Of course, I had to also research under which circumstances the M50 was used in that war. It came down primarily to two engagements: the Battle of Khe Sanh and the Battle of Hue. The latter seemed more likely from a dramatic perspective, owing to the brutal building-to-building nature of that fight and the likelihood of using the Ontos to blow up buildings. After all, what do you think Billy Snyder is going to do with this piece of hardware? Hint: he’s not fixing it up for the Fester Veterans’ Day parade.

The research included a detailed investigation into the Battle of Hue in 1969. The research also stumbled across a plastic model of the Ontos. At 1:16 scale, it was large enough to boast a detailed interior. This was important, as I really wanted to know what it was like to ride around and fight in this thing.

The answer: awful. It was cramped, it must have been loud, and with the hatches closed, the only way to see or steer was through periscopes in the hatches. It also had to be difficult knowing that the armor was so paltry, to cut down on weight. One thing became apparent – the driver’s position (the one Billy had in the war) was the safest on the vehicle, since the engine compartment protected the driver’s right side.

It was an aggravatingly detailed model, and it took nearly three months to put together. After it was done, my wife asked if I was going to do any more. I said no way. One could be excused as research, but any more would just make it another pathetic middle-aged white-guy pastime, and I already have enough of those.

NaNoWriMo: the Wrap-Up

Published by Crawford on December 3, 2024

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was going to attempt the NaNoWriMo Full Meal Deal. That is, I was going engage in the National Novel Writing Month challenge of writing 50,000 of a novel during the month of November. This breaks down to 1,667 words per day. This was pretty intimidating to me; I usually only crank out ~500 words per day in my usual laid-back style of writing. This was going to take courage! This was going to take discipline! Did I have what it takes? I wasn’t sure, and it was only at the last moment (literally, Halloween) did I toss my hat in the ring and commit myself to the NaNoWriMo challenge.

On November 1, I wrote 2,187 words. It didn’t seem that hard. On the 2nd, I wrote 2,031 words, just to prove to myself that it wasn’t just a fluke. After a few more days of 2000+ words per day, I decided to shoot for an overall goal of 60,000 words by the end of the month. And I did!

I had a work-in-progress: the sequel to Fester, which is currently using the working title of Descent. The manuscript had been off to a sluggish start, with a little under 25K words written in 5 months. NaNoWriMo seemed like it would be a great opportunity to give the project a boost.

And it did – but it was not without its challenges. I am a pantser when it comes to my writing. That is, I don’t do a lot of planning or outlining – I just fly by the seat of my pants. This typically isn’t a problem when I’m writing at my normally glacial pace, but it got to be an issue for NaNoWriMo.

One of the fun things about pantsing is that the story and characters will take off in directions I’d never conceived. It can be fun, but also frustrating. Cranking out 2,000 words a day in this mode can be a problem, however. I liken it to driving fast at night. The headlights can only illuminate so much of the road ahead; the faster you go, the less time you have to react. And I was going pretty fast, especially towards the end of the month. It felt like I was running out of road. Up until then, I’d had a pretty good idea what was going to happen over the next three or so chapters. Not so for the last week, where I was pantsing it to the max. The verbiage became verbose: I was shoveling adjectives and adverbs as much as I could.

In the end it was a good thing, though. Having to write something, even when I had no idea what it might be, definitely introduced some interesting elements into the story. My characters really had to bear the brunt of my word count goal!

At the end, it was a good thing. Tapping into my long-dormant overachiever tendencies, I kept going even when I’d met the 50K goal. I needed to collect all of the badges (see image above). And I did, just because I’m a Lisa Simpson-type geek.

More than that, it really helped me as a writer. First, it helped move my latest project along by getting 10 or 12 months’ worth of writing done in just one month. It also allowed me to understand how to deal with some serious production. I intend to keep moving Descent along sharply – but I’m taking a week off just to let things percolate in my subconscious. I have a lot of loose ends to tie up in the story now!

Laughingstock — Buy this book! Buy it right now!

Covid, Comedy and the Summertime Blues

Published by Crawford on August 20, 2022

Okay, first of all, I have Covid. This is crummy; I feel crummy. Not a small part of that crummy feeling is knowing that I have been as cautious as I could possibly be for the last two and a half(!) years of this plague. Fortunately, part of that caution has been getting any vaccination I could as soon as it became available, so the effects of the infection haven’t been nearly as bad as they might have been. Still crummy, though.

A big part of the crumminess is the isolation; not even being able to hug my sweet wife or squiggle the ferret (down to one now; another crummy part of the summer). You might have thought that the Covid-imposed isolation would be a boon for my writing activities. You would have thought wrong in that case. Hell, it’s a titanic struggle just getting this post committed to the page.

I have definitely hit a wall with the second draft of Laughingstock. I was jazzed when I finished up the first draft earlier this year; sat down and wrote a bunch of notes for how to improve it for the second draft; and promptly did next to nothing.

Part of the reason for that is I’m trying a new piece of writing software called Scrivener, after having used boring ol’ MS Word for umpteen years. The problem is that Scrivener is just too cool for school. It’s got all sorts of neat little authorial bells and whistles and features and stuff, and as a techno-geek of the old school, I can’t resist playing with them all – even if I’m certain that I will only use these features for a short time if at all. Scrivener has a lot of rabbit holes to go down.

Of course, that’s really only an excuse – and not a particularly good one at that. Not nearly as good as, say, getting a disease.

To lift my diseased spirits and try to provide some inspiration for continuation of Laughingstock, I’ve been listening to a lot of comedy. I’ve been a comedy geek for nearly as long as I’ve been a techno-geek (I’m into a lot of geekery; I’m somewhat of a Renaissance geek).

Last week, I was listening to Mitch Hedberg. If you’ve never done so, I’d recommend it. His was a unique voice, and it still makes me sad that a drug overdose cut that voice back in 2005. His comedy is not for everyone – he employs a lot of nonsequiturs and unexpected wordplay. That’s what I find so appealing.

As I learned from Mitch’s Wikipedia entry, he also employs a figure of speech called a paraprosdokian. According to Merriam-Webster, this is “a figure of speech in which the end of the sentence is surprising, or causes the reader to reinterpret the first part.” This is a useful tool in the comedian’s toolbox, as evidenced by Henny Youngman’s famous line “Take my wife – please!”

I was pleased to learn the word paraprosokian, because I had encountered on in the form of a bumper-sticker about a year ago. I was taking a walk in the neighborhood and my eyes glanced over a bumper-sticker on a parked minivan. I took two more steps while my brain processed what I had read, then I doubled over laughing. Here it is:

I suppose you have to get a laugh wherever you can these days; it’s good to know they’re all around if you have the right eye. Meanwhile, I’m back to the recuperation lounge with a huge freakin’ Ken Follett novel about cathedrals.

Unlikely Inspiration

Published by Crawford on September 18, 2021

Sometimes, inspiration for a story can come from unexpected places. This happened to me last weekend. In my case, the inspiration was a “welcome” binder in a rental property.

I am a compulsive reader and all-around nerd, so I always read the guest book whenever we check into a hotel room or whatnot. I want to see the local map, find out what good bars and restaurants are nearby, and know the best way to make a speedy exit if necessary.

When we checked into a 2-bedroom rental for a long weekend in Astoria, Oregon, I immediately thumbed through the binder that had been left on the kitchen table. Tucked in the back pocket of the binder was a number of newspaper pages from the Daily Astorian from 2012. I expected a review of the place we were staying (the “Painted Lady”), or a rehash of a long-past local festival. The first page I saw carried the banner headline “Mary Louise Flavel found.” This piqued my interest right away – who was Mary Louise Flavel and why were people looking for her? As I continued to read through the newspaper articles, it soon became evident as to why, and I soon became amazed at the story that led up to Mary Louise’s discovery.

First, a bit about Astoria. Located at the mouth of the Columbia River, Astoria was the first American settlement west of the Rockies. The town was founded in 1811, by John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company as a fortress trading post. Given the strategic location as the Pacific connection to one of the continent’s main inland waterways, it soon began to thrive.

Captain George E. Flavel was one of the first licensed sea pilots in Oregon. As the only bar pilot at the mouth of the Columbia, he had a virtual monopoly on sea traffic moving in and out of the river. He charged accordingly, and one contemporary editorial described him as “the bloodsucker at the mouth of the river.”

The Flavel family fortune grew, as Captain George expanded into shipping, banking, coal, commercial real estate and other business ventures. The fortunes of the town grew with the fortunes of the Flavel family. Captain George built a fine house in the Queen Anne style a few blocks from the waterfront. The family eventually donated it to the county historical society, and it is operated as a museum today.

George E. Flavel House, now a museum in Astoria, OR

Flavel’s son, George C., also became a bar pilot, and built himself a grand house a few blocks away from his father’s. After the original house was donated, George C.’s became the family seat.

As I continued to read about the fate of the house and the Flavels that lived there, I was amazed. It was an incredible story of the decline and fall of a prominent family, and a town who turned on them. I read through the newspaper articles twice, then grabbed a notebook and filled four and a half pages with notes. The next day, we went to the Flavel House Museum, and I picked up a book in the gift shop that offered some more details on the rise and fall of the Flavel family.

That evening, as I was watching the ships laying at anchor in the river, I had an epiphany: “Astoria is Fester.” Even the geography is similar (although the Columbia is much wider than the Black River flowing through Fester). With that realization, I began plotting how to fit the story of the Flavels into the context of Fester. I grabbed my notebook again, and soon had the outline for about 75% of the story that may serve as a sequel to Fester.

Which leaves me with a nice conundrum: should I pursue this new inspiration, or should I continue with the story on which I had been working, a story about stand-up comedians, tentatively titled Laughingstock? It’s a nice problem to have, for a writer.

At this point, I’m only a chapter or two away from finishing the equivalent of Act 1 from Laughingstock, so I owe it to the story to get at least that far. Then I’ll take a stab at the Fester followup. We’ll see what inspires after that.