Month: January 2018

The Process Pt. 1

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Someone asked me recently how I found the time to write in my blog. I want to put this in perspective before I go into a lot of detail about my creative output.

I went on a date recently with an individual who had just lost her job, was planning to move away to grad school in five-months and expressed an interest in publishing her own blog posts as a hardcover collection by the end of the year, December 2018. She obviously had a lot on her plate and seemed to be seeking advice. I have never felt like the type of person anyone would need advice from, so this initially shocked me.

To set the tone of this post I will start with the fact that our date was bad. The food was bad, the beer was bad and the conversation sat comfortably somewhere between chitchat and public school lecture.  The only good thing to come out of this date would be this blog post, which has a lot of potential, but we’ll see where it all ends up. 

See, reader, I’ve had the idea to talk about my creative method on the blog for some time now. Lord knows every other writer in the world has been asked about their own process, so I thought I might beat the wolves to the bite.  The trouble came from not believing it would make for very interesting reading, and it was this issue that stopped me from writing about my method before. Admit it, if you sat down and saw a post that began with a monologue about which socks I wear when I sit alone in the kitchen to scribble out a bit of writing to share with you, you would skip it and go right to the stories about Cloudy Day and his detective agency.

At least, I hope you would.  I’m very proud of the way that story came out, all in all.

Now, when I went on this date I hadn’t the slightest hope that I would gain anything in the way of creative writing out of it. I suppose that just goes to show you, you never know where inspiration will spark. In fact, rule one of writing for Holding The Universe Together: You never know where inspiration will spark.

That’s a good spring board from which to launch the rest of my tale.

As I explained to my date that night, I don’t find the time to write, it just sort of comes along. I’ll be sitting at home or at work and a computer will happen to be in front of me and I will just so happen to feel like writing 800-1000 words. Honestly. I don’t think I’ve said anything so honest in my life. Some writers, very famous ones with loads of fans and published works, will tell their fans in their published works that any good writer should sit down and write at least a thousand words a day. Stephen King, in his book On Writing, explains that as you develop your skill and patience you will eventually come to a point where you are writing over two-thousand words a day.

That’s over-whelming. I tried it. One summer, the one I spent living in Alaska, I dedicated my time to writing at least one-thousand words a day. I felt great about it, I felt achieved and successful, even though all of those words are still sitting in a couple of journals near my bed at this point. As a result I did get a lot of ideas down on paper that I might never have if I hadn’t taken that time.

The problem is, it didn’t stick. It didn’t stay with me. And maybe that’s why I’m not an accomplished writer, but it’s just so… limiting. To sit and write every day with a goal in mind, it starts to feel like a chore. And suddenly writing isn’t any fun anymore.

I love to write, reader. I love it more than anything, and if I could do it with the dedication of Stephen King, believe me, I would be so happy. But I can’t. Or better yet, I don’t want to. I would rather let the moment happen, let the writing find me, rather than go hunting and searching for the writing. That sounds metaphysical and spiritual, but it’s not. I just believe that there is a time and a place when everything comes together in the right way and it doesn’t do anybody any good to go looking for that time and place.

So here I am, in front of a computer, and I am writing down ideas that have been floating around in my head for days. These ideas have been turning over in my head, mixing and mingling and becoming bigger and smaller at the same time, condensing and refining for a little over two weeks. Until now, when I find myself sitting near a computer on a rainy day, alone in my apartment ready an dedicated.

That’s how most of these stories and autobiographical collections came about. That’s how this blog came about. In its own kind of over-whelming nature, the ideas and words in my head craved an outlet.

I don’t think that my date understood the point I was trying to make. She seemed to be the type of person who focuses on the goal rather than the route while I am much more interested in the path under my feet than where it ends up. You may take this as a caution if you ever feel like going on a date with me.

In a jumbled up sort of way, there you have part one of this selection called: The Process.

I didn’t want to make it a two-part story when I sat down to write it, but now it feels like one. I certainly can’t go into the rest of my creative process in less than two-hundred words.  I will hint at the next section, though. In the next part I am going to talk about how my style has changed over time and my biggest influences as a writer. I’ll talk about what got me to this point, the advice I followed and the obstacles I’ve over-come. I’ll also try to get into the actual process of sitting down and writing for me, which will go into how I write, edit and when I know it’s ready to be published. Then I’ll talk about how it feels to share all this with anyone who happens to stumble across it and hopefully wrap the ideas I started in this blog in a neat little package.

See you for Part Two, reader. And as always, thank you so much for dropping in and reading.

Cloudy Day Detective Agency: The First Case P.6

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There are subtle ways to end a story. Death, loss of a friend, loss of an enemy, or a simple  change of mind following a heartfelt conversation. The end comes along and you realize only too late that it came without provocation, without hesitation. It came without warrant and without a second thought. The story is over before you realize you’re in the epilogue, and your friend, your partner, sits across the desk from you with his head bowed to look over the fresh stitches in his arm. Gun shot wounds heal ugly. You can’t tell him this, not then. He’ll learn. You’ll both learn.

I faced the villain on the rooftop under the afternoon sun, his hat in his hands and a smile on his face. The man looked at me as if he were looking at a priest. Guilt seeped through the his pores; he stunk of bad choices.  I’m sure I didn’t smell any better.

The gun, a yard away on the gravely rooftop, winked at us with a spark of light from the setting sun.  It dared us to make a move. It dared me to be a different man. It dared him to be the same.

I looked at his eyes instead, yellow with malnourishment. Even beneath the man’s hat I could easily see his hair was greasy and thin. The longer I took him in, the less I liked my chances of being able to talk my way out of the situation.

Charlie had pulled every fiber of that standoff from me.  He wanted to know how I got off that roof with my life. How we all did; Scoop, the brave, young newspaper jockey and Charlie, the bleeding detective in the shadows of a decrepit staircase. And me, the man who just couldn’t get enough grit under his fingernails.

As we sat in our office with the fixed window and our names painted on the door just like the first day, I told him that if a man is gullible enough to toss away a weapon, he also might be fragile enough to crack. I didn’t regret my decision to come out from behind that vent on the roof. Not then, and not afterward, when blood pooled in the sunlight right next to that gun.

“What do you want?” the man had asked me. I had waited for his mark, and when it came I told him exactly what I wanted.

“I want to take you to jail,” I’d said.

His eyes had dropped to the gun, then to the top of my head. He wouldn’t look me in the eye.

I’d seen that grasping glance before.  I admitted to Charlie that if the man dived for his weapon I wasn’t sure what I’d’ve done. Charlie looked at me at first with humor when I’d told him this, then with pity. He knew all too well then that everything we’d overcome on that rooftop, everything we now owed our lives to, came down to luck.

I poured myself a drink and lit a cigarette. All this in a minute, maybe less, but it bought me time where I could sort my thoughts. Charlie needed to hear this, and maybe I needed to say it, but damn it if I would tell my story by someone else’s watch, even my partner’s.

The man on the roof thought for a long time about God knows what. He lifted his hat and scratched at his head. His hands were gnarled and boney. “You expect me to come quiet?”

“Yes I do.”

The noise from the street below grew and the wind whistled across the openings of the pipes sticking out of the roof. The man in front of me started to look away, toward Scoop and where Charlie lay on the dark stairs.

I blew smoke into the air between Charlie and me, watched it wisp away into nothingness against the ceiling of our office.

Steam lofted through the air between the villain and me on the rooftop, steam from the vents that I’d hidden behind when I came out from the staircase.

“I know it looks bleak,” I said and the man’s eye darted to my feet. “We can work this out. But you shot a man, and you didn’t even know his name.”

“I knew his name,” the man had said. “He may have had a few aliases over the years, but Mr. Gorbateski always went back to his roots. And to his daughter.”

“Gorbateski,” Charlie said. He leaned to his right in the chair, careful to not rest his patched-up arm on the arm rest.”That’s the man who bought the shipping yard after it went under. Got it for almost nothing.”

I watched Charlie for a moment, tried to find something in his face. Recognition, maybe, or maybe a clue to lead me to something I’d missed.  Or maybe, I was looking for myself.

“You’re trying to figure all this out,” the villain had said to me when he saw my reaction to the name.

“We shot her. We shot him, too, though it was me pulling the trigger on that one. We didn’t need to kill him since we were trying to wound him by shooting his daughter. It just worked out that he was waiting outside when she went in to talk to you.”

“You knew she would come to me?” I’d said.

“’Course we did,” the man had said. “Who do you think put your name in that paper on 4th street.”

“Those bastards,” Charlie said and used his good arm to slam a fist on our desk. “I can swallow shooting a man in cold blood, I can even tolerate taking a bullet from a man who killed for a couple of trains on the East side of town. But when that man tarnishes our reputation, which is barely a reputation to begin with, with false acclaims in a bogus newspaper, that’s where I draw the line.”

After Charlie said this, when the hard look on his face melted to a smirk, I nodded. Not because I agreed with him, but because I liked that he was there. Despite the fact that he was fool-headed enough to get shot, I was glad that he was my partner. And I wished that he’d been on the rooftop with me. 


“Why Gorbateski?” I’d said, but the villain had kept his composure. His face straight as an arrow, though his palms had sweat on them.

“Yeah,” the man said with a voice that dripped with malice. “Why would anyone have a hit put out on the biggest piece of scum in the city.”

“You’re no hit man,” I’d said. I told Charlie that the man laughed at me then. The man laughed a wheezy laugh that made me itch. Charlie smiled again, sympathetic this time. He knew how this all ended, and he knew how tempted I’d been to end it right then when the laugh came at me. And in Charlie’s eyes I saw what I’d felt only moments before. Charlie was happy I’d become his partner.

“You’re right,” the villain had said and pulled off his hat to run his knobby hand through his nasty hair. “I’m not exactly the hit man type. But I can point a gun, and pull the trigger, too. That’s not a skill too many people have these days. Anyone can point a gun. It takes gut to use it, though. And you know what else? I come cheap. Because I like pulling the trigger.”

At that’s when it had happened. I told Charlie about the crunching sound, like a dog that’d finally gotten a bite through a nice chunk of bone.  The villain fell sideways to the gravel. I watched as the brick that had struck the man in the head landed on his chest then slid off of him. The dust he’d raised cleared in the breeze, but the blood pooled.

“What the hell did you do?” I’d shouted and turned to find Scoop near the stairs with a pale face.

Scoop straightened himself and stammered before finding words.  Before he spoke, I saw something in the way he stood, something in the way he held himself after throwing the brick that would end our villain’s speech. I saw hope. He didn’t look mean or scared. Scoop looked sure of himself, sure, but he looked like he did what he thought was right.

When we’d gotten back to the office, Charlie had asked me why I gave Scoop our card and told him to call when something came up.  He didn’t like the idea of me enforcing a kid. When Charlie had asked me that then, I didn’t have an answer. As I told him my story, and he sat across from me at the desk after all this was done and I looked back at how it all ended, I knew I’d found my answer.

“If we don’t ask him for help,” I said to Charlie. “If we don’t give him something to do, someone else might. And in a city like this, where guys get shot for just reaching out at an opportunity, where whole families crumble beneath angry boots, it may be good for the kid to see that guys like us are still out there. We may not be perfect, and we may survive just by getting lucky, but if I told that kid to scram and find his own way in the world, I can’t help but think it might be his body we’re tracking the killer of next time.”

I chewed on the filter of the cigarette. It’d gone out sometime during my story.

On the roof, I’d stepped over to the man who lay bleeding. Up close, I could see the blood leaking from his temple, could smell it heating up in the sun, could almost taste it. I’d toed the man’s arm. It’d moved with no resistance. Against the small of his back, I’d found another gun. Smaller than the other, but just as deadly.

“I saw him reaching,” Scoop had told me then. “He was drawing you in, not the other way around. He was going to shoot you.”

I’d stood, more to get away form the dying man that anything else. The small pistol rested heavily in my palm.

“He never would have given away his employer,” I said to Charlie. “Scoop saved my life on the rooftop.  Save us all. We owe him.”

Charlie leaned back in the chair and it groaned with him. On the desk two mugs filled with cold coffee sat, ignored since I’d poured them. I waited for Charlie to speak, and as I did I lifted the mug closest to me and sipped at it.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Charlie said.

“What’s that?”

“We heard Scoop stomping around like an elephant when we went into that house,” he said. “That’s how we found him and all. But then he sneaks up to the guy on the roof, close enough to lob a brick at his head, and you two don’t hear him coming.”

“Yeah,” I said. “How about that.”

The Void

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Have you ever stared off into space? Lots of space out there, isn’t there.  Stars, planets, clouds and comets and dust. Lots and lots of cluttered space.

It’s quite comforting, seeing that we’re very small and there is something so impressive and big out there, just above us.

If you compare it to your head, a head filled with nonsense and trouble and things you’ve learned, what then?  How does your head feel, if you look inside instead of out. Does it feel heavy? Does it feel filled and busy?  If you’re like me, it may feel as busy as the space above. Shooting stars of fleeting thoughts, heavy planets of choices you’ve made long ago that are weighing on your mind. I feel it. And sometimes I don’t even realize that I’m feeling it, but I am. If I pay attention, if I really focus on it, I can feel the weight of each and every bit of knowledge and space dust bristling through my brain.

Now, have you ever done the opposite? Have you ever had the opportunity to stare off into nothingness?  Not nothingness like the vastness of space above, because that’s a cluttered void. Have you ever had the chance to stare off into a truly empty void. Have you ever stared off into true space?

I had the privilege of looking at a true void recently, a few weeks back. The feeling I got from doing that, it was instant. Weight lifted from my head and I physically felt my shoulders raise from the lifting of it.

At my job, a silly old job, but one that demands quite a lot of creative thinking to avoid obstacles, I found a void.

Here’s how:

During a normal day I am given half-an-hour to find lunch and eat it. On most days I end up eating at my desk as I work. These days this doesn’t sound like much of a new concept, I know, but that’s the way it was for me, anyway.  One day, there I was walking around the food court hunting after something to eat. I don’t remember what I got, a burger probably, but I do remember finding a seat. This was rare. Usually, in this food court every seat would be taken and, when vacated, swiftly filled with another bottom.

I found a seat for the first time in the months that I’d worked this job. I took the seat and decided that on that day I would take the time to myself, let myself unwind a bit from the day.  This decision was important for two reasons. The first, it gave me the chance to sit near the large window that took up an entire wall in the food court. The second, by deciding to pause my day, I opened myself up for what happened next. I’m not sure if this would have worked if I didn’t  open myself up first.

Back to that window, because it leads to me finding my void. This window is a massive construct of a hundred smaller windows that, on a normal day, would provide a view of the world outside. People could look though them and see the weather, the mountains and so much more if they really looked. When I sat in front of it, the window was black. It was night out, you see. I managed to sit down in front of the window with a meal maybe an hour after dusk.  Due to my hunger I barely register the window as merely another feature of the room; a feature just like the plants hanging in planters, the coffee shop and the tables and chairs.

After a few bites of food I reminded myself that I’d come to this spot to decompress and I slowed down. I set the burger down and looked around me. Not right away, but eventually, I found the window. At first I didn’t think much of it because I couldn’t see anything through the glass, not even the mountains in the dark. Then I recognized what I was seeing: Nothing. True and absolute nothing. The world was so dark and so distant through those windows it couldn’t be found. I had discovered a true void.

It was then and there that I started calling the window “The Void”. I didn’t realize the whole weight of my discovery for a few days, and after another visit to The Void. But that first time, when I looked into a true void, I felt everything leave my mind. The work that needed finishing, the people I needed to talk to and e-mail, even the uniform I wore and bore the emblem of vanished from my thoughts when I looked into The Void. I became so free and, though I didn’t understand completely, I felt the impact instantly.

I mentioned openness earlier. I said that it was important that I be open to experiencing the void because if I had been closed-off and full of worry about my day ahead or how I would manage all my daily tasks, I would have looked at that window and then looked away. There would be no experience involved and I would have forgotten the window just as easily as I’d found it. Some time before this experience I’d looked into Chakras. Through that research I found how important it was to take in the world around you. Through opening the first Chakra, also known as the Root Chakra, I recognized how important it was to ground yourself to the earth, to feel your bond with the world around you. I believe that it was through this understanding that I could feel this true void in front of me.  If I’d not looked into Chakras, I might not have been able to open myself, or unable to understand that I had opened myself.

That being said reader, I don’t mean to tell you that you won’t be able to feel a true void if you haven’t played with your Chakras. I also won’t pretend to be the only one who has ever felt a true void. But for those of you who haven’t, or want to better understand what you felt when you discovered a void and didn’t know what to make of it, I hope this will bring a little clarity.  If nothing else, maybe this will merely spark a bit of interest in you.

At first, I found the feeling addictive. I wanted more of The Void. But I restrained myself and, like with anything good in this world, I practiced moderation. I let that void lift me, give me weightlessness for the first time in so long, probably since I first started being weighed down by school work and emotional troubles of adolescence. Maybe even earlier. Then I let The Void go.

Maybe I’ll go back when it all gets to be too much again. This world isn’t all about looking at stars and airplanes and smiles and cars. Sometimes you need a good bit of nothing to dissolve into for a few seconds and recharge.