Author Archives: Kyle Kimberlin

Home Again

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My folks and I returned last night from our annual trip to visit my brother and his family for Christmas. We were gone for several days and now we miss our loved ones very much.

We got to watch my 9 year old nephew T swing from rope swings which hang from big trees in his back yard. He put on an excellent demonstration for us on Christmas Eve. Later, we went to church, then had a beautiful dinner with wonderful people.

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My brother and me at the dinner party. Don’t bother pressing me to explain the headgear. I could tell you, but then I’d have to drown you in a vat of mulled cider.

There was much more celebration on Christmas Day, which lasted into the evening. And there was rain to keep things moving along without drying up. Then on Sunday, a few of us traveled to the coast, to San Francisco, for more fun. Others stayed home to break in the new toys.

A great time was had by all. And again, I miss those I had to leave behind up yonder, in the dripping trees and enviable quiet, amongst the nibbling deer. I love you all… I would rather be with you on Christmas than with the finest people in the world.

In the words of Alma Garret, “We do love each other. Our being together ought not to seem so outlandish a proposition. … Except for every other single thing.”

Defining Fire

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I am sitting here in my home office, drinking coffee and watching my fireplace DVD. It’s nice on a rainy day, relaxing; a nice ambiance, without being distracting.

I’m thinking about fire. It’s one of the elemental facets of our world, and we know what it is, but how would you define it? In school we learned that it’s a chemical reaction, but …well, you know me, I had to look it up.

Fire – n. 1. a. A rapid, persistent chemical change that releases heat and light and is accompanied by flame, especially the exothermic oxidation of a combustible substance. b. Burning fuel or other material: a cooking fire; a forest fire.

Of course, there are many other definitions, but that’s not my point.

Being writers and poets, it is important that we know and ponder the meanings of words. Having a conversational familiarity is not enough. Because using words normally isn’t always art. Sometimes we use words almost just a little bit wrong, which is to say creatively. To be a moment misunderstood, understood almost too late.

Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,
But every seeming aberration willed.
– Robert Francis

So I ask you, my artistic friend, what’s your persistent chemical change today? I know where mine is, and it’s not out there in the cold wind and rain, yet out I go. I hope for you the banking of a brazen pagan fire for the solstice between your ears, with a sparkling euphony of tintinnabulous bells.

Hear the sledges with the bells-
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

– Poe

Thinking is Overrated

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When I think about writing something, sometimes I think about the results that might or might not result, instead of the opportunity to explore. I think about whether it seems like a good idea.

I can understand that kind of thinking if there was some investment involved, like lumber. If you’re making chairs or birdhouses, maybe you should have a plan first. But creative writing doesn’t work that way. Not well. Well, maybe if you’re writing a novel … but even that is exploration.

Tonight I’m going to watch TV from 8:00 – to 9:00, then turn off the tube. From 9:00 – 11:00, I’m going to write something.

Results be damned.

By the way, still liking DarkRoom here.

Writing in the Dark

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Do you ever wish, when you sit down to concentrate and try to write, that you were not confronted with an array of technology? Buttons and toolbars and menus, oh my. It can make it hard to focus on the words and sentences, can’t it? And the black letters on the bright white screen are hard on the eyes, don’t you think? 

Sure, you can take a program like Word or OpenOffice to full screen temporarily, and in Word you can change the appearance to blue with white text, to help your eyes. But those things make you jump through some hoops. This delays concentration, and it’s still not quite the same as being completely alone with one’s words and sentences.

Last night I read an article in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers magazine, called "Writers Rolling Back the Revolution." It begins:

“Firing up WriteRoom, a minimalist word processor developed by Hog Bay Software, is like turning the clock back thirty years. Gone are the toolbars, the menus, and the array of options that jostle for real estate on the modern screen. In their place, the program unfolds an empty black expanse, a void that can be filled only with the monochromatic glow of unadorned text.”

I will provide a link to the entire article below.*

It seems there is a trend among writers these days, to reclaim focus and concentration that have been hijacked by the unending swells and ripples of technology’s distractions. I’ve seen several interviews and columns by accomplished wordsmiths, saying they eschew full feature software for programs that just let them capture words.

The writer Corey Doctorow wrote a post in which he explains all the tools he uses for his writing, business, and life. He wrote:

Writing: I use a plain-jane text editor that comes with Ubuntu called Gedit. It doesn’t do anything except accept text and save it and let me search and replace it. … I like writing in simple environments that don’t do anything except remember what words I’ve thought up. It helps me resist the temptation to tinker with formatting.

And he has a point. When I’m writing in Word, I’m constantly tinkering with all the bells and whistles, and trying to keep the formatting right. As if the project is headed off to the publisher tomorrow, which it’s not.

So I checked out WriteRoom, and found that it’s for Mac. But there is a clone called Dark Room, for PC. I downloaded it – free gratis – and saw first that it’s so small and light weight, that it downloaded in a few seconds, and doesn’t even install in the system registry. It just arrived, ready to work.

Dark Room is designed for writers, people who need to concentrate for a while and drain the swamp. It’s not for someone who is concerned with formatting their document for presentation, at the same time that they’re composing the text. It simply opens a blank black writing surface which fills your screen without any menus or toolbars at all. In the center is a column for writing plain text. The default is green text on black. If you click Esc or F11, the full screen shifts to a normal Window, with a basic menu. File > Edit > View > Help. Hit F11, and you’re back in full screen.

While working, the right mouse button brings up a content menu with the basics, including some Preferences. You can change the colors and the font, the width of the center writing column, and a few other thoughtful things.

Dark Room saves your work in plain text, Windows txt, the same file type used by Notepad, which has come free and installed on every PC for at least 15 years. And txt is opened easily by Word or virtually any Windows word processor on the planet. No worries about compatibility.

By the way, there’s no speelchker. Spellchkre. Spellchecker. The idea, as I see it, is to open your plain text file in Word or OpenOffice when you’re ready to format it. Spellcheck will run then. And then you can deal with editing, page format, fonts and colors, indenting, page breaks, etc. Then you can print your work when it’s pretty and fancy, or make your PDF. (Yes, you can print from Dark Room. And if you’re a true geek like me, you can make a PDF straight from Dark Room, but I won’t bore you with that.)

So if the point is to get your new ideas – your fresh writing – into the computer without the tech in the way, why not just use Notepad? Sure, I love it. Notepad is the old school #2 pencil of computing. It’s great for keeping little notes. But it’s black text on a bright white screen. And the text runs the width of the window. So either there’s distraction around the window, or your text is filling the full width of your monitor. Dark Room has the adjustable column down the center. So in full screen mode, there’s nothing else visible at all.

Or maybe you want to see a little of your computer – the desktop perhaps – without leaving full screen? Right click > Preferences. There’s a slider to adjust the opacity of the program, so you can see through it.

I used Dark Room to write this post. And the lack of distractions probably contributed to its incredible length. Then I pasted the text into Windows Live Writer, make a few adjustments, corrected a couple of typos which the spelling checker caught, added a link or two, and clicked Publish. Done.

Links

You can find and download the program free at:

http://they.misled.us/dark-room

That Poets & Writers article is here:

http://www.pw.org/content/digital_digest_writers_rolling_back_the_revolution

Corey Doctorow’s article on his tools:

http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2010/07/cory-doctorow-what-i-do/

*Footnote

You might have noticed I used no in-text hyperlinks in this post, although hyperlinks are the salt and pepper of blogging. That’s because I wanted you to keep reading, not click a link and go off somewhere else. You might not come back, and if you did, that’s still a distraction. Food for thought?

As Such Places Go

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My most recently completed flash fiction piece, Passing Trees, is available now for download in pdf format. It has also been added to the list of downloads on the Flash Fiction page, above, and was posted on this page a few days ago. Since then, I’ve been sitting here listening to crickets in my computer. But we must endeavor to persevere.

Click here to download, free gratis.

“… The house was brightly lit, and smoke rose from the chimney. It was a stranger’s life sitting quietly surrounded by death, waiting to be swallowed by time and rain. She could not wait to get home, turn on lights and music, make tea, and pretend, like that house pretended, that the world was safe.”

First Fruit

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Today I started learning to use Windows Moviemaker to create a photo slideshow. It seems pretty cool. I made a little show of photos of my sheltie Tasha. She ran on ahead to the clearing by the bridge in 2005, and she is waiting for me to catch up.

Christmas in Santa Barbara

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I know that a couple of my readers are in the midwest and the eastern part of the country. So I wanted to share this: At mid afternoon today, the ambient temperature on my parents’ back yard deck – on the southern, sunniest side of the house – was 87 degrees. Humidity about 45 percent.

Neener neener neener.

Perhaps a visit to Santa Barbara at the holidays would be nice for you.

You are most welcome! Though I have to admit, all this sunshine does not make for a traditionally picturesque Christmas.

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But I imagine having to dig your car out of a drift doesn’t set you to singing carols either.

Longer Darkness

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I have been outside this evening after dark, getting acquainted with the night, rearranging the strings of Christmas lights on my balcony irons. One of the strings went dead, you see. Probably a fussy little fuse.

But, you know, that old Grinch was so smart and so slick
He thought up a lie, and he thought it up quick!
"Why, my sweet little tot," the fake Santy Claus lied,
"There’s a light on this tree condo that won’t light on one side.
"So I’m taking it home to my workshop, my dear.
"I’ll fix it up there. Then I’ll bring it back here."

The days, you may have noticed, are getting terribly short. The sun’s arc is shallow, almost begrudging, even this far south of the North Pole. We’re only 10 days now from the Solstice. So Christmas lights are important, and I was out there in all this longer darkness, stringing twinklers at the top of my outside stairs. I guess there’s a slight chance of a quick and messy death in that. Which naturally set me to wondering what was the last thing I said to anyone, since that might turn out to be the last thing I said to anyone.

I couldn’t remember. It might have been something like “have a good night,” to my neighbor. But nobody wrote it down.

Wouldn’t it be cool if somebody – besides Facebook – was discreetly recording our every utterance, just in case it might be our last? Well my last words, if I had tumbled down the concrete steps, might not have been fit for polite conversation. Let alone to be etched in marble or quoted as an epigraph in literature. But you never know. I might have been wise or funny in the end.

Goethe is said to have thundered, "More light!" But there is, I believe, some contention. Some have quoted him as saying, “Open the second shutter so that more light may come in." The former is better. Still others say his final utterance was really, "Come my little one, and give me your paw." And where does your imagination go with that?

Henry David Thoreau’s last words were, "Moose. Indian." Just shortly before that, we was asked if he had made his peace with God. He said, "I did not know we had quarreled."

Walt Whitman’s last yawp: "Hold me up; I want to shit."

Emily Dickinson finally said, "Let us go in; the fog is rising." For her, everything was poetry, nothing ordinary.

When a nurse told Henrik Ibsen that he seemed to be improving, he said, "On the contrary!" and died.

Ludwig van Beethoven: "Friends, applaud. The comedy is over."

Oscar Wilde’s famous last words were, "Either this wallpaper goes or I do."

Welcome Christmas bring your cheer
Fahoo fores dahoo dores
Welcome all Whos far and near
Welcome Christmas, fahoo ramus
Welcome Christmas, dahoo damus
Christmas day will always be
Just so long as we have we
Fahoo fores dahoo dores
Welcome Christmas bring your light

Everyman Knows

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What shall we say, shall we call it by a name
As well to count the angels dancing on a pin.
– The Grateful Dead

There was a well known and successful writer interviewed on TV the other day. Her name escapes. Suffice to say, her ship is in. She was saying that the writer has to know something in order to write.

I don’t know about that. I tend to throw in with Joseph Campbell, who said

He who thinks he knows does not know. He who knows he does not know, knows.

If he’s right, everyone knows, and nobody does. But see if you think this little piece gets any air among the clouds of unknowing.

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Passing Trees

“What time is it?”

Taking one hand from the wheel, he started to push back the sleeve of his jacket to see his watch, then stopped. He glanced over at her. She sat looking out her window through the rain, at the trees.

“There’s a clock on the dashboard in front of you.”

“Is it right?”

“Yeah.”

“So you won’t tell me?”

“What’s the use of having a clock in the car, if you always ask me anyway?” But now he did push back his sleeve and look. “The clock on the dash says the world is one minute older than the watch on my wrist. So I’m going with the clock. I’m feeling pretty old right now.”

She frowned and watched the trees, a dark wall and a dark road, a grim and rainy day. She did not look at him, or care about the time. It was only something to say, some excuse to conjure his voice out of the distance between them. It was a good voice, solid and deep, a comfort so often, and always in the dead of night. Sometimes she lay awake and whispered I love you, and he would answer in that voice, without waking. Love you too.

As they passed the end of the orchard, a field opened up. It was fallow, the earth broken and turned. Far back from the road was a brick house and a barn. The house was brightly lit, and smoke rose from the chimney. It was a stranger’s life sitting quietly surrounded by death, waiting to be swallowed by time and rain. She could not wait to get home, turn on lights and music, make tea, and pretend, like that house pretended, that the world was safe.

“I hate myself for leaving him there.”

He checked the mirror and said, “It’s a nice place.”

She turned at looked at him. “Nice? I hate us both.”

“Now, now. Yes, it’s a decent place, as …”

“And he hates us too.”

“… as such places go. Pleasant and homey.”

“Well.”

“He’ll come around. It’s very nice. He’ll get used to it, make friends, have activities. You saw they have a piano in the recreation room. And the courtyard will be warm on sunny days. We’ll visit and take him outside. He’ll be fine in no time.”

“He’s never yelled at us like that. Never at anyone, that I can remember. So angry. Like we’re Eskimos, shoving him out on an ice flow.”

“We’ve been over this. Can you really pretend we’ve been thoughtless?”

“Do they even do that, did they ever?”

“What?”

“The Eskimos.”

“I don’t know.”

“He said we’re going to hell.”

“Oh God. Everyone is on their way someplace, but not there. And we’re only doing our best.”

“No. We could do better. We should bring him back. Fix up the spare bedroom.”

“Honey.”

“Rent one of those hospital beds. I could take care of him, I know it. I could quit my job, we’d get by.”

“You couldn’t. You can’t even lift him. Neither can I.”

They passed the end of a narrow road that broke the blur of idle land and disappeared toward the hills. She saw that her hands were resting on her lap palms up, waiting to be filled by something only God could design.

“You know him better than me.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Since the hour of your birth.”

“Jesus.”

“So I hope you’re right. But he’s already haunting me.”

There was another line of trees close against the road. Almonds, dark and full of rain.

 

Creative Commons License
Passing Trees by J. Kyle Kimberlin is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

More Satisfied Human Beings

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I know, I’m on a video spree here, but this is just great stuff. We know this actor from The Office, and here he really nails it. He says more that’s meaningful about creativity in 4 minutes than most teachers on the subject can say in an hour.

Actor Rainn Wilson says:

“People have trouble living creatively when they don’t know who they are or what they’re about. The best thing to do if you’re blocked is to make radical changes and get outside your comfort zone.”