It’s been a dozen years since I left full-time employment, but I can say I still don’t know what “retirement” is. Could it be because I don’t play golf or tennis?

After years of hoping to be financially able to leave the newsroom and instead concentrate on a life as an author, I finally made it to freedom. In the years leading up to that, I had put together detailed plans of running on a tight schedule, rising to meditate and pray, do some yoga, attend to correspondence, tackle some heavy new writing, and so on, but that’s not how things turned out. At least guilt hasn’t kicked in. I haven’t exactly been a slacker.

In those earlier schemes, I didn’t envision swimming laps every day at the city’s indoor pool or my weekly trip to Boston to sing in a choir. Nor was self-publishing the novels and poetry or the expanse of blogging or other social media. Photography, even of a digital sort, was an unexpected new hobby. Yearly Meeting responsibilities, however, were on the list and duly enjoyed. I’m embarrassed to admit that many yoga exercises are now beyond me – it’s amazing what 50 years of physical neglect can do.

I’m still trying to discover my natural sleep cycle, too. Eastport is a place where most folks rise early, and that’s generally what I’m doing – often, 3 am in the summer and a bit later in winter. The roads around here are busier at 5:30 in the morning than at 5:30 in the late afternoon or evening. A nap helps but isn’t always a daily option. And I’m spending more time at the keyboard than is probably healthy.

~*~

The most obvious way my life changed my writing life was is in having longer periods where I could concentrate on a given work or project. I wasn’t writing on the fly, like graffiti, as I have quipped, or immersing myself for a vacation week or two and then reluctantly putting the manuscript aside. My attention wasn’t diverted as often, either. I no longer had the daily commutes as time for reflection, but it’s amazing what bubbled up as a swam my half-mile of laps – some of my favorite lines in What’s Left, especially.

No longer writing or revising on the fly apparently made my new work more difficult.

At the beginning of my new life, I took up blogging, first to clear out much of my backlog of writing and small-press first publications, and then the photography came forward. One blog became five. Networking face-to-face with other writers once a month was on my rounds, and there were other events for poets, too. That led to the release of most of my scripted fiction, a huge emotional relief.

Curiously, I haven’t written poetry. The focus has been on prose, especially my one new novel, What’s Left. You’d think in my expanded creative schedule combined with my earlier experience of shaping fiction, this would have been a breeze. Instead, it was the thorniest project. Its purpose was to wrap up the hippie era, drawing together my Kenzie stories. The book kept shifting focus, and even finding an appropriate title was elusive. (A cover image was even more problematic.) It was also the least autobiographical, even with the new Greek-Orthodox circle in my life.

I can’t say which of my novels underwent the most exhaustive transformation from their first published version to the way they stand now, but What’s Left was the most painful as well as the biggest turning point. None of the others changed that drastically from their starting point to what hit print. The changes from first published version to what now stands is another matter.

But What’s Left did prompt that deep reworking of all the earlier ones, as well as the big round of republication.

My other piece of new fiction was perhaps the easiest of all, the middle novella in the Secret Side of Jaya. This was set between two earlier ones that had undergone multiple revisions before I inserted Jaya as a unifying voice.

~*~

If I thought I could kick back after those revisions, I was mistaken. Quaking Dover was on the horizon.

It was the book I didn’t want to write, I was truly tired, but the one that’s carried me the farthest with readers. It wasn’t even fiction.

And it proved as difficult in its revisions as What’s Left had. There was the challenge of fitting myself into the text as the “gently laughing curmudgeon” that one insightful beta reader suggested. It ran counter to all of my journalistic training as a neutral observer and my yoga humility of rendering myself invisible.

When I undertook Quaking Dover, Covid broke out. My laps in the pool ended, as did Revels Singers in Boston. After finishing the first draft, I relocated to Way Downeast Maine in what became an ideal writer’s retreat. It was amazing what I could find online in my research and revision.

As I’ve said, our move was the next step in some necessary downsizing in our life. Over the past decade, I’ve shifted to the Web and am now largely paper-free. I am going to have to face considerably more purging when we get the rest of my book collection out of storage and try to fit what we can (or what I need) into this smaller house. And let’s not forget, there’s no barn here.

~*~

Quaking Dover did lead to live and streamed PowerPoint presentations, a further new skillset for me.

Among other things, my concentration isn’t what it was. I learned in a few months of working as a 2020 Census enumerator that my stamina has also faded – it was an exhausting job. My spelling’s declined. And I’m not as sharp-eyed as an editor, either. In fact, I’m more tolerant.

I’m reading mostly ebooks, avoiding the filled shelves conundrum.

I don’t feel an urgency trying to “understand my problem.”

Even the journaling is slowing.

And there was a round of renewed therapy, ending shortly before the death of my therapist.

Personal biases do come into play – as a novelist and as a reader. For me, some of them as pet peeves are a reflection of my preferences. Consider those as graded on a scale, one to five or ten.

For example, New York City is way overrepresented in literature – especially Manhattan and Greenwich Village. And so, even though I based one novel on an out-of-towner’s encounters with the subway and then transported part of that to another, setting a book in the Big Apple definitely costs points in my esteem. Harlem, however, is a plus, along with overlooked corners of the boroughs. See Chester Hines, for starters. Something similar happens with Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, Chicago, and Seattle. Show me someplace way, way out of the usual media spotlight.

Books celebrating novelists, poets, musicians, visual artists, actors, university professors, or celebrities in general also cost points. We aren’t a superhuman clan, OK? And way too often we’re deeply flawed in ways nobody examines. Still, a rare work, like Tar or Maestro, portraying Leonard Bernstein, breaks through my resistance.

Anything that feels contrived, rather than organic, also turns me off. It goes back to what I considered “Found” versus “Invented” when I was evaluating cartoonists and stand-up comics. Real-life discoveries are superior. How well is the author listening to what’s going on around him (or her)? Or observing in the details?

Escapist. This goes for most of the genres, actually. Off somewhere in space? Or back in a medieval court? Or even in romance and pornography. I read and write to better record the history evolving around and within me.

Factual misrepresentations are an instant turnoff. Getting a key date off, for example, often rips apart the rest of the timeline.

That points to cliché, especially in thinking. What happens when you invert it, so that winners become losers? Maybe a story is more about losers than winners, at least the ones that ring true to me.

Purple prose follows up on that. I hate being told what I’m supposed to be feeling. Will somebody please pop that balloon? But flat, conventionally viewed background also fails.

Inconsistent use of punctuation. Yes, God and the devil are both within the details. Hello, are you awake or fully there at the keyboard? Show me that you’ve mastered the basics.

Grammar and syntax mistakes. Inconsistent tenses drive me up a wall. Misuse of commas or more creates a mess. These are lines in the sand between professional writers and the wannabes. It’s quickly signaled by “towards” rather than the American “toward” or “that” where it should be “who.” Beyond that, “whom” seems relegated to those who want to seem British.

Gratuitous violence is another turnoff. It doesn’t connect with life as I’ve known it.

Dialogue is a special high-wire act. When it rings wooden, I’m gone. The attribution proves equally tricky. I long ago tired of “said” but “stated” is equally overdone.

Well, maybe that will do for starters. There’s so much more I need to start collecting. I know it’s out there.

This is not the place for me to explain why I feel spirituality and religion are important. but rather to consider how they infused my vision as I drafted and revised my novels.

Church was important to my family when I grew up. We were Evangelical United Brethren, a mainstream Protestant denomination that had originated as two Wesleyan bodies of German-speaking Americans. It claims roots back to 1767, before its official organization in 1800. Until I took up genealogy, I had no idea that some of my grandmother’s roots reach back to its founding. During my childhood, though, I knew none of that, only that were somehow different. It was the center of our social connections, including the Boy Scout troop that was so crucial in my development. And it’s where the United Methodist Church got the “United” after a big merger when I moved on.

During my senior year of high school, I secretly broke with that, rejecting the culture as well as the faith. After five years of floating through degrees of agnosticism and positive-logic philosophy, I found myself practicing yoga and that, in turn, would open me to Quakers (the Society of Friends) for its weekly group meditation.

By the time my big-writing sabbatical got underway, I was deeply immersed in Quaker faith and public ministry and also fellowshipping with Mennonites and Brethren, all in the historic peace churches stream. In addition, one girlfriend introduced me to the evening services of a Pentecostal megachurch, which at first intrigued but ultimately appalled me, though I did gain some fluency in its ways.

And then, moving to New Hampshire, my Quaker activity intensified. At some point after my remarriage and relocation to Dover, where our meetinghouse was, I also got to know the Greek Orthodox community and its strand of Christianity. As a member of the local religious leaders’ monthly gathering and a Sanctuary alliance, I came to a broader understanding of the different bodies of faith in the surrounding society.

For me, then, when I’m addressing religion, I’m not so much interested in theoretical arguments but rather personal experiences and the ways that discipline strengthens them or even harms over time.

While I’ve come to embrace a radical Christianity, I diverge from many of the commonly accepted doctrines while also valuing Jewish, Buddhist, and Native American teachings. In addition, I’m imbued with the Quaker emphasis of faith being how we live rather than what we say we believe.

~*~

In my fiction, religion and spirituality are central elements. In the four hippie-era novels built around Kenzie, they appear as Tibetan Buddhism. When I drafted What’s Left, I finally had enough firsthand observation of Greek-American tradition to enlarge on the concluding flash of inspiration from my subway novel.

In Hometown News, my attitude toward religion was essentially negative. The congregations are ultimately insular and self-serving rivals. I’d say it’s my most secular novel, and the most dystopian.

Yoga Bootcamp is obviously about religion and spirituality, which then continues in Nearly Canaan with Jaya in her moves to the Midwest, Southwest, and Pacific Northwest. Her practice of what I call the DLQ is the embodiment of her faith.

And the Secret Side of Jaya throws in early Bible translator John Wycliffe, a slew of rural Baptists, and Native lore’s Kokopelli.

For me, designating a religious identity clarifies a character’s underpinnings. Sometimes an ethnic outlook, as well.

In my round of big revisions to my previously published fiction, I had fresh insights to weave into Kenzie’s upbringing in Daffodil Uprising, Subway Visions, and What’s Left. His daughter, Cassia, has her own struggles of blending her parents’ Tibetan Buddhism and Greek Orthodox faith together as well as her being subjected to her classmates’ taunting. I also had fresh insights from a friend who was on her way to being ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist nun.

Jaya’s encounters with her husband’s family’s Pentecostal church were significantly expanded in my revisions for What’s Left. Pastor Bob emerges as a more complex figure, and his wife becomes one of my favorites, especially as she and Jaya become close friends.

Later, we have Beulah Miller in the Secret Side of Jaya. I’m really fond of her and her Baptist faith-infused ways. Not that all Baptists would agree with her.

~*~

In my writing, I lean toward the positive side of most people. I idealize. I avoid violence. Hope reigns eternal. People are honest, or at least try to be. I doubt that I could craft a truly evil person or even a skilled liar. My sense of social community revolves around the remarkable people I’ve met in religious circles where I’ve been active. It’s definitely not an army unit or casino or auto dealership. It does shape the adage of writing about what I know. And it does limit my range of perception, even as fiction.

Still, in my latest revisions, I’ve attempted to admit some of the darker undercurrents.

I am wondering, too, how Robert Alter’s descriptions of Biblical poetry, narrative, and translations would apply to my own efforts.

Somebody’s telling of an event that took place – or allegedly did – and I find myself evaluating it through an either/or lens. This wouldn’t fly as fiction (nobody would believe it) or, oh yes, it would. It’s not a matter of factuality but rather whether it would fit into an acceptable mindset.

I can even listen to people’s names along the same line. First names carry an impression, OK? I’m not sure where the dividing line is on this consideration, but it’s there. Stanley is going to have a few obstacles as a lover, right?

Another viewpoint comes in looking at what’s happening through an imaginary cameraman’s lens. Have you ever found yourself framing scenes or even wondering who could be cast as one of your friends? Just look at how they move around in the picture. Cut! And splice to this …

For an artist, reality often clashes with the ideal, I’d say.

~*~

For a journalist, at least, the biggest difference in fiction is the importance of emotions rather than facts. It means asking yourself how you feel about a detail. Warm? Cool? We’d never ask that of a news story.

~*~

Revision is where we, as writers, step back from what we’ve written to view our pages from a distance, the way a film director would or later, the film editor.

Perhaps you’ve heard of how much footage winds up on the cutting room floor. Writing, it’s the same.

For me, the cut pages were rarely wasted. For example, a lode of outtakes regarding my experiences of Bloomington went from my subway novel and on to what now stands as Daffodil Uprising. Many more of those outtakes went into What’s Left somewhere off in the future. Still more relocated to the Ozarks in Nearly Canaan and the Secret Side of Jaya.

They didn’t go exactly straight, as I recall, but underwent thorough embellishment along the way.

My interactions with the Bloomington as a research associate were much different than they had been as an undergraduate. I didn’t go to as many concerts or operas. My new spiritual and writing disciplines had me rising before dawn. I was emerging as a poet, too, and I was, most of all, newly married. And then that blew up, only to land us, hallelujah, in what I thought of as our promised land, only it was in the open desert rather than the wet thick forests of the Pacific Northwest.

How could this not be material for reading? Or, more profitably, something for the Hollywood treatment?

In preparing this weekly series about things that were behind my novels, I wasn’t expecting to see how much of what was happening in my own life during a revision could also impact a manuscript based on much earlier events. It’s not something I’ve seen mentioned in author interviews.

One of the writing adages I’ve kept at hand is this: “Steer into the pain.” I’m not sure where I found it or perhaps adapted it, but it has been helpful in reminding me not to take the emotionally easier way out when facing a situation, whether personal history or fictional abstraction. The pain is where the higher-level energy is as well as the revelation.

So add to the advices, “Write about what you’re discovering.”

In a way, it’s a reminder to write about what you don’t want to know but with the added kicker, “What you don’t want to admit.”

For those of you doing the NaNoWriMo challenge this month, may you add that insight to your energizers.

More recently, I would add to that something else that motivates me: The magic!

Or, in my case, pure wonder. Again, what do I know? And celebrate?

I’m finding they’re both essential currents in my life’s work.

~*~

Let me say I rather miss Cassia from my novel What’s Left. After prodding me to that round of big revisions of my previously published fiction, she’s gone off on her own. She was even remote when it came to my nonfiction volume that more recently demanded my fullest attention. Well, she did earn her own category here at the Barn – Cassia’s World, based on the research and many outtakes from her novel’s drafting.

As for the real-life inspiration for many of my characters, let me repeat: Where are they all now? Or more accurately, where did they go? I don’t mean the aging rockers. I can think of social activists who kept the faith and marched on, largely out of the spotlight, though they’re aging, without replacements in line. But as for the others? I’m unsure of most of their names. And let’s forget the boilerplate disclaimer regarding all persons living or dead, even for futuristic space journeys or fantasies deep into the past.

~*~

As I look back on the history underpinning my novels, I have to insist the potential was there. I must also ask, what if we had a more solid social structure and tradition, with something akin to elders? The dorm I lived in, the core of the opening half of the revised Daffodil novel, has today become something of the center I envisioned, without the radical political edge.

I suppose I could have told these stories time after time after work in a bar, but to me they seem to address a different collective experience. Besides, journalists have their own “war stories” to compare.

Just where were we gathering now, anyway? And where have we gone to get here?

A few have found a progressive faith community – church, synagogue, sangha, or perhaps a masonic order or fraternal lodge. But for the others?

Should I point back to the posts on the breakdown of community?

And here we had thought we were creating tribe.

As an extra point of emphasis, I’ll add: I’ve never returned to many of the locations where I’ve lived.