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Through windows closed and shuttered you can see where fun was had, Where tales were served by a young barkeep, a story-tellin' lad. The barmaids teased and plied their trade twixt the tables, dark and light, And the patrons there gave not a thought to the lurking veil of night. But night did come, as it always must, and the lamps went dark at last, And the barmaids left, and the patrons, too, and the barkeep's grief was vast. It's said if you pass on the lonely road where the tavern stands abandoned, You can still hear, if you strain your ear, the barkeep's pen a'scratchin'. Some call him a phantom, some call him a fool, but call him what you will, He'll never give up on the stories he told 'til they're back, his tavern to fill. So give him a thought on your busy road, and stop for a while as you pass, 'Cause you just never know when the stories will flow, and the thrill will return at last! Hello and welcome. My name is Jack, and for around a decade, my "muse," whatever you conceive that to be, has been lying in a coma; that's her picture on the cover. I refuse to give up on her, but at this point I'm applying the chest paddles. What does that mean? I'm hoping against hope that I can deliver a worthwhile short story. We shall see... In the meantime, I still love to read, and offer positive reviews for stories that I enjoy. While I'm trying, I keep this blog open to exchange encouraging thoughts with the fine writers found in every corner of this site. I won't give up until the Reaper comes calling, This is where we can talk, and I would love to discuss your thoughts on any subject appropriate for the world's greatest writing site. Thanks for your support. You guys are the best! Jack...  ![Merit Badge in WdC Community Hero
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| It's been ten days since I posted here, and that's long enough. You're all familiar with my trials and tribulations on the subject of writing new fiction. I've been retired for nine years and eight months, so I can't fall back on that old excuse of the working man, "I don't have time." I have time to do anything I want. What I want hasn't been to write. We're in the process of swapping rooms right now, and I'm hoping that will help. I'm on the east side, using a TV tray for a desk and looking essentially at a wall, but even when I do crane my neck to look out the window, I see our driveway, a small, steep hill behind its retaining wall, and the side of another house. When I get into my new digs on the west side, I'll have a big, hexagonal table tucked into a bay window looking down a hill at the rooftops of the little community I live in, the road at the bottom of the valley, and on to the brush-covered hill on the other side. I'll have a panoramic view of the incredible sunsets this region is known for, and can watch my neighbors going about their lives in blissful ignorance of the writer watching from the hillside. The room even has a fireplace. My hope is, of course, that working in that environment will spark something, anything, to life. Of course, the accurate statement is that nothing I've tried has worked for a decade. Maybe this major external upheaval will be the catalyst. Maybe... In the interim, I've suspended The Orphan Princess, which you probably know if you've been there recently. The lowdown on her is that I have several chapters finished from years ago when the words came easy. She was the story I was working on when the music died. I felt that if I posted a scene a week and got some nice comments, that I would be sparked to add more scenes on the back end until she was brought to a conclusion. I have not. So she is suspended until I arrive in my new digs and see what I can accomplish over there. It's a huge job. There are myself, leaning on 80. and my daughter, leaning on 50, to do this, and there always seems to be a bottleneck. Currently, there is a giant couch taking up half the room. I have a guy coming to saw it up into sections and haul it to the dump, but he wants to accumulate a large load from several houses so he only has to pay one dump fee, which is completely reasonable, but until he gets his load together, that literal elephant is literally sitting in the middle of the project. I hope that when it's finally out of here... no, I dare not say it. In the meanwhile, I'll be reviewing, occasionally blogging when I have something worth talking about, and will answer anything that turns up on "Scribblers' Den"  . I have an idea for a little project there, nothing at all major, but something to keep me interested. And a short story, maybe. Princess is a novel. Perhaps something smaller, 5,000 words instead 50,000 or more. I just know I can get started again by staying active in this most wonderful community of writers. So here I am. You want to know who I am? Read the poem on the intro page. I mean every word of it!Stay inspired, Jack |
...or a brief dissertation on how I got from there to here... You all know the story of how I was encouraged to write by my fifth grade teacher at the age of ten, and yadda-yadda-yadda, I've been writing ever since. But what I haven't talked about much, if at all, is my mental state along the journey. That's what I'm going to look at now, and I should point out that this post was inspired by our fellow member Tegs  , whose biography lists his very sensible reasons for not choosing to pursue fame. I strongly urge my readers to pay his port a visit and look into some of his work. I found it fascinating.Anyway, returning to my mental state... As a preteen who wasn't particularly popular, when Mrs. Warner read our stories without revealing who wrote them, mine were always rated highly by me peers. Mind you, I was writing the same sort of drivel that any ten-year-old boy churns out, but the mechanics of the writing itself seemed to be what the other kids were reacting to. Then I left Mrs. Warner's tender care, and the stories and the reactions stopped. I joined the navy straight out of high school; it was 1965, and better that than being drafted into a service where you lived in a bunker and greeted unannounced visitors with the point of your bayonet. The navy, as I suppose it is with most services, divides its time between periods of controlled chaos and those of utter boredom. I began to fill the boredom with writing, and continued after my discharge. I did some yard work for a neighbor who paid me with an antique Remington typewriter. I was on my way to the Big Time! Or so I thought. Somewhere I had gotten the idea that I could only have one work in progress at a time, so every time I got a new idea, I would abandon the old one with a same regard a female cat has for her last litter. Needless to say, I wrote for years without ever getting close to finishing anything. It didn't help that I knew nothing about writing. Not how to drive a plot, develop characters, not even how to outline. I was just copying the style of writers I liked with no idea what factors had led to their success. At some point I discovered "how to write books" books, treatises by successful authors describing how they had done it. I learned some techniques and grasped the fact, finally, that I could work on more that one project at a time and learned how to outline, but still got no closer to finishing anything. I married, my twin sons were born, both named after characters in books that never made it to the finish line, but I never stopped plugging away. In 1996, the year my wife retired and my sons turned twenty, I finally finished my first book. I put it down to wife leaving the workforce, the boys being on their own, and I suddenly had nothing to worry about anymore... well, relatively speaking. Voila, completed novel! It still wasn't all that great, but having read all these how to write books, I didn't recognize that. I counted the previous forty years of fits and starts as training, which it was, I suppose, but that much writing time obviously made me an expert, and I began to plan my book tours and clear time for the late-night talk show circuit. I still had no clue that I wasn't good, and no clue why agents and publishers weren't beating down my door. I mean, my stuff was out there. Where were the contracts? I did eventually find some modest success with the "Beyond the Rails" series and a few submissions to anthologies, but the Big Time never came knocking, and over time, I began to realize just how lucky I'd been.You see, there are a finite number of hours in a day, days in a week, and so on, and book tours and late-night talk shows, fame in any form, tend to eat up those hours like a pig at trough. And when I think about all the time ~ not all sunshine and roses, to be sure ~ that I've been able to enjoy my first small, then increasingly extended family without agents, publishers, book stores and talk show hosts making demands on it, the only feeling I can muster is gratitude. I could have lost so much in exchange for fame, and you know the old saying about fame, right? "They will never forget you 'til somebody else comes along." So I post my writing on Writing dot Com. This is my publishing house. I get frequent reviews and critiques, I know my readers, and most of them are my friends. I have a few books and stories on Amazon, and sometimes I get a sale, but I almost never get to know the purchaser or what they thought of my writing. They can have it. This is my writing home, and I don't plan to stray further. How about you? Are you still chasing the Big Time? There's certainly nothing wrong with that. Just have a clear picture of what you'll exchange for it if it comes knocking, and choose wisely... Stay inspired, Jack ![Merit Badge in Reviewing
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| Good morning, friends and followers, and I hope it finds you well. With a title like that, you wouldn't be wrong in guessing that it finds me capricious. You see, I'm not here to offer an exposé on my beloved horror genre. I'm not even offering a story. So, what, you may ask, is coming "up from the grave?" Funny you should ask. Back last September, I offered a forum, the idea being that you could talk to me, ask questions, open topics of interest to you, and so forth, and I would reply. That never really took off, and around mid-December I gave it up as a distraction that didn't have a worthwhile payoff, it garnering a single rating of three stars and going weeks between comments. So I marked it private with a view toward deleting it altogether if no one protested its disappearance. Well, no one protested and I didn't miss it any more than anyone else did, but there's a little snag in my whole get-rid-of-it program: It's been nominated for a Quill Award in the Best New Forum category. I don't know who nominated it ~ that's forbidden ~ and I don't think it's the sort of thing that will finish in the top ten, but someone does, and what a slap in the face to the nominator to find that they thought something was worthy of a Quill, and my response to that is to delete the item. Add to that the fact that I'm curious as to how it might stack up, and it is, quite literally, coming up from the grave. I think I know how it will fare, but it isn't for us to decide how others view our efforts, so here it is in all it's glory... or something:
I have two other active projects that I'd like to keep in the public eye. One is that I'm transcribing Book III of Beyond the Rails, which is rapidly approaching completion:
Finally, I have a long-unfinished story that I am working on in an attempt to bring my "muse," whatever that is, up from the grave. It's a fantasy with a large nautical component, and some widely-scattered characters who are slowly being brought together for what I hope will be a slam-bang finish:
And that's 30 for today. Hope you all have a wonderful Sunday. You guys are the best! Stay inspired, Jack |
| A very good morning to all my wonderful friends, and I hope it finds you full of hope for the new year. I'm back from my customary Thursday hiatus and hopeful for a few things, but it finds me full of honesty as regards my WdC membership, and that's what I'm here to address. The first thing you will have noticed is the new cover. That is a photograph of the design on a jacket that doesn't fit me anymore, but the photograph does. The skull represents my love of the horror genre, and the gears inside and scattered around, my enjoyment of steampunk, the genre where I first achieved some minor recognition. This replaces the plaque I was awarded by "The WDC Angel Army" for being named the WdC Angel of the Month for September. This was a great honor and I displayed it for three months, but it's time to stop resting on those laurels and look to the future.Second, I feel the need to fess up: I'm not here to participate in the same way that all of you are. It's been years since I've produced anything original, and it's long past time that I stop pretending that the "muse" is going to come back refreshed from her ten-year vacation. I'm familiar with WdC from previous memberships, and I came here because it seemed a stable site to store all the things I wrote years ago when I was active. That's what you see in my portfolio now. This includes the supposedly "new" work, "The Orphan Princess [Suspended]" . I had written the first few chapters of this when the muse quit without notice and moved on to greener pastures. I've been posting a scene per week, and working in the background to continue the story. Hopefully I'll have some new stuff to post when I run out of old stuff, but only time will tell.Finally, once I returned, I found a vast universe of your fantastic stories, poems, and even novels to read, and I initiated an award, "Jack's Diamonds" , to offer encouragement to the best of the best. I just gave one this morning, in fact, to a great poem. Go check it out when you're finished here. It's really worth a read.So that's the new course I've set to navigate 2026. I once was a writer. I may be again, but I'm going to stop pretending that I currently am. Peruse the port and enjoy the stories. Encouragement and even suggestions for possible ways to take The Orphan Princess wouldn't go amiss, but don't expect to see a lot of new material going up. There's a vanishingly small store of that in the warehouse. But I wish you all the best, and look forward to discovering more and more of your fine writing. You guys are the best! Stay inspired, Jack  "Best Reviewer" Category |
Good morning, all, and welcome back. You may have seen this annoying "six things" infection making the rounds, and now it looks like it's my turn. An acquaintance of mine, Amethyst Snow Angel  , has infected me with it, and while I'll play your silly game, know that I'll get you for this. Okay, here we go.1. I was born in the witching hour under a waxing crescent moon. I do not believe that explains either my love of being alone, or my love of suspenseful horror, but it's a fun story. 2. My great-grandmother had me reading at the age of three. I've enjoyed it ever since. It made for a rough first-grade, as the other kids would be struggling with "S-s-seeeee... Diiiick... r-ruuuun..." while I'm banging my head on my desk, mentally screaming, "GET ON WITH IT!" My fifth-grade teacher encouraged me to write, and I've never looked back. She would read some of our stories anonymously to the class, and mine were always highly-rated. If only no one had liked them, I probably wouldn't be in this rut today. 3. Through a bizarre combination of circumstances, I grew up lower-middle class in Point Loma, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the San Diego region. But down the hill was Ocean Beach, a community of hippies, beatniks, and surfers, where I spent every moment that I could get away. "Safe Haven" is set in that venue, and rubbing elbows with all those different social levels is what I believe has given me such a wide range of experience vis a vis making my characters rich and varied.4. I joined the navy at 17. I knew that I wasn't doing well in school, I wasn't going to college, and that I would soon be drafted; it was 1965. Why not choose my service? So I chose the one where you at least get hot meals and running water, no matter what else is going on. During my hitch, I served on a minesweeper, an oil tanker, and the big communications hub on Guam. I did some time in Vietnam, and have seven medals, all for time-in-service, nothing heroic. I rode out two hurricanes on the minesweeper and a typhoon on the oiler. I am officially ~ and still ~ salty. By the way, only one of my friends from Point Loma served, and that was by choice. The rest of them all found ways to duck out of serving the country that enabled them to live their privileged lifestyles. 5. Of all the skills the navy taught me, the one that took me the farthest was the ability to type. That and my five-point Veteran's Preference got me a job as a supply clerk with the navy. I met my wife on my first job (more on her later), and worked my way into the Fuel Department of the big Naval Air Station in the middle of San Diego Bay. Once there, I worked myself into a job as the safety, fire, and environmental inspector for the fuel operation. I can never know what might have happened during operations I was present at if I hadn't been there, but it's possible, just possible, that my presence may have saved lives and expensive equipment from young sailors taking shortcuts. 6. I met my wife in 1975. She is the most amazing person I've ever crossed paths with, and we just celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary last week. She gave us twin boys and a daughter just over a year later. We had great fun raising them ~ mostly ~ and while the boys are scattered across the continent, our daughter lives with us and looks out for the old folks, running errands, squiring us around to appointments and whatnot, and being the third leg of our social triangle. It's been a wonderful life, and I look forward to a lot more of it to come. We're old and wearing out; she's in a wheelchair and my back is shot, but love makes up for it all. And there you are, six things that are interesting to me, at least. Hopefully you found them to be amusing if nothing else. Now the rest of the requirement is that I have to infect ~ I mean nominate ~ three other people, and I decided that, rather than go after friends of mine for years, I would pick out some newbies and let them make themselves known. Sound good? I hope so, because the following members may consider themselves tagged: Vicious Alex Emberly Gray  Ready, set, GO! J |
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Good morning, friends, and I hope it finds you well! What's with this title, you ask? Well, it has been a madhouse of activity and anticipation leading up to the Holiday. Oh, we're not unique in that? Yeah, I think we all understand each other. The shopping, wrapping, and decorating is in the wake, the anticipation subsided as the gifts were opened, and now we're all looking at piles of crumpled paper and cardboard that we somehow need to cram into our waste cans so we can all fit in our homes again. We've catalogued our swag, and I hope we all liked it ~ I know I did ~ and now it's time to start easing back toward our regular routine. I get to enjoy a few more days with my son before he heads back to Colorado, and then the clean-up starts in earnest with an even larger task looming after that. But a few more days of peace. I'll take them. But I'm going to do some clean-up on my port earlier than that, in fact, immediately. Look, I've been trying to return to form as an author, but I have created an assortment of distractions for myself that vie for my attention every time I log in. This blog is one of them, but it's a good place for me to "think out loud," and sound for opinions on some of my wilder ideas. But in the interim, I started two forums ~ fora? ~ that seemed like a good idea at the time. Well, one hasn't had a visit in 17 days, and the other had one enthusiastic visitor, then went to crickets thereafter. These are unnecessary distractions that I don't need to deal with, and are accordingly being closed forthwith. I'm going to mark them Private for right now to give myself time to consider my options, but I don't see myself starting up again. Both were experiments, and while it's too early to deem them outright failures, they are things I don't need to be spending mental effort on while I'm trying to return to form as an author. So there you have it. You don't need two forums to talk to me. I have an e-mail address, and anything you want to discuss may end up as a post here anyway. I love you guys, I don't want to shun anyone, but those experiments didn't pan out. Let's see if I can wow you with some literature instead! J |
Good evening. It's the wee hours, the madhouse has quieted down, and I have a few moments to write. It's time to deliver my third gift of Christmas. You've suffered through the lunacy of "Star Drek" . You've endured the dubious reality of "The Coder's Muse" . Hopefully the third gift will be one that holds a bit more value. You're all cordially invited to
Hope to see you there! Have a very merry Christmas, Jack |
| I suppose the title should really be "Who WAS I as a Writer," given the conversations I've been dispensing here, but I'm still trying, and I'm not going to give up that easily. I'm in for the long haul. But when I write, I have a certain style ~ we all do ~ and mine has always had a certain feel about it. This is a quick dissertation about where that style came from... If you're interested. I was a child of the '50s, which means that I just caught the tail end of the old Victorian manners and attitudes as they were being swept out to make room for the modern era of snatchin' and grabbin', of "Me first, and eff you!" I miss those times. More to the point, as a lifelong avid reader, I did my formative reading in the genre of adventure books for boys. This was a time when villains were cads, ladies were elegant, and the hero had perfect teeth... and since it was fairly obvious that no one else was going to write them anymore, I made it my business to write them myself. And here's the funny thing: Unless a few dozen total strangers who don't know each other are lying through their teeth for no other reason than to boost my ego, virtually everyone who reads these stories and takes the time to leave a comment or write a review, LOVES them! I have always felt humbled, honored, and blown away by turns. I had no idea that something so obsolete could strike such a chord with so many diverse people. And if that answers any questions you may have had, I'm pleased to do it; this is where I talk to you. If you'd like to discuss this, the comment section awaits. If you'd like to discuss anything else, ask a question, recommend a read, the place for that is "Scribblers' Den" ; that's where you can "blog" to me, so to speak. I'm open for business all day every day except Thursday. Anything on your mind?Stay inspired! Jack ![Merit Badge in Good Deeds
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| Good morning, wonderful person, and I hope it finds you well! I'm here today for a couple of reasons. First is that according to my stat page, many, many people visit this blog every day; my forum, "Scribblers' Den" , not so much. The thing that immediately suggests to me is that I need to service this blog much more often. So be it. In my travels yesterday, I ran across this meme: WRITER'S BLOCK: When your imaginary friends stop talking to you. That is honestly the best description I've ever heard. I have a head full of imaginary friends, and I haven't heard a peep from them since... Let me see. I self-published The Stone Seekers in 2016, and I shopped that around for over a year after I finished it, so I'd have to say it's been at least a decade. Wherever do they go? Is there an unemployment office for characters who won't get up and perform anymore? Do they draw some kind of imaginary welfare? They must be making a living somehow, 'cause they sure ain't working for me! I talked recently about working on one story at a time, steeping myself in it, and avoiding all other distractions. I can't tell if it's going to work yet, but here's the lowdown: I have this old story, a novel really, that I was working on when something else came up, some trendy story that I have no memory of now, but it served to derail "The Orphan Princess [Suspended]" permanently... until now. It's a slow process, and that's deliberate. Every week I post a scene that I've previously written. It's polished in the sense that things that were plot distractions are filtered out, and each time I post a scene, I try to outline another chapter down at the bottom end. So far it's working. Will it continue? Stick around and find out!And that's what I've been up to lately. From this point on, I'll keep an eye out for things that might make interesting blog posts and try to get things up here before all that interest I spoke of dies out. So, what have you been up to lately? Stay inspired! J |
| Good morning, all, and I hope it finds you well. It finds me thrilled... overall. I was supposed to write a review today but I couldn't get my head around it, and rather than give some unsuspecting newbie a half-assed review, I decided I'd blog instead. So here I am. Now, what to blog about? Hmmm... Oh, I know! I said I was thrilled, and that's quite true. My little "let's chew the fat" forum, "Scribblers' Den" , was just nominated for a Quill Award for Best New Forum, as was I in the category of Best Reviewer. Best reviewer, me! Can you imagine? And the icing on that cake is that two of my reviews have been nominated for Best Review, so I'm chuffed, as my Australian friends say.But that isn't what I came here for. As everyone knows by now, I have been a prolific writer over a period of decades, but all that has gone away. I miss it terribly, and signed on here and began reviewing in the hope that rubbing up against the talented writers on the site and dissecting their work would snap my "muse" out of her coma. It hasn't, but apparently I'm a fair hand at reviewing, and the site has been kind enough to recognize it. Perhaps next year... but this is now, and I'm thrilled to recognized for something to do with writing, even if it isn't what I'd hoped. Of course, I can't be too put out by these developments. I mean, I knew what I was doing when I came here. My first handle was The Phantom Reviewer and "Jack's Diamonds" began life as Phantom's Gold, so I can't play ignorant now. Nor do I want to. I am quite pleased with how things have developed, and owe great thanks to you for accepting me in my role here. That doesn't mean that I'm not still trying to write, and if success should finally attend my efforts, you'll bed hearing about it here, in my forum, in the newsfeed, and anyplace else I can find to crow about it. But I'm not going to jump around like a hyperactive chihuahua shoving my half-finished projects in people's faces anymore. I've disappointed quite enough friends doing that to last a lifetime!Finally, a word about my username: I stormed out of here under a cloud a couple of years ago, and after waiting a while, wanted to tip-toe back in and turn over a new leaf. My handle in the old days was Blimprider, and some of you who had your toes trod upon by that A-hole may remember him. I couldn't very well use that again, so, the story behind holttaylor: Holt is my middle name; Taylor is what everyone I deal with invariably calls me two seconds after I say "It's Tyler, T-Y-L-E-R." And there you have it, a snapshot of me today, December 8th, 2025... For what it's worth. I hope you know me a little better now, and find me even more interesting. Have a great day, and I'll see you around the stacks. Stay inspired, Jack |
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