Gary Numan

I’ve rediscovered an old friend. Gary Numan, the 80’s New Wave pioneer who had a break out hit with his 1979 song Cars. Most people’s knowledge of the man and his music ends there, relegating him to the world of one-hit wonders.


 I was more tenacious than some, but not most. I followed his career for a while into the mid-eighties, three or four albums, but when he moved from synthesizers to guitars, I lost interest. He was just another three cord wanna-be rock and roller I thought. Striving for mainstream acceptance with conventional tools. He fell off my American radio stations and it it was natural to relegate him to the back of my cassette case and forget he existed as I followed other experimental bands.

But, whereas I gave up on him, he never gave up and his new album crossed my internet browsing and I gave i a listen.

It was very cool.

I brushed off my old albums and gave them a new listen and then dug into the decades of work he’d put out without my knowledge. Like binge-watching a career I saw his evolution and growth. He never stopped his experimentation. He built upon his moody vibes and throbbing dance songs that made me wiggle in my seat the first time I heard them.


He’d had changes in his life. He’d touched a nerve in politics before it was normal for artists to have and voice political opinions. He’d married, had kids and never stopped writing music. He was successful. He was under the radar, the mainstream had their new flash in the pans, but he’d found an audience and had kept them. They’d allowed him to continue creating.

He stayed dark and brooding, echoed the theme bands of his birth, Flock of Seagulls and the like, live shows with costumes and trippy lights, How'd I miss all this? I asked myself. Oh, yeah. Wrong continent.

Now, I’m digging on the new album. Now critics are re-evaluating him as well. Musicians are commenting on his influence on their careers and he’s been named “the Father of Dark Wave.” Pretty damn cool that he has a sub-genre of his own. What artist can hope for more?

I love this. Not only because it’s like meeting an old friend and falling in love again, but as an artist it thrills me that he kept at it. I was too quick to dismiss me, but luckily for everyone, he didn’t listen to me. He had his own path and every album I download and listen to is a picture of progress, a gem and joy. He inspires me.

O,h and his new album is charting.

Check out Gary Numan, Savage (Songs from a Broken World).

Egad!

I’ve been using that word a lot this week. I wrote it in my newest Work In Progress and just texted it again to someone. I spoke it three times and slept on it last night.

It’s one of those words that can’t be spelled properly without an exclamation point. It’s half onomatopoeia half ancient comment.

 It is a way for the civilized to show

We can only imagine that there was a moment in history when the phrase existed earnestly, but now it has a unique place in American vocabulary as an intellectualized exclamation of mock surprise. Singular or plural it is sarcasm embodied in an erudite enunciation.

Have you ever considered this?

You have?

Egads!

#amwriting

Let me state, for the record, that writing is great. I mean it. It’s a wonderful activity, an unparalleled job.

It pays shit.

It’s wall to wall rejection.

It’s unending work.

It’s draining.

It can be drudgery.

It can be thankless.

It can feel like having your chest exposed to swarming hornets.

And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

What writing has that makes it all worth while, is creation, expression, art. It is the feeling of elation when you channels the muse to the page. It is feeling of having written a phrase, a sentence, a scene that speaks truth. Witty, and wise. Fumbling and fearful.

Feeling the pulse, writing, having written.

They are great things.

Now. Back to work!

LUW Spring Conference 2019 coming up

Let us consider the writer, an artist, a lone voice in the creative wilderness, dreaming and plotting, creating and expressing. Now imagine a collection of these, a room of creators, each driven to make and imagine, witness and weave. If energy and love were light, we'd be blinded to see it.

We writers are driven by unseen forces, muses, geniuses, the subconscious, working at first alone, listening to the aether for inspiration, testing the limits of our own skill to bridge the quiet moments when the angel is silent. Then perhaps to open our book and our heart to others.

Alone we make, but then, like a great migration, we collect together in miraculous conclaves. It is a wonder. We congregate to congratulate. We share. We understand each others perils, if not our genres. We sympathize with the journey, if not the outcomes. And we share our knowledge and talents to strengthen the community as whole.

It is the best in us.

This is the purpose of our conferences, to reach our dreams by helping others reach theirs. To go forward by helping others come along. 

Case in brilliant point: The League of Utah Writers Spring Conference which is happening this April. Here we summon our own and a few friends to present insights to us all. Small or big— a comma, or a magic system, dialog, setting, plot, all is discussed and examined to improve our craft. For those seeking, there is hard learned advice about marketing tips, netting agents, cornering publishers, blogs and book signings. At every level, with every facet there is something to learn, and something to share.

Spring Conference is a gem of an event. It’s priced to allow everyone to come. It encourages us all to be a part of the process. It is a chance to build up our skills, knowledge and resume. It’s a chance to be with each other, each of us artist and writer defying the blank page, turning expectations into realities, bucking the odds, enjoying the ride. Dreaming the dream and making it real in letters.

Living in Letters.,

Make sure you have April 27th blocked off on your calendar for a casual, exciting, and rejuvenating event. Sign up is now at the League of Utah Writers website.

www.leagueofutahwriters.com

See you at Spring Conference 2019.

Sick

I’ve been visited by a true ruler of the planet. I’m not sure which variety, pedigree, house or cadre, but one of vessels of life itself has made residence in my sinuses and is ruling my body in aches and sneezes, oozes and limits. It is, however, a generous ruler, and gives freely its largess of copious snot.

Fortunately, I am a-self-employed writer, creating masterpieces out of trauma, big and little. Here’s one now. When I finally get the energy to write again, I’ll have a renewed understanding of sickness, infection and misery that I might have forgotten from the last hundred times I was here. Am I fortunate or what?

My doctor swears I’m not contagious, at least I think that’s what he said. It was hard to understand him through the blue biohazard suit.

I suffer, and like all great writers, and men in general I hear, I shall not bear my misery alone. I will tell the world! I will move them to sympathize, to feel the pressure and my dry nasal passages, the dizziness and dehydration. It burns, it smears the world. Pressures the senses, makes things oblong, stretched, and gooey. Here is proof that reality is only what we perceive, and is how we perceive it. The world is thick semi-clear yellowish resistance. This is true. This is here. The air is thick, pushes back against the slightest disturbance, a hand reaching for a tissue, a head raising to see the cat. The pillow is harder, the Kleenex turned to sand paper, the water to paste, the caffeine to nectar. Time is not frozen, but freezing. Glacial and quiet. Long moments of nothing, staring, empty, waiting, and sudden returns to now, which is later but still the same. Pills alarm, reminders to eat, stand, email, think.

It is a gift. That which does not kill me makes me stronger. I count my blessings that this bug is not anti-biotic resistance and that I have the time and means to mend and notice it. I bow down to the rulers of life, the teachers of death, the lenses of reality.

I got a bug.

Snowed In

I can’t remember the last time Salt Lake City shut down due a snowstorm. I remember some pretty hellish depths growing up. Remember driving to college dictating my will over a phone up on Wasatch, but today, the whole valley shut down. For a foot of snow.

I’m embarrassed. Come on, Utah. This is, well Utah. We have skiers on our license plates. Snow shouldn’t be a stranger.

But it’s wrecking havoc.

The first major storm of the season is always the worse because people forget how to drive in snow. Driving in snow is about stopping in snow. Sure you’ve got four wheel drive and can zip through a foot of snow like it’s fog, but I don’t care how big your Hummer is, you can’t stop any faster than anyone else and all that speed means that the freeway gets closed for a half a day. Congratulations.

I suppose there are snow plows out there pushing snow banks into recently cleared driveways, but they aren’t here yet. Are there as many as there used to be? I feel old remembering my childhood when a storm would hit and the roads would be cleared in an hour. What happened? Layoffs? Tax cuts? Run out of salt? Something’s different, I tell you.

Drivers are stupid and over-confident. Check.

Snow hasn’t really stopped. Check

But this is Utah. A mountain state. Home of the Winter Olympics.

I should be able to go get a burrito!

Wasatch Fellowship Conference

I’ll be the Wasatch Fellowship Conference this weekend. It runs Friday and Saturday up in Kaysville. If you’re looking for some writing inspiration and networking, this would be a good place to look 

Wasatch Writers
Fellowship Conference

Hopebox Theatre
1700 Frontage Rd.
Kaysville, UT 84037


Here’re my specific assignments

Friday, January 25, 2019
Panel 6:00-6:50 p.m. (Main Room)
Traditional Publishing

Saturday, January 26, 2019
Presentation 2:30-3:20 p.m. (Small Room)
A Study in Mystery