I have been retired now for nearly four years. It has not been an easy thing to adjust to. I am used to hard work and constant thinking on my feet. Yet I have been mostly confined to the house and unable to do much beyond write and drive my kids to the many places high school kids need to go. I don’t really have trouble keeping busy, but I need to do something to reconnect to the outside world beyond the bedroom door.
I have been teaching myself to cook. These muffins are strawberry flavored and only require milk added to the mix, no eggs to crack and shell pieces to pick out of the batter. I have also been learning the hard way how to burn the crap out of pans and muffin trays. And… learning how to clean burned pans… but obviously not very well.
I have been getting to know the oven quite well. We talk about life and muffins and heat and baking times, and she is constantly beeping at me to warn me when things are about to burn.
She has also been giving me writing advice. She got me talked into not burning my bank account any further by investing in publishing services. Those goobers are mostly just money-grubbers in a dying industry. My novel Stardusters and Space Lizards was thoroughly baked on this blog over the last sixty eight weeks, and so I needed to finally take it out of the oven. This I did through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. The book was formatted and put together in publishable form in a matter of days. You can find it here on Amazon… My Book. Page Publishing still has my novel Magical Miss Morgan in page formatting after over a year and a half of working with them. No way are their services worth the money I paid them. They work slowly and dangerously incompetently. I would sue them to get my money back, but it would cost me more for a lawyer than what I paid them. So far with self-publishing I am only ten dollars in the hole, the amount I spent on copies of my own book.
But as the stove pointed out heatedly, the kitchen and computer are not actually getting out of the house and meeting the world again after three and three quarters years. And the chances of income from muffins and writing are slim. So I also made a plan to be an Uber driver. I got carefully signed up and prepared. I was finally able to download the Uber driving app last weekend, and this weekend I finally felt well enough to try driving for money. So last night I got in the car and connected with a potential passenger, my first ever Uber drive.
Of course, this is Mickey we are talking about here. Nothing in my little life ever goes smoothly, especially at the start. If things were perfect, I would definitely be worried that something was seriously wrong with the universe. So, my first passenger was a guy who needed to be driven to the 7-Eleven to buy beer. And naturally, I couldn’t find the place to start with. The Uber computer-voice lady kept wanting me to download something in the middle of giving me directions. She also wanted me to turn left and drive through a fence. But when I finally did turn in to the apartment complex and realized that I was in the wrong section of the complex to pick up my passenger, I quickly corrected my error and found him. Computer-voice lady kept telling me to turn the wrong direction, so I listened to my passenger to make the proper turns and got him there on time. My car, however, overheated in the parking lot. Now, that isn’t entirely accurate. It has a faulty heat-sensor that registers overheating whenever the car is idling and heat is reflected back up from stationary pavement under the car. I had the thing in to the dealer for the recall fix twice, and the replacement chips are just as defective as the original chips. And, of course, I have been notified about the class action lawsuit, but because it is not a life-threatening malfunction, it may be some time before that is resolved. So, I rolled down the windows and turned the car heater up high and reduced the heat the defective detector detected. The drunk guy got back in the car with his beer and I successfully took him back to his apartment, his girlfriend, and his party. I got a five star rating for the trip. But I cut the night short. I earned $4.oo total for the evening. It wasn’t perfect, but I was finally out in the world again. I was earning money again. And I got to discuss the perils of diabetes with a drunk guy whose brother had juvenile diabetes. Life is good… some of the time.
But that, of course, is not how it works in real life… even without the nuclear physics which was an exaggeration for humorous effect.
Catch a Falling Star 
Why Mickey Writes
If you are wondering, “How in the Heck can Mickey write nonsense like that essay he wrote yesterday?”, then please be aware that Mickey is pondering that same question.
Seriously, why would a writer publish personal thoughts and allude to personal tragedies? Especially when they are about things that once upon a time nearly killed him? (Please note that when Mickey starts a sentence with “Seriously” it is probably about to lead to a joke, the same way as when Trump says, “Believe me” we should assume he is telling a lie and knows it.)
The answer is simply, writers write stuff. They have to. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be writers.
It is really not something to do to earn fame and fortune. Fame and fortune happen to rare individuals like J. K. Rowling and Steven King… and even Stephanie Meyer, to prove that it is totally random and not based on actual writing talent… except for sometimes.
You write to get your head right about bad things that happen in life. You find that factor in Mark Twain whose infant son died, as well as most of the rest of his family, before him, forcing him to face survivor’s guilt and the notion that life is random and death does not come for you based on any kind of merit system. Charles Dickens wrote about the foibles of his father, on whom he based the David Copperfield character Wilkins Micawber, a man who was overly optimistic and constantly landing in debtor’s prison because of it. He also wrote in his stories about the women he truly loved (who were not, it seems, his wife) one of whom died in his arms while yet a teenager. Dickens’ amused take on the innate foolishness of mankind gave him a chance to powerfully depict great tragedies both large (as in a Tale of Two Cities) and small (as in Oliver Twist). I wrote yesterday’s post based on the connection between the nudity I write about in novels and my own traumatic assault when I was only ten.
You write because you have wisdom, an inner personal truth, that you are convinced needs to be crystallized in words and written down on paper. It isn’t necessarily real truth. Lots of idiots write things and post them in newspapers, blogs, and even books. And it is often true that their inner personal truth is complete hogwash. (But, hey, at least the hogs are cleaner that way.) Still, your wisdom is your own, and it is true for you even if some idiot like Mickey reads it and thinks it is only fit for cleaning hogs.
And you truly do have to write. If I did not write my stupid, worthless novels, all the hundreds of characters in my head would get mad and start kicking the pillars that hold up the structures in my head. I do have structures in my head. My mind is organized in boxes that contain specifically sorted ideas and stories and notions. It is not a festering stew pot where everything is mixed together and either bubbling or boiling with hot places or coagulating in the cold corners. (That is how I picture Donald Trump’s mind. It is certainly not an empty desert like many people think, because deserts don’t explode all over Twitter early in the morning like the stew pot metaphor obviously would.)
And so, I have done it again. I have set down my 500+ words for today and made a complete fool of myself. And why do I do it? Because Mickey is a writer, and so, Mickey writes stuff.
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Tagged as goofy thoughts on writing