Hi, for several good reasons we’ve moved the blog to SubStack.com. Managing web site and email security has become a part time job.

Substack does all that for me so I have time to write, or work on my cars.

All of the old blogs can be found there too!

Please join us at our new home on the web:

https://williamlobb.substack.com/

Bill

I can’t figure out what to write about today. I’m told consistency is important, so I try to put out something I consider at least not a complete embarrassment every Wednesday and Saturday.

I can’t stand some newsletters and blogs I see that are essentially ‘buy my book.’

I get genuinely happy when one of you buys or reads one of my books, but what I enjoy most is the feedback I get from you about whatever it is I write. The emails I get from you are humbling. The thought that something I posted sparked the stories sent back to me is inspiring.How my words are interpreted or sometimes misinterpreted into something I didn’t even imagine. A reader left a review a while back. She said she had little money to spend on books. Her income was quite limited. But she bought one of mine, read it and thanked me with a review on Amazon. I hope Bonnie knows how much that touched me. At its core, writing is about communication and connection, right? This connection with a total stranger is really what it’s all about for me.

My editor, Mark, suggested this morning I write about not knowing what to write about. The dude is a genius. As soon as he said that I sat down, and this happened. I doubt this blog will have anything notable in it, but it got me thinking about my process.

I’ve got about a thousand snippets of stuff in my notebook. It is either a mess or some roughhewn art waiting in the wings. My money is on it’s a mess.

Water Wars is the first book I’ve written in any kind of order. But progress on it has slowed. I think it’s slowed because this isn’t how I write. I’ve got two new characters I love, and I hope you all will too. They are strong-minded people from the Louisiana swamps. I love Louisiana and New Orleans and all that goes with it. It’s like no other place on earth I’ve ever seen. But these characters are still being developed, they are incomplete. I haven’t come to know them yet. Often I write stuff, especially characters and I really get to like them, then I scramble where to fit them into the story. The first book, The Third Step, has one such character in it. A reader asked me where he came from and my honest answer was, “I have no idea…”

One of these new characters, I called her Jackie. A woman who slipped between the cracks of this society and hit the bottom. She came back angry and hard, but I’m afraid she may be crazy. That’s ok, crazy makes a good character who is fun to write, and I hope fun to read. But right now, she just lives in my notebook with a gaggle of other ideas and unfinished stories.

I don’t like my writing methods. It’s scattered and chaotic, much like what’s going on in my head in any one day. I always imagined writing in an oak lined study, wearing one of those corduroy jackets with the patched sleeves. It ain’t like that. I’m writing this in my tool shed. My happy place.

A very good friend, a writer and journalist called me a ‘master of the cruel underbelly of life.’ I take that as a high honor. I never know if something I’ve written is any good, or in the words of Hemingway, “just shit…”

There is surely plenty to write about these days. I struggle a lot with sounding preachy. I never want to do that. If I ever do I apologize. It’s so hard for a thinking, open-minded person to form an opinion these days. Facts are commingled with hype and whatever media frenzy happens to be blowing up in the moment. I fear at times we are on the brink of a war that will forever change the world, then I hear some talking head saying it is no big deal. Sometimes I feel the constant influx of news, for lack of a better term, gives me whiplash.

Regardless, there is plenty to write and think about and so many great characters to let come to the surface.

I guess, six-hundred or so words into this and Mark was right. I just wrote about not knowing what to write about.

Thomas Paine wrote The Age Of Reason in 1794. Paine was a Diest. He believed in a creator of the universe, but he didn’t subscribe to a God who manages every aspect of a person’s day to day life.

I’m not going to get into religion here. I firmly believe in John Lennon’s words: “Whatever gets you through the night, is all right.” You believe what you believe, and I’ll believe what I believe, you don’t come to my front porch selling your philosophy and I’ll never show up at your house selling mine. I’ll never hate you for your religion or start a war with you because you don’t see things the way I do.

Totally off point here but I love Lennon’s, “Working Class Hero” it is possibly my favorite song, well that, and Springsteen’s “Jungleland,” especially about three minutes and thirty seconds in where Clarence Clemons whipsaws the whole song apart with his saxophone, and of course, William Devaughn’s “Be Thankful For What You Got.”

Ok, back on point. That point is: fact and reason. I’m not sure we ever did, but we certainly don’t now live in The Age Of Reason. Not even close.

My work in technology and IT predates the Internet. In fact, it predates IT, we used to be MIS, before that we were “that guy in who can fix your computer…” In the early nineties a lot of us were convinced the Internet was going to make us smarter. Well, that didn’t happen…

I no longer interact or react with Trolls, but I still read their nonsense. The earth is flat, we not only never went to the moon, but we’ve also never even been into space. These are possibly the most ridiculous and laughable. Vaccines don’t work or they cause God knows what, less laughable. I’m old enough to have known some people who had Polio. They were much older than me. I don’t know any of my peers who ever suffered that horror. I had measles and the mumps. My kids never did. Neither did your kids. Sowing doubt and denying science harms all of us. Vaccines work.

Flat-earthers and moon landing deniers aren’t dangerous. They can be amusing or frustrating. Truth be told I kind of enjoy them. I saw a photo the other day, a guy took it on an early morning flight on a commercial airliner. He got a photo of the rising sun in one window and the setting moon on the opposite window. He posted this with his photos, PROOF! All I could think was, you do you, bro…

People deny the Holocaust ever happened. That is dangerous. It’s delusional. This kind of thinking allows things like this to happen again. We can’t allow that. I fear it will.

Our next book, “Water Wars” is about a handful of people dealing with the collapse of society and order and government in the face of a mounting environmental crisis. I’m no climate scientist, I’m not even very smart, but I know the lakes and streams here used to freeze solid come late November and stay frozen until March. I’ve not seen a frozen pond around here, the place I’ve lived all my life in about five years, maybe more. Yesterday it was eighty degrees in Baltimore. You can be a climate change denier all day, that’s up to you, but I know what I see and what I see scares me some.

When did we start blindly supporting politicians? I’ve worked with some lawyers who are banging clients at five-hundred bucks an hour—banging is the appropriate word here too. Think about that. That’s twenty-thousand dollars a week, well over a million dollars a year. Many, if not most politicians, at least at the federal level, are lawyers who gave up their practices so they can go to Washington DC, for a tenth of that salary. Yet somehow many of us believe they do this for some altruistic love of the people.

My best friend, right hand man and editor Mark is a Mets fan, I’m a Yankees fan since I fell out of the womb. We’re still friends. We look past each other’s failures in baseball.

I know a guy, a big dude, union electrician, who actually cries when the NY Islanders lose a hockey game. I get being a sports fan, I even understand idolizing some of the best in their particular field. I idolized Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle, Jackie Robinson, and Pete Rose. The wisdom of this may be questionable, but it’s relatively harmless. Idolizing and taking sides and becoming violent and risking prison and ruining your life to defend your chosen political idol isn’t just dangerous, it defies logic, common sense. Know this, they will not reciprocate—ever! Not at all.

I may be a fan of John and Clarence and William and Roger and The Mick, but I’ll not let them define who I am.

Sadly, Mr. Paine, it’s been over two hundred years since you wrote your pamphlet that caused so much commotion, and we still ain’t anywhere near the age of reason. In fact, we’re about as far from it as I think we’ve ever been.

There’s a mirror on the wall of my office. It’s at least eighty years old, maybe more. It has stood watch over my life, a silent sentinel.

It was at my mother and father’s little stone house by the swamp. In its reflection has been every significant person and event of my life. My father’s father, born 1882, looked into its glass. My youngest grandchild, born 2016, has smiled into it and laughed a child’s giggle.

The mirror watched as my sister tried to get me to dance like Elvis. It reflected the tiny black-and-white TV screen when Cronkite said JFK was dead.

It was there showing us the sadness of the day my father died, and the disbelief and crushing heartbreak in his brother’s faces, in his mother’s face.

We took the mirror off the wall and took it with us when my mother had to move away from the swamp to a small apartment a few miles up the road. I didn’t want to leave his house. Ma couldn’t survive there. It was a haunted house, but I wanted to stay near the ghost. The mirror hung in that living room, too. It reflected the emptiness and sadness of a little boy who just wanted to run away to his uncle’s farm and hated the place with the mirror.

We took it to the first house Ma bought on her own. It reflected pride and struggle with sadness. Ma never fully recovered from my dad’s early exit. Canadian rye whiskey seemed to help her some, though not enough.

Somehow the mirror came to me in the late 1980s. It reflected a semi-suicidal drunken drug addict stumbling and reeling through a rapidly collapsing life. I’d sometimes gaze at the image and have no idea at all who was that person staring back at me. It reflected the red-faced, blood-eyed vomiting demon that night in 1993 when I had to decide to cut that life loose or die.

It watched a messy divorce unfold in all its raw and perfect ugliness. The looking glass watched my daughter grow up and become a good woman and fly away, but she comes back sometimes, and the glass sees her again and that makes me smile. It has reflected the light of a much better marriage this time around and it watched me grow fat and happy, until I realize it is time to step on the scale to reel it back in a mite, again. It’s watched a son from that new marriage become a good man in a world where it’s challenging to be a good man.

The mirror stood there as Ma moved into my house and fell to the insanity of Alzheimer’s. It shined back to us at my sista Donna’s mile-wide smile, and her cancer emaciated face. It has watched Da Ace scheming, and me and Mark laughing our asses off, and Bobby and me trying to figure stuff out, and the ages old battle, Ford versus Chevy, and Carlos trying to explain how the world works to me.

Now, the mirror is on my office wall. It reflects an aging man trying to work and write to come to terms with a confounding, terrible world. It reflects me and the grandboy building models while I try to explain life, as I understand it, to him.

Sometimes I look into the glass, and I see all those faces, smiling and crying and laughing and screaming. Some faces I miss so desperately; it physically hurts. People have told me they are in a better place. I’m not sure how much I buy into that. I’d prefer it if they were still here, reflecting back to me.

My life has literally played out in the reflection of this four-foot by four-foot piece of glass, some art deco reject from the 1930s Ma somehow inherited, and now it’s mine. One day I’m sure it will fall from the wall and shatter into a million pieces. I hope I don’t live to see that. The part of me that believes in such silliness likes to think the mirror holds just a bit of all of us who’ve ever gazed into its shiny light and when it breaks will be the day when all of us, living and dead will be scattered finally and then no more.

Writing is a bizarre process. I think, though I’m not sure, that I admire the outliners, the writers who know precisely every step of their story before they type the first word.

That ain’t me. I’m told Kurt Vonnegut was not an outliner, but a seat of the pants writer. James Patterson spends more time outlining than writing the story. If you’ve ever read either of these guys, you can see the difference.

I must drive my editor, Mark, nuts. He’ll often comment, “I didn’t see that coming!” My reply, “Neither did I!”

A story must have its own life. In the current WIP I’ve got two guys running away from a bad situation and headed to a new one. Dependingon what happens along the way; who they meet, and the troubles they encounter;these factorswill determine the story, not me, I’m just along for the ride.

Right now, the pair is dealing with an unfolding climate crisis, made worse by a government that is unable to deal with the situation and provide basic services to the people. This leads to riots of scared and angry people. The ensuing misinformation campaigns that inevitably drive public opinion and in some way or another play out in the streets my characters find themselves living on.

In this case, I’ve got to ponder how would I react to the information I’m being fed? One radio broadcast tells the pair the government has fallen, and Washington is overrun. Another, hours later, reports the military has put down the uprising and is in control. Is the military in the streets of the US Capital a source of comfort or terror? Who knows? I’ll find out as the story unfolds.

I think misinformation and disinformation may be the greatest crisis we face as a nation. I am finding it harder and harder to take a stand or even know what to think or believe.

Case in point; I read an article the other day from a fairly legit source that there may be some truth to the rumor that Covid was leaked from a lab. First you have to consider the source, the writer, his politics, etc. once you do you need to ponder the story itself. If there is any truth to this, it means that a lot of the stories I’ve heard since 2020 is not true. Then you need to consider the spin of the story and ramifications. If Covid did indeed come from a lab in China, will that lead to even more unfounded hate and attacks on innocent Asian people? And where does this leave me with my faith in leadership? I posed this question to a cousin, a very bright guy, physics professor, he said, “I always start by taking everything the left says about the right and everything the right says about the left and filter that out. Whatever remains in the middle, the tiny fragments of truth are what I’ll choose to believe.

It’s a lot like my characters driving south now to escape the hellscape they’d been living in. Do they believe the conflicting stories on the radio as they motor south, or do they believe the reality unfolding on the streets before them, or do they fall into some opaque almost hologram reality where each man’s truth is some kind of twisted fabrication of all those pieces.

I’ll let you know as soon as I find out!