As the year ends, I'm saddened by the Christmas morning death of my wife's favorite Aunt at 79 in Rome, Georgia, after a long illness. It will take a while for our loss to dawn on us full force because we're in the middle of a hectic countdown getting Jefferson Georgia's Crawford W. Long Museum ready for its grand reopening on January 9th after a two-year building restoration and exhibits update project.
My wife is the museum's acting director and the project manager. A lot has been accomplished. The three historic buildings that house the museum have been stabilized and repaired, including a new roof, rewiring, repaired historic brickwork and a lot of paining. The exhibits have been updated to reflect modern best practices as well as putting things on display that have been out of the public eye for years. This includes a new history of anesthesiology exhibit.
I'm pleased that my new comedic thriller novel "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire" was released in August and that an article of mine about the Montana flood of 1964 appears in "100 Years, 100 stories," the new National Park Service book celebrating the 2010 Glacier National Park centennial. In preparation at Vanilla Heart Publishing for 2010 are a new edition of my novel "The Sun Singer" and an Earth Day anthology called "Nature's Gifts" that includes an article of mine about Glacier National Park's Swiftcurrent Valley.
Meanwhile, I'm still seeking a publisher for my novel "Garden of Heaven" (finished in 2008) while getting ready (finally) to write "Sarabande," the sequel to "The Sun Singer."
Like many of you who write, I submit work to various contests and then usually read that other people have won them. The contests, though, are an incentive to keep working on new stuff. While it's nice to hope that one day I might get past the Glimmer Train Magazine barrier and see some of my work in print there, I think one grows as an author by just working on the material. The work is done, basically, as soon as the work is uploaded to a magazine's online submission system.
Most writers work in obscurity. Seeing one's work in print is, I suppose a fulfilling thing, for it's a validation of sorts and the culmination of many months or years of work. On days when my mood is bad, I'm human enough to wish a few people in the town where I live might have thought to pay the $5+ to buy the "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire" e-book, the $9+ Kindle edition or the $11+ paperback out of (variously) a desire to read a funny book, out of interest and support, or even as a "turn about is fair play" thank you for my supporting their projects and local businesses.
I am not without dreams, naive and otherwise, about such things as a bestselling novel or seeing my work appear on the big screen or small screen, or even being able to earn a living doing what I love.
Love is blind, and for a writer the love of the work shines so brightly that most of the time it blinds him to concerns about low sales and friends who don't buy his books. Every book is, for me, a much more exciting experience that, say, a cruise to the Greek Islands or an African safari trek. While some avidly journey around the world, my worlds are contained within my writing whether it's my 240,000-word "Garden of Heaven" Odyssey set in Pakistan, the Philippines, Montana, Illinois, and Florida or my recent Glacier Park Centennial post about Helen Clarke, the first woman elected to public office in the Montana territory.
Sometimes people ask me while my eyes glaze over while watching routine TV shows; usually, I say that I've been up late and am simply very sleepy. The real reason is that my inner worlds that are finding their way toward print are, as journeys, much more exciting to me than the weekly episode of "Ghost Whisperer" or "Survivor." Yes, writing is both a mission and an addiction. Perhaps it's all escapist work to take me away from the hard challenges of the "real world."
Whatever it is, I must say that while I'm having fun helping out at the museum and hope to spend many more July weekends with my brother and his wife in Daytona and many more October weekends with my Granddaughter in Indianapolis, that when I look back over a year, I'm most likely to remember first what I spent the most time doing: sitting at this 70-year-old desk traveling with words.
Copyright (c) 2009 by Malcolm R. Campbell