Writing In Winter

You slog from one coffee house to the next backpack in tow. The snow comes down and you drift along with it Why not? The world has finally come to a halt and you can think and in the Midwest everyone goes to sleep in winter anyway. That is the deal. That is why people get cranky when the snow doesn't come as it didn't until now this year. The snow lets you know that there is nothing you can do and winter is here and you will be inside for at least a few months. And so you let the world drift.

And for the writer you find your footing and contemplate what hasn't been written. You get your shot in winter. Let everyone else rush around, you are in the corner with your computer and your coffee trying to get your moment. But you have already written and look forward to the next day already. You don't want to use it up all in one day. You have to be ready for tomorrow so you read and blog and read some more. Mostly you are by yourself. Even the coffee house is empty because of the storm.

And you are glad to still be doing it. You may not be where you want to be. Maybe the bestseller or the publisher has eluded you, but you are still writing. And with the wind blowing outside and the snow falling and in the middle of the day in the middle of nowhere, you have it all...the writer in winter

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/ 

A clean well lit coffee house to write in

Rewriting is mind numbing. The same thing over and over and over. Four hundred some plus pages you climb over like a runner who just keeps going around the same track trying to improve their time just a little. Each time you start again you hope this might be the final lap, but there is always that nagging suspicion that one more time might be the charm. To pull this off without losing your mind requires boat loads of coffee, sweets, and lots of company and white noise. You have to trick your mind into not wandering off and never coming back. So you haunt every coffee house you can find.


The first coffee house works for a while until the Internet dies. They complain that their WIFI has been going in and out and of course when you are there it just up and dies. You need the Internet. Not for the rewriting but for the breaks to give your mind release. You need something to distract you between chapters and after eating lunch and caramel rolls and drinking coffee you feel it is time to go find somewhere with WIFI. You run down the street to a little dark coffee house run by a tough woman who gives you a hot chocolate. You plug in and start again. That's when you hear it.

You need background noise not the greatest hits of love songs from the Seventies. Afternoon Delight gets you off the chair to hunt down the tough Chicago woman who is reading The Inquirer behind the counter. Pardon me. But could you put on some classical music or jazz? The flat expression. NO. She goes back to the Inquirer. You sit down again to Mandy, It Don't Matter to Me, Have you Ever Been Mellow. That's it. You can't wall it out. Olivia Newton John doesn't belong in your novel. You unplug and give the tough broad from Chicago a dirty look and head out into the snow.

Starbucks. Ah, you know the menu. A good place to plug in. Consistent. You bust in, a man on a mission. Every table is taken. Worse the one table with an outlet is taken. You stare at the lone man drinking coffee by himself. You have an hour of battery time if only the sonofabitch would leave! No, you aren't ready to order yet thank you very much. You stand around and glare and glare. Nobody cares and nobody is giving up their table. Shite! You head back out and down the street. Desperate for a clean well lighted place to write in or at least a place with an open table.

You head into Cozi Cafe and find a corner table with an outlet. You plug in, order some really bad coffee. Sit down and begin again. Wifi works. There are sweet rolls. There are no people. It's as cold as a morgue, but you can work here. At least for a little while.

www.billhazelgrove.com/

Allen Ginsberg's HOWL Fifty Years Later

In our time of crushing. In our time of crushing middle class lifelessness. In our time of struggle as we look at the madness of our world now with the incessant wars and incessant poverty and incessant intolerance among ourselves, we have Ginsbergs HOWL from 1957. A poem written over fifty years ago and made into a movie that if you have or have not read the poem, you should see. Because Ginsberg was right on and he reminds us that there is nothing new under our megalopolis sun.

And as a writer I am reminded that truth should win out. You write in the confines of the internet mega world now and you think of yourself no longer apart. HOWL is about the man apart from his world and how the world crushes the individual and drives the individual mad.  If you are an artist or a thinking person then you can only marvel at the heinous quality of our everyday life. The slavery of our everyday life.

And Ginsberg reminds us it was always so. Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy and Allen Ginsberg were early pioneers who gave birth to our later rock stars who sold out so fast we cant even count Gene Simmons five thousand women because he is a businessman as all rockers are now. But not those guys. They all died for their sins and Ginsberg saw the crushing totality of our society and he zoomed over the rooftops and wrote it as he flew. If you have read any Kerouac or Howl then you know what I am talking about.

Maybe they were the last modernists. Maybe they were the last bridge between the thinking individual and the mega wired mass consciousness of today where nobody thinks anymore. Maybe Ginsberg saw it coming and like the rest of the Beats left his message, his warning that we were at a crossroad and night was on the way and here was our last cry of humanity, our last cry of literature for a people losing all sight of anything literary.

They are all gone but you can read HOWL  and get a glimmer of the world as it was and is now. Ginsberg spoke of a hideous night of the soul that would crush him. And us. What we have now is something worse. Eternal empty daylight without the poetry. A church of conformity without the drugs. Ginsberg would have appreciated that.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out July 26th

The Confessions of an Ex Cable News Junkie

Hello my name is Bill, I am a cable news junkie. Recovering. I fell off the wagon a year ago and started watching hours and hours of cable news beginning with Keith Olbermann, then Rachel Maddow, then Chris Matthews, then Lawrence O'Donnell. Some nights I watched three hours of straight talk with the same topics regurgitated on every show but I didn't care. Hell, I was such a junkie I switched to Fox and watched The Factor and Sean Hannity during commercial breaks. Talk about addicted.

But I am back on the wagon and I have gone cold turkey. I have to say it has not been hard this time around. I don't know what happened, but suddenly I just didnt' care. I just couldn't buy off on Rachel's impassioned carefully researched, fully felt, emphatically delivered diatribes on why don't ask don't tell should be abolished and why it wasnt' happening. Maybe it is because it did happen and when she announced it on her show in a town hall meeting everyone clapped FOR HER like she was the President who had just accomplished getting rid of the policy!

Or maybe it was Keith Olbermann who I really dug and would watch sometimes two or three times a night! I just couldnt' get enough. But then I started to realize there were never any guests from the other side. And how many times can he have Eugene on from the Washington Post in his super hip glasses? Or the little guy from The Nation who stands in for him? Or Howard from Newsweek then the Huffington Post in his scarf and hipster long hair? It just began to feel regurgitated with his question at the beginning: How many of these stories will you be talking about tomorrow? Um, really none of them.

Or  Chris Matthews yelling at everyone and letting no one finish. Or Lawrence O'Donnell with his quirky sense of humor and his government experience allowing himself to get the last word. Or even Anderson Cooper keeping them honest with his white hair and dwarfish good looks. Don't get me wrong. I could easily fall off the wagon and go back to my old ways of watching three straight hours a night, but I think what is different this time is I started to wonder what else I could be doing with that time! And that's what really got me. Forget that it is really entertainment, that there are millions of people watching the guys on the other side, that it doesn't really matter at all because these are talk show hosts. Forget all that, here is what really got me back on the wagon and why I will never return to the cable news wasteland.

I could have probably written another novel with all the time I wasted in front of the boob tube getting riled up all night. Ouch. Now that hurts.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January