Summer doldrums

The end of summer approaches rapidly now. I can't say I am disappointed. The record heat this year in the northeast has sapped my energy and reduced the time i can work outside. I look forward to returning to work after Labor day. Other than a trip hiking in the Rocky Mountain National Park the summer has dragged. We look forward to four days in the New York Finger Lakes the first week in September. The wine trails around Lakes Cayuga and Seneca are worth doing.

The summer has been largely non-productive. Private Practice has been slow. I've submitted a grant proposal to a private foundation for a leadership training program conducted at the high school to which I consult. I have had a short book of poetry, Oliver Twists in America, published by PublishAmerica. They have raised their prices and do not respond to telephone calls for author discounts. I order two copies of my new book and only received one. They continue to offer promotions attached to book purchases. I have resumed writing the fourth Morrie Scwartz story after about a year layoff. I wrote myself into a corner and was disappointed with book sales of Shrink and Finding Jackson. In Nobody, Morrie visits his future gravesite and finds it occupied. The grave marker indicates his date of death. The book depicts the ultimate identity theft. Morrie becomes involved in finding the culprit, who has also attacked his mututal fund savings. I was a victim of identity theft myself but it occurred after beginning this book. This will be the last Morrie book. I would like to bind them all together in one volume if I even finish this latest adventure.

My summer reading included Dan Brown's latest, "The Lost Symbol." It is a real page turner. A more ambitious read is Mark Twain's "Innocents Abroad." Someone published his autobiography recently, which was reviewd by Time Magazine. It motivated me to tackle this very long narrative in an Unabridged copy of Twain. He was a very funny man but a bit of a misanthrope. I follow his travels in an atlas. So far he didn't like the Portugese, the Italians, the Turks and the Catholic Church. Politically correct he was not. I particularly enjoy his reactions in the 1860s to cities I visited a few years ago.

Back in the saddle

It's been a tough summer. Unrelenting heat in the notheast has sapped the energy of everyone. Too hot to work outside, too hot to work up enough motivation to do anything, even write.

All of this is just a poor excuse for not blogging. Worse than that, no writing at all. My second book of poetry, Oliver Twists in America, did finally get published. It is a short collection of poems written over ten years ago describing the kids in placement at the residential treatment center where I worked as psychologist. But no new writing since Finding Jackson, my sequel to Shrink.

So, why now am I suddenly motivated to finish Nobody, a second sequel? A discussion with Abe (identified as Irv in Shrink) about our recollections of growing up in New York City, me in the Bronx and he in Brooklyn, led to his observation that people become more interested in the lives of their parents and grandparents around age fifty. I mentioned that in my early years of professional writing I would save my published papers in folders meant for my children. They were never rally interested in reading them and eventually I destroyed the folders. Even my semi-autobiographoical novel Shrink aroused bad feelings in my daughter because my character and alter ego, Morrie, said spomething unkind about my first wife, her mother. "That's temporary," Abe advised. "Wait until they are a little older. They will become more interested in what you've had to say about yourself. Keep writing."

I returned to the manuscript this morning, which was sitting on my computer,untouched and without an ending. Morrie is asked to treat an man with intractible pain in his arm and no neurological evidence of a cause. In the course of treatment the patient reveals that he is Confederate Civil War Commander Stonewall Jackson, accidentally killed by his own men at Chancellorsvile, but now reincarnated. I had painted myself into a corner in my story about a year ago and put it aside. Now I must extracate my character and solve a crime. In Nobody Morrie is the victim of the penultimate identity theft. In attempting to find the culprit and make things right, Morrie's clinical acumen and emotional resources are seriously challenged. Now I've got to help him find his way. We'll just have to see how this turns out.