Winter 2013 -- Waiting

Waiting Out the Winter

New Year's Day 2013

In his preface to his 1964 short story collection, _Waiting for Winter_, John O'Hara -- the mid-Twentieth Century American author famous for such titles as _Appointment in Samara_ and _BUtterfield 8_ -- noted that he wrote willingly and easily during the long, dark winter months when the cold and gray out of doors forced him to remain in his study ... but stirred his imagination most deeply.

Such is not the case for me.

On the coldest, wettest days I wrap myself in wool. My furnace is blasting. My body remains chilled. All I want is to sleep, and wait for summer. When the clouds occasionally break and the yellow winter sun weakly warms my room, I remain in my bed, my skin sticky under the blankets, cherishing the warmth... much like my cat, Charlie, a lazy old boy who is currently snugly curled up on my wife's lap.

Such times are not conducive to any writing.

And so I wait.

Today in American literary history

Jack London Returns from His First Sea Venture

Today, August 26, 2012, marks the one hundred and nineteenth (119) anniversary of the day that seventeen-year-old Jack London returned from a eight-month seal-hunting voyage that ranged from the northern Pacific coast of the United States and Canada, and eventually to Japan.

On January 20, 1893, a week or so after his seventeenth birthday, London signed the articles that enrolled him as a merchant sailor on the hunting vessel Sophie Sutherland. London describes his adventures in his alcoholic memoirs, John Barleycorn, and the trip was the source of his very first published story, A Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan, which had been published by the San Francisco Morning Call newspaper on November 11, 1893, when he was still only seventeen.

With this trip and the subsequent narrative the seed was planted for a literary career that was fully launched in 1899 -- which included more than two hundred (200) short stories, twenty-three (23) novels, and several memoirs and nonfiction works -- and ended only with London's death at age forty in 1916.

Wrote a Review

I wrote a restaurant review. I tell myself any writing will do ... especially now. I am just trying to get started.