Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

OLD HAUNTS

by Wayne Allen Sallee

You can thank Mr. Wilson for reeling me back in from the troposphere. Last month I had fully intended to do an entry about how writers, at times, have to write on the holidays–May 28th was Memorial Day–but I was in the middle of a private meltdown. Almost all my stories are thinly-veiled autobiograhical, so one day I’ll email everyone a nice story about a crazy bald guy blah blah blah.

Needless to say, Dave told me not to bail on SU, that I had something to bring to the table each month like everyone else, and to not think of the 28th as my day to write an essay, but to think of it as another blog entry. You know this guy was in the military, he would not let me leave this place. (Not saying its Iraq or anything, of course). So here goes:

I had to put on my Robert Mitchum CD to get settled after coming in from work. I couldn’t get Rascal Flatt’s “Life Is A Highway” out of my head for hours. I didn’t hear it on the radio today, I didn’t watch CARS with my nieces, I DON’T DRIVE, so why its in my head (or was, until Bobby the Mitch started singing “Thunder Road”) is beyond me.

Most of what I’m typing here was written down while I worked at the graphics shop this afternoon. Call me Jonny Analog, I still write things down as my first draft. After I fill a notebook, I send it to someone. Once I sent a journal to Peggy Nadramia (editor of GRUE) and she called me, thinking I was going to jump off a bridge because I had parted with something so important. Its almost funny, because now I can write my deepest thoughts (or my purpleist prose, and there I go making up yet another new word, recognized only by me), and “burn” them on a disk or simply email them to several dozen people. Or post them as a blog entry. This is my brain. This is my brain online. Any questions?

I had a specific topic in mind when I titled this post. I’ve been proofreading my past. I wrote a novel back in 1992, THE HOLY TERROR. Later this year, Midnight Library will publish a mass market 15th Anniversary edition of the book, with a new Forward by me relating how page 243 languished in my word processor for 68 days because I was hit by a car after leaving my doctor’s office, and how I wrote in snippets between operations on the mangled bones in my only good limb, my left arm, and when I couldn’t write, Yvonne Navarro received the supreme pleasure of typing chapters after deciphering my Demerol-slurred voice on an old-timey cassette recorder.

The book is set in downtown Chicago during the winter of 1989–I was hit by the car on March 18th of that year–and so many of the buildings and local iconography like Gold Coast Dogs that I mentioned are gone, replaced by parking garages for the high-rise condos next door. Its not like rereading, say, PROTOTYPE by the illustrious Brian Hodge. There is nothing directly definable within those pages as, say, the city streets in my book, but I remember Brian as he was writing the book, hell, I knew him before his second novel saw print.

But there is a weird sensation to again read a book by someone you know closely, as I do Brian and Beth. I look back to the early to mid-90s when there were no computers or dozens of area codes, and I’d receive letters from other Brian, Beth, and other writers on dot-matrix printers. Then the Pentium chip came along and I started falling behind everyone else in the sense of keeping in touch. Technology is my worst enemy. One of my stories, “Mitch,” is available as a podcast and I barely know what a podcast is. I’ve never seen one, except when someone burns one for me on a CD. However one burns a CD (just kidding, I’m not the Unabomber when it comes to these contraptions).

One of the extra AOL screen names I have is DrMilesBennel, after the main character in Jack Finney’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. One by one, my friends became sucked into cyberspace, pods pulsating as they grew beneath the computer desk in each home. I was no longer in the race, keeping pace with handwritten script, rather moving along with one typing finger, two on a good day. Never mind the pain caused by the fine motor function of touching the keys. (I can lift an eighty pound box, as I did earlier this afternoon at work, with no problem whatsoever, yet typing a word with three syllables–for example, syllables, ha ha–sends shards of glass into my neck and back).

I’m an old coot nearing the age of 48 and don’t care to use voice activation software because, well, because I tried and the damn program still isn’t that big a help (it can’t quite grasp my stuttering words which I do when spasming), and also because after I’m dead I’d like whoever is left reading my work realizes I never tried to do things the easy way. Mind you, I’m not pissing and moaning now. Certainly, I wish it was fifteen years ago and the world itself was a little bit simpler, conventions were a hell of a lot cheaper to attend, not just me trying to type and sell my stories to print magazines not e-zines or whatever they were called when this whole internet thing started.

I finally got a new friend of mine to submit a story for some werewolf anthology (online, of course, not an actual #%$#%$ book). She emailed me back all worried that she hadn’t heard anything back and was certain that her story was reviled. This was TWO DAYS LATER. I explained how it was Back In The Day, feeling increasingly older with every sentence. Sure, it was the first time she had sent out a story, but it shows the immediacy of everything now. If I am writing a new story, I’m not looking at my email for at least a week, never mind answering any of it. Its not that I can’t multi-task, its that I’m too damn slooowwww at doing more than one thing at the same time.

Oh, gee, look at the time. I suppose I’ve taken up enough of yours for this month. I don’t think I’ve written anything that the collective readership can learn from, I just did what Dave said and approached this as if there were a bunch of us sitting around a table in between panels at some unnamed convention.

Though its OK with me if someone starts the legend of a bent over bald guy named Jonny Analog, an urban myth who shambled from town to town, babbling odd stories about having to use self-addressed stamped envelopes and ink pens and other things from the dark ages.

Wayne Allen Sallee
jonalgiers@aol.com

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