I Will Come Back

Western Gunman #1: Well, well, well little doggie, back around these parts are we?

Hero (caught off guard): This fight doesn’t involve you. I’m not here for vengeance.

WG1 spits into the ground and laughs.

WG1: We’re all here for vengeance fella’. God included, and you know me well. You know I do not bluff. Why then, would you come back down this road? I need to know.

We focus in on our hero, tired, on his horse, tiny tinkles of blood limping down the right side of his body. He looks ready to give up, but not in the eyes.

Hero: I can make this your battle.

WG1: You already have.

(Curtains; scene one)

That’s all I have, dear readers. First thing I’ve written down in a month, and I didn’t even write it: that’s a lost manuscript I found floating down the beach after Hurricane Sandy’s massive swell. Less of a manuscript, more of a single piece of paper, but either way, not something I wrote. Not that I would regret it if I did: that’s Americana writing squeezed true like fine butter. That’s what happens when the road wears you a bit thin. I’ve been squeezed thin.

It’s not bad either. In fact, when I found it crumpled up in the new crossover I haven’t fully claimed (or understood) as my beach yet, and read it, I wanted to know more. What happens with Western Gunman #2? Is there more then two Gunmen? Great piece of description about the eyes too. It does a lot of things correctly. More things correctly then not actually. Hero needs more development, but we can work on that in Post, and either way, the Hero’s ethos is usually a given anyway. Tell us that he is the hero, and we will believe it. We want to believe.

So I read that one-page manuscript on my beach crossover (and there may have been more to it, but I only found that page), and graded it. Lucky for the unknown writer, whoever he or she may be (probably she), I had a fancy red felt pen with me. And also lucky, they we’re going to get the comments of professional published and paid Man of the Letters. Advice passed down from on high, advice from someone paid in this craft of words and ideas. Someone with sway and ability, someone who felt, just slightly, and in that moment, that their ideas had connected with force. And maybe they had.

I gave it a C+. Maybe harsh, but please remember, I was high on my own literary success. And I wrote on the sand-smoothed piece of paper literal advice as well: about syntax and character, about how to hook but not so deeply that the hook would be irretrievable, and not so loose as to lose the reader mere sentences in. As a professional, I felt good about this advice. I crumpled that lost critiqued manuscript into a ball, walked down the crossover and threw it back into the ocean. On a mission to find it’s Creator, as I knew it would. And with the notes they’d been given, a career may have well been made.

A few days later The Space Coast Florida Weekly shutdown. And with it, the Long Sunset column went into the belly of the beast, screaming all the way down.

I was no longer a published and paid writer. My opinion no longer mattered; my thoughts were again but the flotsam of human inactivity and randomness. Just another curve in a long road with many. I had done some damage, but not enough.

In my seven months of being the featured Page 2 writer I received 216 e-mails regarding my columns and work. I answered every single one.

This is the first thing I’ve written since it dissolved. And in that note, I’d like to thank all of my editors and the staff at the Weekly that supported me constantly. Jeff Cull, and especially, Keith. Below this garbage is a link to everything I wrote for them, as long as it is still hosted, and I must say that it is mostly medicore. And yet…..sometimes it hits. Hard.

That’s what a writing professor of mine said once about my ability. When I have it, I have it, and when I don’t….I’m nothing but another piece of sand, and melancholy and bitter piece at that.

Either way, after the column dissolved, I searched the beach for that manuscript. I hated the thought of giving someone advice on their writing when it was clear that my own had had no effect, and was now gone. And beyond that, who was I to pick at the fantasy of someone else's mind? I hope they finished the story, and I hope everyone reads it. I actually wrote my own ending to the manuscript, and then I stood on top of the dock I now live near, lit that ending on fire, and cried as it burned.

What follows is the Long Sunset Florida Weekly Columns. Thank you all for reading when you did:

(just copy and paste to read)


http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-06-07/PDF/Page_002.pdf

http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-06-14/PDF/Page_002.pdf

http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-06-21/PDF/Page_002.pdf

http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-06-28/PDF/Page_002.pdf

http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-07-05/PDF/Page_002.pdf

http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-07-12/PDF/Page_002.pdf

http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-07-19/PDF/Page_002.pdf

http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-07-26/PDF/Page_002.pdf

http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-08-02/PDF/Page_002.pdf

http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-08-09/PDF/Page_002.pdf

http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-08-16/PDF/Page_002.pdf

http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-08-23/PDF/Page_002.pdf

http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-08-30/PDF/Page_002.pdf

http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-09-06/PDF/Page_002.pdf

http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-09-13/PDF/Page_002.pdf

http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-09-20/PDF/Page_002.pdf

http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-09-27/PDF/Page_002.pdf

http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-10-04/PDF/Page_002.pdf

http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-10-11/PDF/Page_002.pdf

http://spacecoast.floridaweekly.com/news/2012-10-18/PDF/Page_002.pdf