“Revision is the only writing instructor worth the investment required.” Mark Bertrand offers the best writing advice available, despite the plethora of ideas which can make enjoyable reading. This is the reason I don’t want to pursue a graduate degree in writing.

Apologies for not posting yesterday. The day went in a direction I hadn’t planned.

This week I’ve been taking what’s now known as a stay-cation, loafing some and pottering with things I’ve been putting off handling. Yesterday I’d planned on going to dinner with a friend I see periodically, and somehow that restaurant date turned into a reunion with other old friends, and then an evening at the home of one of those old friend’s relatives, up in the trackless wastes of the far northern suburbs. We spent the hours talking about old times, some of which I’d shared in, and it was pretty late by the time I got home.

Today I went to the post office to get my picture taken so I could send in my passport renewal form. I wanted to do it at mid-morning so I wouldn’t be slowing down a long line of customers. The clerk who helped me was the nice-looking lady there I’ve long admired, which may explain a certain wistful look in my eyes in the picture (I think I’m the only person in the world who generally likes his passport photos).

Then I found out the renewal fee. When in the name of all that’s wholly unreasonable did the price of renewing a passport get to be $110.00? Plus the cost of the photo and certification of the letter? I’d write to my congressman if he weren’t Keith Ellison.

Then in the afternoon I gave blood. This was at my favorite hemorrhaging venue, the VFW in Golden Valley, where they serve you sloppy joes as a reward for your suffering. I got the pretty technician, which should have put me on alert from the start. Pretty women almost always end up hurting me, and this one didn’t break form. She finally had to get another tech to find the right place to puncture my vein. In fairness to them, I’ve given a lot of blood and there’s a great deal of scar tissue inside my left elbow. Nobody’s ever been able to get anything out of the right arm.

And then home. Some reading, and then I worked a little more on revising the last completed novel I’ve got in storage, which may or may not come out as an e-book after a while, depending on how diligent I am. I’m worried about one character – someone I don’t like, and who was intended as a caricature of a kind of person we all know. I don’t like plain caricature in other people’s novels, and I need to get past it in my own. I’ve got to find something admirable or sympathetic in this person. I’m working on it.

I have been asked to mention a web site called Grammarly on this blog. It advertises itself as “an automated proofreader and your personal grammar coach. Correct up to 10 times more mistakes than popular word processors.”

I have not personally used Grammarly, but from looking at the site and doing some web searching, it seems to me this sort of thing might be useful to a fair number of people. I’d compare it to “coarse” sandpaper, in contrast to fine sandpaper. If you’re one of those people (and in my experience in recent reading, I think there are many) who just can’t figure out these grammar rules, Grammarly might be worth the price to you.

Full disclosure: I was offered a substantial remuneration for posting about Grammarly.

Does my doing this trouble you? Give me your feedback.

Image by Stefan-Xp.

Finally we got a spot of what the Vikings would have called “weather-luck.” It did snow last night, as described, but it lost interest after about three inches. And through the day most of it gradually liquefied and returned to the bosom of the thirsty earth. Right now the sun is shining cheerily. I took my evening walk. The forecast actually calls for 70 degrees this weekend. Maybe our long regional nightmare is over.

But I’m not putting the snowblower away just yet.

I thought about The Boy With the Red Pencil today.

That’s not what the title of the book was, I’m pretty sure. I never actually read it. I was too young. It was a book I remember lying around the house when I was very small. Somebody must have read it to me, I’m sure, but my chief memory of it is seeing it on the couch in the sun porch, picking it up, and looking at the pictures, following the story through them.

It was about a little boy who got a red pencil that had magical powers. Whenever he drew something with it, that thing would become real. Complications ensued, but I’m unclear on what they were after all the years.

All I remember is how fascinated I was with the idea of using a writing instrument to create real things.

I suppose my whole life since then has been an effort to emulate that boy with the red pencil. At first I drew pictures, like him, but eventually I moved on to writing stories, which (for me) produced results more like real things.

Tolkien called it “subcreation,” the compulsion of the created being to emulate his Creator by creating things of his own in turn. Such an impulse, like all our impulses, can be turned to good or evil. Creativity is a power, capable of corruption like any other power (the aesthetes never seem to grasp this point).

But whether you’re a computer programmer, or a tailor, or an architect, making things is essentially good. It’s part of what God put us here for.

“How has your decision to write affected your health? Has it had negative effects on your personal life?” asks a survey. Kvetch for us about your life, they say, to which Neal Pollack responds, “How do I even know whether writing has had negative effects on my personal life? Maybe I would have been a jerk no matter what I did, and my being a writer at least keeps me in a room by myself so I can’t bother other people as much.”