Tag Archives: friendship

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe

Photo Friday: Wishes For 2021

At long last, 2020 is in the world’s rearview mirror, and good riddance. We have a couple of weeks of craziness to get through, and a pandemic to beat back. But I enter this new year optimistic, for our planet, for our nation, for my friends and colleagues, for my family and me. Maybe that makes me naïve. So be it. I spent too much of 2020 anticipating the worst, and making myself miserable in the process. I choose not to do that again.

And so I share with you this image, captured last week during a lovely photo walk I took with a dear friend. I came back with several good pictures, but this one spoke to me. We are, I believe, crossing to a new normal that will be different from what we have known, but tempered and — dare I hope — better for what we have learned.

I wish you a wonderful New Year. May you find light in unexpected places, clarity in reflection, and joy in the simple beauty of the world around us.

Walking Bridge at the Golden Hour, by David B. Coe

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Writing-Tip Wednesday: Why Do We Create?

I just reread my first post of the year, when I first discussed my weekly blogging plans, and my goals for the months to come. I closed the post with “Happy 2020. May it be your best year yet.”

How did that work out…?

This is likely my last post of the year, and my final Writing-Tip Wednesday post before I shift Wednesdays to a slightly broader format. It’s also a slightly longer post than usual; I hope you’ll stick with it. I have posted about a vast array of topics over the past fifty-one weeks, and all of them have dealt with creativity in one way or another. At times, the creative elements of my posts have been explicit and obvious; at other times, when discussing the business and the state of the market, the connections have been less clear. But always it comes back to the act of creating, the process of harnessing the imagination in order to produce… something.

Creativity is integral to who I am, to the life I lead. I consider myself fortunate beyond words in this regard. And I’m not just talking about writing. If you follow my blog or my social media, then you know that I am also an avid photographer and a longtime musician, and I’m passionate about all of my creative endeavors. But I do each of these things for different reasons, and I think this speaks to something all writers ought to consider.

Why do we create?

I like to tell people that I wrote my first book when I was six. It wasn’t much of a book — a few sheets of paper on which I had scrawled a story and scribbled illustrations, sandwiched between a couple of pieces of colored construction paper and bound with yellow yarn. But it was, to my mind, as much a book as all the titles on my shelves. All through my childhood, there was nothing I enjoyed more in school than creative writing. Any opportunity we were given to sit quietly and write was, for me, like the most glorious sort of recess.

In junior high, my classmates and I were assigned to keep a creative journal. For an entire semester, we were to write every night — or as close to it as we could manage — and we were free to write whatever we wanted. I still have mine. I did write every night. I wrote short stories and poems and my reflections on the world as I saw it. I LOVED keeping that journal.

All through high school and college, I wrote. I saw the world through a writer’s eyes. Always, my first thought upon seeing a sunset, or enjoying a meal, or even dealing with emotional problems, was “How would I write this?”

My love of storytelling, of the creative alchemy we perform when converting emotion and sensation into words, still drives me, challenges me, fills me with joy and satisfaction (when it’s not frustrating me and making me want to chuck my computer through a window).

But, of course, my writing is also my job, and I have to think about it as such. That’s fine. I am so lucky to be able earn money doing what I love; I can hardly complain. At this point, though, I write to publish. Anything I work on for any amount of time, I expect to sell. If I don’t, then that piece of writing has…failed in some respect. That sounds harsh, I know, but it’s true. It also sounds mercenary, and that, I fear, is unavoidable. I can be passionate about my work, and also want to make money off of it. I make no apologies for that.

I feel quite differently about my photography. I am, I believe, a very good photographer. I have spent years studying photography, teaching myself techniques, making myself see my surroundings with an artist’s eye. I was drawn to photography early in life, in part, I have to admit, out of jealousy. My older brother, Jim, is a renowned and immensely talented painter. He was a bit of prodigy — his talent emerged in his early teens and as passionate as I am about writing, that’s how he continues to be about visual art. I wanted to creative images, too, but I have never been able to draw. Oh, I tried. But I’m terrible. There’s no other way to put it.

When I was thirteen, I asked for a camera, thinking that perhaps photography would offer me a path to visual artistic expression. My early efforts didn’t amount to much, and eventually I stopped trying. About fifteen years ago, though, I decided to try again. I dedicated myself to learning how to shoot, how to see, how to frame. The results have been deeply satisfying. I have sold a few photos and I’ve had work in local galleries. But while I have been pleased by these moments of public attention, I mostly capture images for myself. Nancy and I recently enlarged and framed several of my best images and they are now gracing the walls of our home. I have also produced a coffee-table photo book that I shared with just a few friends and family members. And my computer’s screen saver is a slide show of my best images.

I get as much joy out of seeing my own images in my house, in that book, on my computer, as I have from any sale of a photo. To be honest, I took nearly as much pride in hanging those images as I have in selling a new novel. I do it for me, and that’s enough.

And I feel still another sort of love and pride for my music. I have been playing guitar for more than forty years. I have always been able to sing, and for a while, in elementary school and junior high, I was content to express that talent in school musicals. But at some point I figured out that playing guitar might attract the notice of girls. (As it turns out, guitars weren’t enough. I also needed charm, height, and good looks, none of which I possessed. But hey, I learned to play guitar.)

I still love to play — for myself, for Nancy, occasionally for and with friends. Playing for my girls when they were young was truly a joy. I’ve never been very good at writing songs. I tried. I wrote a very few decent tunes in college, but I had a couple of friends who wrote amazing music, and my inability to craft songs as good as theirs, and as good as I thought mine should be as well, frustrated me. At some point, I stopped trying. Today, most of my playing is fairly derivative. I hear a song I like and I teach myself to play it. It’s fun. I get to recreate songs I admire, either for a small audience or for me. The truth is, though, I’m not adding much to the world’s music. I’m just another guy learning to play another James Taylor tune.

And so I ask again, why do we create?

I create stories for my livelihood. I create photos that are utterly original, but only for my friends, family, and me. I create music in order to pay homage to something I love, and to entertain myself.

I have tried throughout this year to gear my writing tips to writers of every ability level and every aspiration. Some of you won’t be satisfied with your writing until you’ve published a story, or a novel, or a series, or a bunch of series. I get that.

Some of you write because you want to craft the best story you can, and if you publish it, great. If you don’t, if the only people who read it are your friends and family, that’s okay, too. The process itself is the point. Your goal is to create the best piece you can.

And some of you take great joy in writing fan fiction, in writing homages to characters and storylines that you admire and want to be part of in some way. That’s great, too.

There is no single right answer to “Why do we create?” No matter where you fall on the continuum of creativity I’m describing here, you can learn to be a better writer, you can take satisfaction in the act of creation, and you can engage in that alchemy I mentioned earlier.

Because there is something truly magical in creativity — in the simple act of harnessing the imagination — something that has nothing at all to do with money or reviews.

I wish you joy and inspiration in all your endeavors.

And, of course, keep writing.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe

Monday Musings: Random Thoughts About Thanksgiving

I love Thanksgiving. It is, and has long been, one of my two favorite holidays of the year, along with Passover, the Jewish holiday that marks the coming of spring. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both occasions revolve around family-style meals that are steeped in tradition.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably admit that I didn’t always love Thanksgiving so much. When I was a kid, Turkey Day seemed nothing more than a gift-less dress rehearsal for Christmas. The food was similar, we saw the same relatives. The chocolate treats on the table were basically interchangeable, except for being shaped like turkeys rather than Santa. But, again — and I really can’t stress this enough — there were no presents! And also no tree.

Somehow it became a tradition in our family to pull the same prank on my poor, beleaguered mother year in and year out: At some point during the meal, one of us — usually my sister or me — would go over to speak with her about something we had contrived. And in the course of the conversation, we would slip a dinner mint into the cranberry sauce on her plate. Don’t ask me why we did it; I honestly don’t know. But we did it every year.

By the time I was in high school, we were having our Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations either at our house, or at my aunt and uncle’s house — Turkey Day at one, Christmas at the other. (Yes, we celebrated Christmas, despite being Jewish. A lot of Jewish families did — it was a form of assimilation rooted in social pressure and prejudice.) But in the earliest years of my childhood (and in the years before I was born — I am the youngest child in the family, even the extended family, by quite a few years) we used to drive into New York City to celebrate both holidays at my grandmother’s apartment. Our Gram was a pistol. Funny, irreverent, fiercely loving, independent, strong-willed. She was all of 4 foot 10, but she dominated any room she was in. Even after all these years, when I think of Thanksgiving, the first image that pops into my head is that of our family gathered around her table.

Gram had a few friends who used to join us for Thanksgiving each year. Many of them had been friends of the family for so long that we were expected to call them “Aunt so-and-so” even though there was no actual blood relation. One of these friends was widowed, and she had remarried to a man named Milton, whom we were to call Uncle Milton. Uncle Milton was… Well, how do I describe him? He was old, as one would expect of the friend of a grandparent. But he was also somnambulant. And, looking back on it, I think he used to get pretty hammered at these dinners. We would arrive after he and his wife did, and he would already be well into his cups. We would go to say hello to him and, invariably, he would say, “David. Good to see you. Mind if I don’t get up?” He said this to everyone (although, as far as I know, he didn’t call everyone David…). He never got up, at least not until it was time to transfer from his comfortable chair to the supper table.

Milton became the butt of many, many family jokes. I am not proud of this. None of us are. But it’s true. When we would play 20 Questions, one of us would always devote a round to the poor man. “Is he dead or alive?” “Yes.” “Uncle Milton!” At some point we heard that Milton had fallen and broken his hip. His wife had called him for dinner and he had, against his own better judgment, gotten up. He pushed himself out of his chair and just sort of kept going… When sometime later, we got the sad news that Milton had died, we all wondered how anyone had been able to tell. I know — this is just terrible. Cruel, disrespectful, inappropriate. But, again in the interest of full disclosure, I’m laughing as I type it all out.

Nancy and I have had extended family to our home for Thanksgiving now and again, and for a while we used to share the holiday with another family here in our little town. But our favorite Thanksgivings have been the ones we’ve had with just our daughters, and there have been too few of those in recent years. Our older child has lived in New York since going there for college in 2013. We’ve probably had only two or maybe three Thanksgivings with her since, and we miss her every year. Our younger daughter is still in college and will be coming home this year, with her boyfriend. They both had Covid earlier in the semester and, according to the public health experts Nancy works with at the University, should still be immune and will present no threat to us. It will just be the four of us for the holiday. Quiet, safe. We’ll Zoom with our older daughter at some point, and also with my brother and his wife, who are alone as well, and will be Zooming with their children and my sister-in-law’s parents. Needless to say, this is a strange year.

Which brings me full circle. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, even under these extraordinary circumstances. I find the concept behind it, simple though it is, remarkably affecting. Of course we should take a day to ponder those things for which we are thankful. Yes, we should do this daily, but the fact is we are too often consumed with the demands of the day-to-day, the fraught emotions of a world that seems to careen from one crisis to another, the necessities of work and the obligations that sometimes keep us from appreciating fully the importance of family and friendship. A day of Thanksgiving is, it seems to me, just the tonic we need, this year especially, even as the exigencies of the pandemic limit how many we ought to have seated around our tables.

And so please allow me to close by thanking all of you. Whether you are a stranger who has read one of my books, or a friend I have known for years, or a relative who sat with me at our Gram’s table, I am glad to have you in my life. I wish you a joyous, safe holiday.

Blogging, David B. Coe, Not at all Writing Related

Photo Friday: A Video Instead

With the weekend looming, and another difficult week past, I thought I would do something a little different this week. And so I am making available a video I made of me playing my guitar and singing one of my favorite songs, “Angel From Montgomery,” by the late great John Prine.

I’ve been playing guitar for more than forty years, and I’ve been singing…well, forever. Music has been a balm, a joy, a shared pleasure, and a constant in my life. And this song in particular has been part of my repertoire for years. The video is dedicated to my dear, dear friends, Alan Goldberg and Amy Halliday.

You can find the video here:

I hope you enjoy it.

Have a wonderful weekend, stay safe, and be kind to one another.

Blogging, David B. Coe, Not at all Writing Related

Photo Friday: Photos and Friendship

Earlier this week, after working for much of the day, I went for a short hike with a dear friend of mine, a fellow photographer. It was late afternoon on a cool, crisp, exquisite day, and we went down off the bluff to a stream and small waterfall we’ve visited together several times before. The trees were starting to show some color, as were the downed leaves in the stream bed. We masked, of course, and we maintained proper social distance.

But after so long without seeing other people, it was a special treat to get out with my camera AND to do so with a close friend.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’ve been struggling lately. I needed this day. I needed to remind myself that there is more to life than polls and Twitter rants, Covid fears and isolation. We all cope in different ways, and the truth is I am fortunate beyond reckoning. I have children I adore, a life partner who loves me and whom I love, a comfortable home, a job I enjoy, and friends near and far. I have little cause for complaint really. That doesn’t mean my struggles aren’t real, but it does mean that they will not defeat me.

Others are dealing with far greater problems. Maybe some of you. Please know that I wish you all the best, that there is still beauty and joy in the world, that we will emerge from this.

For now, I wish you a wonderful weekend. Stay safe, do something nice for yourself and your loved ones, be kind to one another. I’ll see you next week.

Morgan's Steep Cascade, Fall, by David B. Coe Morgan's Steep Stream, Fall, by David B. Coe

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Monday Musings: Missing DragonCon

Like so many of you, like so many of my fans, my colleagues, my friends, I was supposed to be in Atlanta for DragonCon this Labor Day weekend. Yes, I have taken part in several online panels and visited with a writing workshop group – all through Zoom – and those appearances have been enjoyable. Let’s be honest, though: Even the best Zoom panels – and all of those I participated in were well run – cannot replace a live DragonCon. Missing the con has left me frustrated and sad, and I know I’m not the only one.

To state the obvious, the tragedy of this pandemic can be measured in lives lost, in lingering medical issues, in economic dislocation at a level not seen since the Great Depression. People have suffered and are suffering still. And in that context, the cancellation of a science fiction/fantasy convention is a tiny thing, barely worthy of mention.

And yet, it is indicative of so much that the Covid crisis has cost us on several levels.

For those of you who don’t know about DragonCon, it is, as I say, a SF/Fantasy convention that takes place every Labor Day weekend in the Peachtree section of Atlanta. It draws anywhere from 75,000 to 90,000 fans and professionals to the city, including artists, writers, editors, agents, actors, directors, costumers, make-up specialists, and others connected to science fiction and fantasy and horror in all their manifestations. The convention is particularly famous for its costumes which are on display during a well-known and much-anticipated parade along Peachtree Street on the Saturday morning of that weekend. DragonCon is, for lack of a better analogy, Mardi Gras for geeks.

For me personally, and, I know, for many friends as well, the absence of the convention leaves a hole in our emotional lives. Most writers work in relative isolation. We spend our work hours researching and writing on our own, communing with the characters who inhabit our imaginations. In normal years, interactions on Facebook and Twitter and other social media platforms supplement the personal experiences with colleagues and fans we expect from workshops and conventions and signings. This year, of course, social media is all we have.

And while the cancellation of each convention this year has been a disappointment, DragonCon is more than just another convention. For me, and for countless others, it is THE convention. It is the centerpiece of my professional year. Everything else I do builds to DragonCon. I reach more of my audience in those four days in Atlanta – through well-attended panels and readings, through signings, through the simple act of walking from one venue to another with so many people – than I do at all my other events combined. More important, I get to see a great number of my writing friends and associates. Every meal is a chance to catch up with an old friend. Every evening in one of the many hotel bars (usually the Westin) my friends and I gather to talk shop and laugh and share news good and bad. It’s very much like a family reunion.

DragonCon also offers countless opportunities for making new professional connections and finding opportunities for work, for collaboration, for broadening our careers in any number of ways. I’ve been attending the convention regularly for the better part of a decade, and over that period I have met with my agent many times; I have had discussions with lots and lots of editors – both those I had worked with already and those I hoped to work with in the future; I have been invited into anthologies; I have worked through plotting problems or character issues or world building conundrums with fellow professionals; I have sold a TON of books. Missing out on those sorts of professional openings, particularly this year, when business is especially tough, serves only to deepen my sense of loss.

DragonCon is famous as well for its dealers’ exhibits, which fill three or more warehouse-sized floors in the America’s Mart in downtown Atlanta. Book sellers, gamers, jewelers, knitters, woodworkers, metalworkers, costumers, and artists in so many other crafts build their years around the convention, just as we writers do. I can hardly imagine what a blow the con’s cancellation must be for them.

As I mentioned before, the convention fills bars and restaurants throughout that part of the city, not to mention all the hotels. I have no doubt that with this event, and ones like it, called off, service industry workers are suffering. It must be harder to find work. Few if any will be earning overtime pay. Cancel an event that brings 80,000 extra people to the city, and it HAS to have a devastating impact, and that impact will be felt most by those who can afford it least.

Exacerbating personal isolation, limiting professional opportunities, deepening economic dislocation – the cancellation of DragonCon offers a view in microcosm of what the pandemic has done to our society. We miss our friends. We begrudge the loss of professional interaction and book sales. We worry for those who need the con’s economic benefits even more than we do personally.

I hope to be back in Atlanta at this time next year. I say that for selfish reasons, for professional ones, and, yes, out of concern for those who depend on the convention for their livelihoods. DragonCon’s cancellation may be a small matter in the constellation of concerns brought on by the pandemic. But as with so much else that has happened this crazy year, its impact is more widely felt than one might expect.

Wishing you a great week.

Blogging, David B. Coe

Photo Friday: Sunset Among Friends

Last weekend we had a socially-distanced get together with friends at the home of one of the couples. Their house, as it happens, sits right on the bluff in our little corner of the Cumberland Plateau, looking west and north toward Nashville.

It was a glorious evening. Cool, breezy, clear. During the course of the night, we were treated to the calls of Eastern Screen Owls and Great Horned Owls, a few beautiful shooting stars courtesy of the Perseid meteor shower, and this stunning sunset.

Best of all, we had a lovely evening with friends — talking, laughing, catching up, feeling at least somewhat normal in this time of historic abnormality.

Wishing you a weekend of simple joys. Be safe, be kind, take care of one another.

Bluff Sunset, by David B. Coe

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Monday Musings: How Are You Doing? How Am I Doing?

How are you holding up?

No, really. I’m asking. I’m asking you, and I’ve been asking myself over the past week or so.

This is a remarkable time we’re living through. Obviously, I don’t mean remarkable as in “This is great!” But remarkable as in, “We’ll be talking about this, and recovering from this, for years to come.” It is fraught and troubling and disorienting and challenging and, well, insert your own adjective here. I tend to be a news junkie; I rarely tune out the world. But I know many people who do, who prefer to keep politics and social issues in the background except for those moments – Election Day, for instance – when they feel they need to tune in.

Right now, though, we are living the news on a daily basis. There is no escaping it. There seems to be no distance between the world and our lives. There’s a direct line from those Covid maps on CNN and MSNBC and the cloth masks we put on to shop or go to the bank. Nor does it help that the Administration, which has failed utterly to develop a strategy for combatting the pandemic is, nevertheless, more than happy to exploit it in the most cynical ways possible for political gain.

But I have addressed those issues in past Monday Musings, and I’m sure I’ll do so again in future ones. Today, I’m focused more on the personal costs.

How am I doing? Thanks for asking. As I say, this is something I’ve been asking myself recently.

I’ll start with this: In all ways that matter I’m fine. My family and I have been fortunate so far and have avoided the virus. I am also fortunate in that I’m self-employed and have resources to fall back on even as the publishing industry has ground to a halt. I’m white, upper-middle class, and I live in a relatively isolated area. For those who are non-white, who lack financial security, who live in cities or crowded suburbs, all of this is far, far worse.

That said, I find that I’m struggling. I miss my kids, who I haven’t been able to see in months because of Covid concerns. Our older daughter is supposed to come pick up our old car tomorrow – our first time seeing her since December – but even this visit will be brief (just the evening) and distanced. Our other daughter we haven’t seen since March, and even that is far too long. I also miss my brother and his family, who we likely would have seen at some point this summer or fall.

I honestly don’t mind masking at all, but I miss seeing people – friends and even strangers. I miss going to a restaurant or bar. I miss travel. Problems of privilege, I know, but I’m being honest here. I really miss conventions – hanging out with friends, talking shop with fellow writers, interacting with fans. This past weekend, I was supposed to be in Calgary for a writing festival. A couple of weeks from now I am supposed to be in Atlanta for DragonCon, a highlight of my professional year. I work alone, and most of the time I enjoy delving into my imagination each day. That’s my job. These days, though, it feels particularly lonely.

I walk every day, but I miss my more vigorous workouts at the gym. And because I’m dealing with an unrelated medical issue that is affecting my shoulder, I have had to cut way back on my home workouts as well, which I find deeply frustrating, even depressing.

Mostly, I am weary of thinking about the pandemic, about the politics of the pandemic, about the logistical gymnastics we all have to go through for even the most mundane of errands because of the pandemic. This is exhausting – and way more so for those who have compromised immune systems and/or belong to at-risk groups. It would be terrifying if we had no health insurance, or lacked faith in the medical professionals in our area. Again, I recognize that I am very fortunate.

(And this, by the way, is what makes the Trump Administration’s mail-system machinations and its blindly foolish insistence on opening schools — just to name two of its worst offenses — so insidious. We are, all of us, dealing with heightened emotions, tensions, apprehensions. I can hardly imagine being the parent of school-aged children and, on top of everything else, worrying now about sending them to school.)

I get mad at myself when I am less productive in my work than I would like to be, or when I let everyday chores slide. The truth is, I should be cutting myself a bit of slack. We all should. The stress induced by this particular moment in history in unlike anything I’ve experienced in my lifetime. To my mind, it is rivaled only by the aftermath of 9/11.

I am, in the end, tired of it all. And I’m tired of whining about it. But for all of us who care, who take the threat as seriously as it merits, this is hard. I have no answers, no wisdom to dispense. As I said, I’m struggling, too. I do believe life will get better. I won’t say I expect us to go back to the old normal, but I expect the new normal – whatever that looks like – to be far more enjoyable than this.

Until then, please know that I am wishing all of you good health, simple joys, moments of peace and laughter and love. Stay well, be safe, take good care of one another. We will get through this.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Writing-Tip Wednesday: Befriend Your Characters…And Be-Character Your Friends

This will be a relatively brief Writing-Tip Wednesday post. It’s a lazy, hot, stormy day and I’m feeling, well, lazy and hot…

So far this year, I have used my Wednesday posts to offer advice about any number of things, from finding agents and navigating the market to processing ideas and building worlds. I believe every topic I’ve covered is important and useful — I wouldn’t put so much work into these posts if I didn’t.

But I recently realized that I have yet to focus a post on character development. I’ve written about conflict and dialogue and point of view, which are integral to developing characters, but I have not tackled the subject head on. So for the next couple of weeks, I’ll be writing specifically about building and deepening characters.

Because nothing is more important to good story telling. For all the time we spend on our worlds, our plots, all the twists and turns and cool stuff we do with our stories, nothing matters more than giving our readers believable, compelling characters. The people in our stories are what captivate our readers. I would argue that they are also what captivate us as we write. I love my worlds and magic systems and such, but I live and die with my characters.

I have lots of suggestions I can make about creating characters, and I will focus on some in-depth specifics next week. For now, though, let me begin with something I have said before at conventions and workshops:

The qualities that make us good spouses, good parents, good siblings and offspring and friends, are also the qualities that make us good writers.

What do I mean by that?

Writing, I believe, is an act of empathy. So is being a good person, a caring companion to those in our lives. When the people we love need our guidance or our sympathy, we do our best to set our egos and needs aside and imagine ourselves in their positions. We draw upon our own experiences of course, and do our best to bring wisdom to their concerns, but we let go of the self and cater to what they require of us.

In the same way, we are at our best as writers when we dive deep into the emotions and thoughts of the people we create, when we put ourselves fully into their minds and their hearts and channel for our readers all that they experience. Put another way, our writing is most effective when we subsume ourselves to our point of view characters.

And so I often tell writers to befriend their characters, to nurture them, to give as much love and compassion to them, even our “villains,” as we do to the real people in our lives. Committing to our characters in that way will make them all the more real to our readers.

In this time of unrest and uncertainty, though, I would add this. I don’t often offer life advice in these posts. It takes enough gumption and hubris to offer writing advice in this environment. But to offer advice for the rest of what we do? What a terrible idea. And yet I would ask your indulgence as I do just that.

Because right now our world cries out for the some level of compassion and love that we ought to bring to our writing. And so I would ask that you “be-character” your friends and loved ones. Be as empathetic in dealing with the people you interact with as you would want to be in creating your characters. The world will be a better place for it.

Keep writing, and be kind to one another.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Not at all Writing Related

Monday Musings: 29 Years Ago This Weekend

Wedding Day Photo 1 It’s Memorial Day – and, it seems to me, a particularly somber one at that – and so I won’t write too much for today’s Musings.

But this is also a very significant weekend in my life. Twenty-nine years ago, on Memorial Day weekend 1991, Nancy and I were married. (Our anniversary is actually tomorrow, the 26th.)

To this day, memories of our wedding, and all the festivities surrounding it, warm me and comfort me and bring a huge smile to my face. We lived in California at the time – Mountain View, in the Bay Area, to be precise. We were graduate students at Stanford, Nancy in biology, me in history. The tradition, of course, is that the bride’s family pays for the wedding, but Nancy’s folks ran a small family farm, and even with our modest plans for the ceremony and reception, a Bay Area wedding was beyond their budget. They helped us out, and so did my parents.

Wedding Day Photo 2But we did everything we could to keep costs down. Because we were students at the school, Stanford allowed us to marry in the Rodin Sculpture Garden, near the university museum, for something like $200. It was a gorgeous venue — we have joked since that we were married in front of the Gates of Hell, because, well, we were. We had our reception at a reasonable local restaurant – part of a Bay Area chain called, I kid you not, the Velvet Turtle. Not amazing, but decent food and lots of it. We hosted a party the night before the wedding at our apartment, and then did the same for brunch the day after the wedding. Our big activity? On Saturday afternoon, after the rehearsal lunch, we had a softball game for the entire guest list – whoever wanted to play. (We played a lot of softball in grad school – her bio lab had an intramural team.) The game was bride’s team against the groom’s team (randomly selected). I have no idea who won. But the two key rules were, 1) Nancy didn’t have to play in the field, and 2) she got to bat whenever she wanted, no matter which team was up. She would just announce, “Bride’s turn to hit!” and then she would…

Mostly, we spent the weekend catching up with family and dear friends from near and far. And, of course, celebrating our love. That sounds like the worst sort of cliché, but I honestly don’t care. It’s the truth. From start to finish it was about the joining of our lives, the bringing together of nearly all the people in the world whom each of us loved most, so that they could be with us when we declared our intention to build a life together.

Yes, the memories are bittersweet. We have lost too many of the people who stood with us that day. Nancy’s sister and one of her brothers, one of my brothers, my parents, other relatives and friends… As I say, too many. And I won’t stand here and try to claim that the entire weekend went smoothly, that there were no conflicts or problems or logistical issues. There were. Some were truly comical, others just annoying.

Overall, though, it was wonderful – the perfect kickoff to what has been an amazing 29 years.

Across the country this Memorial Day, young couples are dealing with wedding plans that look nothing like what they hoped for, or that have been postponed until who-knows-when? It’s not something we hear about often – such disappointments are overshadowed by the breathtaking scope of this tragedy. For those affected, though, it must come as a terrible blow. I can say in all honesty that it’s the love that matters, the bond these couples mean to celebrate. I can also say, with equal candor, that this would have brought me small comfort had we lost out on our big weekend all those years ago.

I wish I had more to offer by way of wisdom and solace for those whose plans have been ruined by the pandemic. I will spare you sappy declarations of my love for Nancy (except to say that I honestly do love her even more today than I did back then, which I wouldn’t have thought possible). Part of the point of Monday Musings is to share with you where my thoughts have wandered over the weekend.

This weekend, they were in a sculpture garden two thousand miles from here.

Wishing you a great week.