This Is the End

In every beginning sleeps the promise of an ending. Works of ancient philosophy as much as contemporary breakup songs address the inevitability of things coming to an end. The Pariah's Syntax started eighteen years ago. Although I wasn't thinking at the time about how or when I'd stop blogging, this wrap-up was bound to come.

I'm minutes away from typing the concluding sentence of this final Pariah's Syntax post. Come 2026, this blog will be an archive. You'll need to follow my Substack if you want to keep reading.

I wonder how many hours I've spent blogging. It all started when a friend offered to post on MySpace some stuff I'd written. Three short personal essays went up on that platform before officials declared social media off-limits for prisoners. I briefly vanished from the public eye, then my supporters got clarification: the DOC gave written authorization to post my writing online, provided I leave out my address and don't try to "solicit pen pals."

Perfectly acceptable. The goal was never two-way communication. That MySpace page existed so I could share perspectives and thoughts from my prison cell. Way back in 2008, that concept felt revolutionary, even a little bit transgressive. Today, websites like Prison Journalism Project, the American Prison Writing Archive, and the Marshall Project showcase the writing of incarcerated people everywhere. Sharing this type of work no longer feels edgy—but it's no less important.

Regardless of how routine authoring this blog has come to feel, eighteen years of doing anything is a long time. I've changed along the way. Forever an unrepentant weirdo, I nevertheless believe that touting my pariah status smells too much like victimhood. I'm an outcast accurate in terms of my legal status, but I've said for years that I am not my case. I'm ready to emerge from this restrictive pariah-cocoon, fully fledged, and fly.

Call it a pivot, a rebranding, a transition, whatever you prefer. The Pariah's Syntax, after this, will be no more. Look for a new beginning on a different platform, with content delivered in a more direct way, along with a few cool surprises.

Go to my Substack now and click "Follow" to be sure you don't miss my first post on New Year's Eve. I'm excited to see you there!

The Happy Man

Max Brod, literary heir to Franz Kafka, believed that diaries never record the highs of life, only the lows. He wrote that diaries "resemble a kind of defective barometric curve," recording only what is "oppressive or irritating" to their keepers.

Notwithstanding Brod's somewhat cynical take, we need only think about the rhapsodic diary entries of a teenager in love, or of a researcher hot on the trail of some long-sought bit of data, to see how wrong Brod's absolutism about diaries truly was. Still, the man got me thinking.

Sure, the twenty-first century has diarists (in the strict sense of the word), but one of our most prevalent forms of personal journaling may be the blog. Without too deeply analyzing what, exactly, this blog is, I can say that The Pariah's Syntax comprises a fractured but honest record of my life in prison, from 2007 to the present – the closest thing I have to a diary. Reading over old posts, I have to further question Brod's sentiment, because while I do often blog about weird and unpleasant stuff (prison's no picnic, after all), there are also quite a few posts about funny exchanges, serendipitous moments, and simple joy. Readers have commented on my sense of humor as much as, if not more than, on the tragedy of my wrongful conviction. And don't forget the weekly comic strip I drew here for almost a year. While it wasn't strictly biographical, it directly drew from my experiences in the literary world, inherently kind of a funny place. This inconsistent online diary obviously fails the Max Brod test pretty badly. Someone, somewhere else claimed that it's impossible to write a good story about a happy man. Their premise was that desire and conflict are necessary to storytelling. Ache propels narrative; characters that want for nothing permit no plot. A writer has to know what drives those who populate the work, so that those desires can be either met or withheld in service to the narrative. The same is true of all writing, whether novelistic, journalistic, or bloggy. In writing this blog, week after week, I feel obligated to give you something at least moderately interesting to read about. In years past, that seemed easier. I could jot down an indignant, maybe snarky account of some prison-yard happening, and that'd be that. Sometimes readers even left nice comments. As the twenty-two year anniversary of my imprisonment approaches, I find it harder to muster much indignation. I accept too much without complaint. Basically, I'm too happy. Its a weird concept, I realize, but true. And who wants to read the thoughts of someone who responds to stressful situations with calm, or who smirks and says, "So it goes," when others see catastrophe looming? I wonder if I'm doing you a disservice by not conjuring up a little more irritation now and again. People who see me every day have spoken about my "Zenlike calm" in the face of harrowing circumstances. A neighbor who recently learned that I practice Buddhism was like, "Wow. That explains everything!" (I had to laugh; exactly what needed explaining?) However, it's true that this practice can incline one's mind toward peaceful acceptance. Does this mean that Buddhists make shitty diarists?

Putting that fruitless question aside, the next imponderable that I present is how might a writer keep satisfaction and harmony from killing a narrative? I suppose I mean that to be rhetorical. This isn't a post about crafting a story, nor about finding happiness. Not directly, anyway. I'm in no position to write about either. I'm just sharing with you, dear reader, what thoughts have recently popped up in my mind. Your comments, of course, are welcomed.

Why I'm a Terrible Blogger

Pariahblog.com has come a long way since its start, about a hundred years ago, on the MySpace page a friend set up for me. Back then, I'd snail mail a short piece of writing from my prison cell (you can still read those 2007 posts – just check the archive) at a rate of about one per month. Then my friend would dutifully transcribe, spell-check, and post them for all to read.

Those early posts were necessarily sporadic. I had no Internet. For the record, I still don't. I didn't want to exploit my friend's generosity by making him type stuff all the time, so I kept my posts to a minimum. Writing one every few weeks wasn't good SEO strategy, but it had the benefit of being easy for us to maintain.

When he got busy with life and had to bow out, another friend took over. The person responsible for maintaining my blog actually changed many times over the years. Eventually someone took charge who could scan my typewritten pages. That system wasn't perfect – we still dealt with occasional typos, and the speed of the US Postal Service occasionally seemed glacial – but it felt pretty cool to still have a voice when circumstances conspired to bury me alive in a kind of silent grave. Now I have what passes for e-mail, and the whole process is an order of magnitude easier.

I fully recognize how fortunate I am. Not every prisoner, wrongfully convicted or otherwise, has the wherewithal to write regular dispatches, let alone ones that the outside world might read. And yet, for all this, I sometimes find myself squandering this fortune.

That I toil on this blog more than I do on my dark fantasy novel-in-progress, – which has all but stalled, two chapters in – is bad enough. Worse is the time I devote to any given post, which, if it's an especially deep dive, can take days. My reading list posts, such as this one, from last month, are the result of several months' notes, compiled over several days. The words you're reading at this very moment came together only after much humming and hawing, and represent a third revision of a much more generalized piece, a lament on time squandered when one should be writing.

I kept parts of the earlier drafts. Here's one now.

Advice for writers: start a blog. Also: don't spend more than an hour a day working on it. I take both of these messages to heart but am clueless about how to reconcile them. For instance, I sat down to compose this post a week late. All last week I'd been down on myself for getting too wrapped up in my job to come up with a post. Screw it, I finally thought, just write about how you wish you had more creative energy to spare, outside of work. That tuned into a slew of thoughts and reconsiderations, drafts and redrafts. Meanwhile, Chapter Three of my second attempt at a novel languishes. I know where it's going, I just haven't dedicated the time to see that it gets there.

And now here we are, with another blog post. It doesn't say much, really, because I don't believe I've got much suitable to relay right now. You've almost certainly not been entertained by it. For wasting your time I apologize. It seems that I've succeeded only in crafting an excuse, a copout, another drop in the bucket.

A Word on Words

There's an apparent paradox in writing. To write effectively, you have to intimately know the limitations of the craft, understand that your words will never, ever equal the experience behind them.

Novelist John Updike summed this up perfectly when he observed, "Language is intrinsically approximate, since words mean different things to different people, and there is no material retaining ground for the imagery that words conjure in one brain or another."

We all have different minds, operating under different perspectives, with different biases, filtering everything through different processes of thought. My "little red wagon" is different from your "little red wagon," and that's okay — provided you understand that writing "little red wagon" isn't going to amount to your reader picturing the same old-school Radio Flyer you had as a kid, with its missing plastic hubcap and rusty scrape across the lip in the rear. That little red wagon is forever trapped in your mind.

Remember Paul Cezanne, the French painter? He did this famous image:

Translated into English, the text says, "This is not a pipe." And of course it isn't; it's an image of a pipe. No big deal, right? But to put this idea out there, right at the turn of the twentieth century, was borderline audacious, like pointing out the emperor's nakedness. It wasn't so much the idea of representations being distinct from reality (which was pretty obvious, once everyone thought about it), as Cezanne's writing it on a canvas and hanging it on a gallery wall.

Today, one and a quarter centuries later, Cezanne's non-pipe is still not a pipe. So too with your memory of a little red wagon. It's just the memory of a little red wagon — not the wagon itself, but a firing of electrical impulses in the brain that conjures up your idea of "little red wagon."

Here's a fun fact: every time you remember something, you're actually only remembering the last time you remembered that thing. The only time you remember a person or event accurately is the very first time. After that, you're building a mirage of a mirage. It's like playing a game of Telephone with yourself — always a little less accurate than the time before.

It's similar with words. Words aren't really things, they're concepts. They point to ideas about things, they don't represent those things. Conjuring representations is the work of yet another mental process, related to language but not part of language.

What I'm talking about here seems very Zen. Again and again, the teachings of Buddhism refer to nonexistence. Things are not things, says the Diamond Sutra. Things are made up, exclusively, of non-things. Vietnameze Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hahn often used the example of a flower, which is "made only of non-flower elements." Water is not a flower, but a flower is made up, in large part, of water. Ditto carbon. And minerals. Even an atom is not an atom. The finger pointing to the moon is not the way.

Zen teachings make frequent references to what's called buddha-nature (i.e., absolute reality). These teachings hold that reality's true nature is indescribable, since to describe it depends on the existence of a perceiver who exists apart from reality, rather than part of it, which, no matter how much we regard ourselves as separate from it, we are. Not to delve too deep into this, but it seemed like a fitting parallel to draw.

So, if any idea we put into words is doomed to fall short, then why bother writing? I ask myself this question a lot, especially since the apparent breakdown of temporal reality under quarantine. Stimulation for the creative mind is difficult to come by, here in this concrete box with the partial view of a parking lot, a narrow rectangle of sky, and some patchy grass. The closest thing to exotic scenery I get is watching Ancient Aliens on mute.

Coming up with material for writing projects is trickier than usual right now. Reporting only my day-to-day activities, the bread and butter of every lazy letter-writer, is out of the question, unless I decide to relay ridiculous conversations my cellmate and I have, or tell you about the giant hairball I found rolling around the floor at work. Trust me, blog posts about that stuff would get old really quickly.

The reason that I write is the same reason that Zen teachers say they practice: because it's what one does. If you're a practitioner of Zen, you practice; if you're a writer, you write. You just do. I don't know if this means that I'm enlightened or just some doofus who's stuck doing the thing he does because he can't be bothered to conceive of worthwhile alternatives. For whatever it's worth, I continue putting my words out there, hoping that one or two of them resonate with you, and that they, for however brief an instant, draw a direct line between my thoughts and yours. Maybe our little red wagons will even turn out to be similar.

Synopsis-Writer's Cramp

There are a lot of things you don’t think about while writing a novel — the number of snow leopards still alive in the wild, what your face was before your parents were born, what Nickelodeon slime is made out of.... As a writer, hard at work on a novel, when you do inevitably dream about crossing the finish line, polishing that last little rough spot out of your manuscript, your mind might conjure book signings, readings, or receiving a lucrative advance, but I guarantee that no one in the history of ever thinks, "How am I going to write this book's synopsis?"

For those who don't know, the synopsis is a punchy summary of the book's plot, beginning to end, that's essential for finding a literary agent and courting potential publishers. It's not as easy as it sounds. In fact, as I just spent a couple of days learning, it's what ten-hour tension headaches are made of.

My novel clocks in at just under 110,000 words. (It took eight years to write, which is very different than saying that I worked on it for eight years.) It features ten narrators and scores of ancillary characters. It features text-message bubbles in one part, Arabic text in another. How could I possibly distill its fine-wrought plot, replete with echoes, overlappings, and allusions, to a few hundred words? The literary snob in me cried foul.

I did it, though. I hacked and I whittled, and, like a sculptor who just keeps chipping away at the stone until the artwork within is exposed, after a couple of days, I have a two-page synopsis that's coherent, free of adverbs, and, I hope, fascinating enough to attract a literary agent. Now I send it off and find something else to occupy my mind for three months while waiting for a response.

Technical Difficulties

I had a blog post typed and ready to go, and, wow, was it good. It was so good that I congratulated myself, saying, "Hell of a job, Byron!" for how well-written, entertaining, and informative it was. I blog about funny stuff, and I blog about serious matters, and I blog about things that you on the outside might find in some way informative, but rarely do I compose a blog post that represents a confluence of all three of these features. This was, I'm telling you now, one hell of a post.

All that remained was to proofread it and send it on its way, via the JPay e-mail app. This app, however, is janky as all get-out. One of its worst handicaps is that it doesn't allow users to save drafts for long periods of time. When I hit the Save icon, this message pops up: "You have 1 day to send this email draft, otherwise it will be deleted." I hit OK, then a second popup box appears: "Your message has been saved as a draft." I hit OK again. After that, the app takes me back to the Drafts screen. The whole process can be pretty annoying.

Even more of a pain in the ass is when you've spent an hour composing what seems like a really clever post, a topical one with lots of your trademark wry wit and humorous sarcasm, only to save your work as an e-mail draft intended to be sent the very next day, then sit on it for what couldn't have been sixty minutes (all right, I'll grant you that it might've been an hour and a half) too long.

I woke up from a nap and went straight for my tablet. It took a century to boot up. The e-mail app took three decades to load. I tapped the menu and selected Drafts. Nada. My post — more than an hour's worth of top-quality writing, replete with the kind of witty narrative that would've had you ROTFLing and jamming the comments section with adulation and love — was gone. Vanished. Auto-deleted. One with the digital void.

I wept for what the world had lost. Then I ate some peach cobbler and set my jaw, resolved to the onerous task of writing of this replacement post, which pales in comparison to the awesome brilliance of what you almost got to read. Think of all the writers throughout history whose works were lost by moldering in forgotten drawers, landing in garbage dumps, burning in fires, sinking into the seas, or, as often happens in our age, getting backspaced out of existence. We can now add another cause to the long list of literature's enemies: getting JPayed.

New Year, New Start

In the year 2020....

Some sci-fi masterwork of yore probably began with these words, then delved into a fantastical far-flung future featuring rocket cars, condominiums on the moon, and food in capsule form. The reality of this date, we all recognize, is a whole lot messier, but here we are, living the dream, one full week into the future.

I've started jotting some decidedly un-science fictional ideas in a composition notebook that hadn't been getting any use. Another book project bubbling up from the creative depths — or wherever such ideas come from — surprised me this past weekend. At this early stage, I'm not altogether sure I know how to classify it. "Speculative fiction" seems too vague; "horror" isn't it at all; "fantasy" involves too much whimsy. My elevator pitch would begin, So it's David Lynch meets Franz Kafka....

Last year saw me finish my first novel, a ten-part collection of interwoven narratives about the survivors of a zombie apocalypse. (It has yet to be published. I can only do so much to push this process along.) Finishing that methodical work took a lot out of me. So much research! So many delays! I honestly wasn't sure when or if I'd write long-term fiction again. Now, unexpected but welcome, the Muse reappears. She looks different than when I last saw her. There's a wild look in her eyes, and I know that this one's going to be a much more frenzied, inspired affair than my last effort.

My sangha chose for our January theme "New Year, New Start." Like a mantra, we've been repeating it to each other at times when our adherence to Buddhism's precepts seems most strenuously tested. It's like advising our Buddhist brethren (and ourselves) to be mindful: "Hey, remember your practice." But it also serves as a source of inspiration. Every breath, every moment, every hour, every day is a rebirth. We are continually in this state of flux and therefore capable of an infinite range of changes.

According to Writing in Flow, one of the last books I read last season, falling into the deepest possible state of engagement with your writing project often demands that you perceive it as a challenge. Well, here's a fresh puzzle for my mind to work out — a weird new world for me to discover, with myself being remade in the process.

Beginning afresh can be intimidating. We humans are such creatures of habit. The familiar, the tried and true, the relatable — these comfort us but can also hinder our growth and leave us stagnant. I have the benefit of seeing the same gray concrete walls day in, day out. There's no way out. This sameness makes it essential for me to stretch my mind through the cracks, out into realms of thought and fancy to which reality sometimes pales in comparison.

This strange new book is going to be like nothing I've tried writing before. This year is going to be like none I've lived before. The two are connected, but there's more to it than just the imaginative journey I'm about to embark on. Other good things are happening. The world is constantly changing. We're constantly changing. Look around: we're already living a speculative-fiction future. This is amazing stuff.

How Long Does It Take to Write a Novel?

How long does it take to write a novel? I didn't note it on my calendar, but a peek back in time turned up this blog post first referencing what became the seed of my manuscript. The answer, therefore, if you're me and you're writing a 300-something-page novel-in-stories set against society's collapse amid a fast-spreading pandemic, is this: it takes about eight years.

I put the final touches on the last page yesterday. How to describe the feeling of putting a project like this to bed, after every day of the last ninety-five months involved the application of thought to it? It still doesn't feel real.

Friends tipped off about my project's wind-down asked me what near-, medium-, and long-term plans I had for afterward. I hadn't given it a lot of thought. Working on the manuscript occupied significant mental resources. I kept pushing other things aside in order to make room for writing, but the work only involved some actual writing.

Halfway through, in 2015, I drew a little comic about writing on one's feet. I drew a lot of comics that year. Too many, really. Once I realized that, I drew a comic announcing I was done drawing comics for a while. You know, as one does.

I engrossed myself in weird, wide-ranging, seemingly irrelevant research, from survivalism to trangenderism, from satellite navigation to garden irrigation, from neurophysiology to Islamic theology. You've got to turn over an entire library, some sage soul said, to create a single book. That applies to scholarly works and works of post-apocalyptic zombie fiction equally, I discovered.

The characters this research allowed me to write are like parts of my self. I know them intimately — arguably too intimately, since so much of who they are, from their histories to their favorite smells, although known to me, never made it onto the page. Is this the sense that every writer experiences at the end of a long literary journey? These nonexistent characters were alive in my head. As of yesterday, because they have no possible future, they face a type of purgatorial, eternal now, having ceased to be. Is this what parents feel like, sending their kid off to college?

Nature abhors a vacuum. Another project (courting publishers doesn't count) will fill the void left by this one soon enough. I have no plan to force it. It'll come when it comes. Meanwhile, as my latest post on recently read books attests, I have ample leisure reading at my disposal and plan to indulge in it... just in time for summer.

Writing My Way to "The End"

Friends know that I'm writing what might be the world's first novel tap-typed on a tablet PC. (Calling it a zombie novel is on par with likening The Hunchback of Notre Dame to a romance novel.) I wrote how my typewriter crashed and burned in January, a catastrophe that left me no real choice than to use the JP5s tablet I blogged about receiving last year to finish the final draft of my novel-in-stories. That's exactly what I've been doing, these past four months, and it's been even more challenging than you might expect.

The JP5s has a seven-inch screen. Without my pinchy new nerd glasses, writing on it sometimes makes my eyes hurt. Never mind the slowness of dispensing with my lightning-fast keyboard skills in order to thumb the onscreen Android keyboard like a maniac. I might be getting carpal tunnel syndrome.

My tablet features no word processor program. That would be too much like right. Instead I've had to type hundreds of pages into JPay's proprietary e-mail app, which limits each e-mail to 6,000 characters — roughly two and a half typewritten pages. Special characters like ñ and é are for some reason deleted by the app when a message is sent. Worst of all, there's no spell check. Good thing I'm fastidious.

Nevertheless, the final draft is about twenty-five pages from being done. Oh, wait, make that twenty-seven. My finger slipped. I accidentally deleted an e-mail in my Drafts folder yesterday. In my defense, it was right above the e-mail I intended to delete, which was pointless and silly and had nothing at all to do with this nine-year project I'm striving to get done. There's no message-recovery option; gone is gone.

Today I retyped the missing bits, hoping like hell that I recall the good revisions I originally made. What I have now is pretty close to what was there before that errant finger did its thing. The zombies still kill pretty much everyone. It's all in a day's writing.

Crafting the Personal Letter: My Second Gavel Club Speech

The second project in Toastmasters International's "Competent Communication" workbook is to give a speech that follows some kind of order — chronological, spatial, logical, et cetera. This morning's Gavel Club meeting marked my second time as a scheduled speaker. I gave the following seven-minute speech on a subject I happen to know quite a lot about. It went a little like this.

Good morning Gavel Club and guests, especially the generous Mr. De Jarnette, who volunteered to be here while Mr. Curry's out of the country.

By a show of hands, who here writes personal letters? Okay, and how many of you get replies thanking you for being so engaging, so entertaining, that your letters are passed around for people you don't even know to appreciate? I write a lot of personal letters and actually do get that kind of response. Today I'm going to clue you in on some techniques for writing the kind of correspondence that someone you care about will want to show around, possibly to people who don't even know you. That's the true power of the personal letter: to bring people together in a meaningful way, to bridge a gap of time and the broadest distance.

We begin at the beginning. Looking at a blank sheet of paper, some guys take one look at it and mentally freeze. It might seem obvious, but quite a few people neglect to put a date at the top of the page. Why is this important? There are a couple of reasons. The first is to fix its place in time. It gives your reader a concrete reference point. They can see this and think, "He wrote this on Wednesday." If they happen to pause for a moment and think back to what they were doing on this particular date, it means that they're already engaging. Tiny details like this matter. Also, success in writing a standout letter means that the person it's addressed to hangs on to it. A really good letter is a meaningful keepsake. The date anchors your letter in time, just like on a precious picture in your photo album.

People let the page and the idea of letter-writing bully them into doing things a particular way. To give someone a memorable, moving, or entertaining experience, you've got to break with the norm. Give them something new and a little different. Just like with writing a speech, your opening sentence should pique curiosity. This is where a lot of guys get stuck. I cannot even tell you how many times I've heard someone say, "I don't know what to write about, because nothing ever happens — it's the same thing, day after day." They're letting the events of their day control the contents of their minds, which sounds pretty miserable, if you ask me. Why limit yourself?

Start with a thought, an inspirational quote, a random fact, a weird dream you had, a news item — something that jump-starts your mind and gets you moving. Whatever you do, do not begin How are you? I am fine. Not only is that not entertaining, it's a dead end. Where can you possibly go after that, except right on the track of relaying events: This happened, then this happened, then this happened. True, you've got to put some facts in your letter, but too many people forget that it's a letter they're writing, not an article. Leave the reporting to the news media. A great letter is made up more of impressions and ideas, the content of a mind. Give opinions, recap an interesting conversation you recently had, write out a poem or a rap, tell a story. What makes a letter personal is how you express yourself in it.

There are three things that your letters should always include. The first? Description. You want sensory stuff: sights, sounds, smells. These are relatable things that put whoever you're writing right into the factual content of your letter.

The second thing is paragraph structure. A lot of letters are just these long big blocks of words, one thought rammed up against another that might not have anything to do with the one before it. On this goes, right down the page. If you indent or insert a line break when you're about to change subjects, a reader will absorb more of what you're trying to get across. The organization lets them pause and consider what they just read.

The third and most important feature of every good letter is curiosity about the recipient. Ask questions! Invite their opinions on subjects you believe interest them. You know how good it feels when someone expresses an interest in your life? Give your recipient that feeling. Always remember that your letter is for another person. It should interest and, if possible, entertain.

You don't have to be a great writer to write a great letter, you just have to keep these five things in mind: put the date at the top, include ideas and opinions, use lots of description, organize your subjects, and ask questions. I promise, the responses you get will be positive.

Like the letters it encouraged my audience to write, the speech was well received.

D-Wing Exodus

Rumors of the move had circulated for weeks. High muckamucks allegedly wanted A-Wing of each housing unit at ERDCC to become an honor dorm. This would mean an en masse cell-swap for those of us in incentive wings 1B, 3B, and 6D, and the GP inhabitants of 4A, 5A, and 6A — an operation involving a total of 432 prisoners. The purported reason was that houses full of well-behaved prisoners require less work by staff; most other houses are full of psychos, creeps, and assholes. But since 6-House already had one so-called incentive wing, moving us from D-Wing to A-Wing seemed so phenomenally nitpicky as to be absurd, like some obsessive bureaucrat's dream of perfect order. What difference could it make, which side of the house we're on? I wouldn't believe it until a guard told me to pack my stuff.

That happened first thing, Friday morning.

Pandemonium ensued. Beginning at 7:30 AM, all 144 prisoners in A- and D-Wing simultaneously packed and moved their worldly belongings out one set of doors, and straight through another. The activity, noise, and proximity of so many people in such a small space had me on edge, fighting back anxiety, as my cellmate and I waited for a cart with which to schlep our stuff.

Although it finally came, promising relief from the madness, a disaster occurred. Owing to distraction, I'd set my precious typewriter in a precarious spot. One nudge by my cellmate's footlocker, as we lifted it onto the cart, sent my typewriter crashing to the concrete floor. Plastic pieces scattered. A chorus of hoots and curses went up. Being in full Self-Control Mode kept me from freaking out at the potential loss of this irreplaceable asset. I decided to wait, deal with the tasks immediately at hand, then, later, plug in Old Faithful and see if she still worked. A neighbor handed me a little piece of the typewriter I'd missed. I accepted it from him with what probably looked like disinterest.

The new cell, when we reached it, stank like a mead hall. Vikings had left their hair and detritus everywhere. Hopper, my cellmate, swept up two dustpans of the stuff — the remnants of a Viking funeral, for all we knew. There was evidence of fire. The underside of Hopper's bunk had DAVE LOVES DE'S NUTS! written on it in soot. The last occupants had been two very classy guys. We purged the place of their residue with only about three and a half hours' worth of sweat. Fully settling in will take a bit longer.

As for the typewriter, it's unusable. I'm hoping that prison ingenuity can help me find a fix. Because it's not the brand and model currently sold by the prison canteen (an almost useless piece of crap), ERDCC won't let me send it out for repair. So I've got a grievance to file and desperately hope that I win. Meanwhile, my long-delayed novel (and so much else) will have to wait a while longer still. I'm trying very hard not to panic.

This Novel Won't Write Itself

Those who asked after the progress of my novel, in the years since I wrote the accidental first piece of it, were usually told that I'd finish it sometime between next month and the inevitable heat death of the universe. I would not be pressured. Ever capricious, the Muse visits episodically.

Being beholden to the Muse's comings and goings is a terrible way to write. Some days I'd manage to bang out pages of content and feel as though I finally had some momentum going. Then months would pass while I futzed around with nonsense. Research made a handy excuse: "I can't write that part until after reading the Koran" and "I'm stuck here until someone sends me that information about injectable testosterone" were both effective stalls. Most often, though, my available time to write got arrogated by personal correspondence.

The realization struck me hard, about a month ago, that I was never going to be a novelist at this rate. Something had to change, and only I could change it.

Finding time is one matter, but when a thing's important enough you make time for it. True to form, I buckled down and made ready. I blocked off weekdays, from 8 AM to 2 PM, as dedicated writing time. I made a sign to hang on my door, which reads, WRITING — DO NOT DISTURB. I decided in advance that my only allowable deviations from routine would be for institutional appointments, unavoidable phone calls, and, once a week, an hour of morning recreation.

I mailed out a final batch of letters. I told my friends that I was embarking on a long trip in my one-man craft, during which time I'd be, as though on a long sea voyage, largely incommunicado. The responses that I got back were encouraging. "See you on the other side" and "May the wind be always at your back" were my favorites.

The novel, I'm pleased to report, is coming along well. I don't find it unreasonable to think that I'll have a polished manuscript ready by year's end. (I'm already ahead of the loose schedule I set myself.) The trick is not taking my eyes off the horizon.

Fiction Contest Frustration

I submitted my short story "Such Misery Moves through the World" to Glimmer Train's New Writers Contest last October. It was my very first time entering a writing contest. As exciting as you'd think this was, I put it out of my mind the moment the envelope went out.

A willed forgetfulness is a crucial skill for all writers who want their work to be published: we send out the submission, we log it in our records, and we move on to the next piece of writing that calls for our attention. Dwelling on the odds of a forthcoming acceptance is a sure-fire way of going insane — and not the good, clever kind of insanity, the checking-your-box-every-ten-minutes-while-pacing-a-furrow-into-your-floor kind. It isn't productive or pretty.

So I waited patiently. A few @Free_Byron_Case followers saw my #ByronSays tweet about the contest and probed for updates, otherwise I might've forgotten it altogether. My writerly anticipations lay mostly in wondering when the essay and poems already accepted elsewhere would be published. Whether this constitutes another kind of madness is debatable, but at least it's based on the written agreement to publish my work, not just wishful thinking.

Three months flew by. Then the envelope arrived. I managed my expectations by thinking, They returned the whole manuscript, but at least they'll have included criticism on the story.

The thirty pages of "Such Misery Moves through the World" were held together by a mini binder clip, my cover letter at the back. A printed announcement of winners had been stuck into the envelope, on top. My name wasn't on it. I read it twice to be sure. Riffling the manuscript pages revealed no footnotes, marginalia, symbols, underlinings, Doritos dust, or dried bodily fluids. I was disappointed.

I hadn't actually expected to win. Glimmer Train attracts a crowd of fiction writers who've yet to publish stories, so the competition is stiff. Also, the story I submitted is pretty fantastical — "Neil Gaiman channeling Garrison Keillor" is how I've described it, and speculative fiction is not the most likely to win over the magazine's editors. For the $18 entry fee, though, I'd think some indication that my manuscript was read by a conscious, literate, human being would've been a given. Other contests' entry fees entitle entrants to one-year subscriptions or copies of the publication they submitted work for. I only got that binder clip.

These things are contraband. Crossroads' mail room should've confiscated it but was apparently in too great a hurry. So, yeah, the one thing my first writing-contest entry got me I had to throw away. That kind of irony is almost good enough to put in a story.

Ever Faithful, My Brother Typewriter Returns to Me

When the correction ribbon started popping off at random times, uncoiling its spool quite inconveniently, I decided it was time to send the workhorse, my typewriter, away for a while.

I knew I'd miss it, but repairs had to be made. I rely on this machine too much — for typing this blog, journal submissions, personal letters, manuscript drafts for my endlessly unfinished novel, and more. It's the tool with which I daily ply my trade, writing. It's my avocation and my primary method of communication. Imagine your cell phone taken away and you'll get a pretty good idea of how I felt about setting Old Faithful in a box and shipping it to one of the last remaining typewriter-supply businesses in existence.

And then it was gone for a month and a half. How did I not lose my mind?

Thankfully, there was no shortage of excellent reading material on hand. I gobbled up a number of books. I even drew a little. Guys in my wing noticed that I came out of my cell a little (a very little) more than usual, too, so I suppose it was good for my social life.

Social, schmocial, though; I wanted to work!

I got a pass to pick up my typewriter from the prison property room, at long last, on Wednesday. I was downright giddy after carrying it back to the housing unit, plugging it in, and hearing the familiar buzz-click-click-click-buzz-buzz of its mechanical power-on sequence, and fell immediately to the task of clearing out my backlog — "triage for my to-do list," I called it.

All may be far from right in the world (I'm still innocent in prison; hey, details), but things in Cell 236 just got a hell of a lot better. 

I Just Adore a Penthouse View

You’d think that someone in the prison’s administrative staff had asked what features I most desired in a cell assignment, then granted every request on my list — my new digs are just that great.

The night I carted my footlocker and property across the yard to 3-House, I halfway expected to enter an awkward living arrangement, one necessitating major compromises. Instead I was met at the wing door by Doyle, a laid-back guy I’ve known casually for years. Doyle’s a fastidious fifty-something-year-old who long ago gave up his stereotypical convict lifestyle for sobriety and an all-day factory job. He doesn’t smoke, and when he smiled and said, “Well, I guess you’re with me,” I breathed a little easier.

Together we humped my stuff up a flight of stairs to a cell with an eastward view. As we set down my footlocker Doyle confessed, “I was about to have a panic attack, wondering who they were gonna put in here with me.” There was peace of mind, all around.

Literal and metaphorical unburdening thus out of the way, it was time to be social. Several guys I hadn’t much seen during my years’ absence from the honor dorm — Jim, Larry, Chris, Billy, and others — came by to say hi, welcoming me back with genuine smiles. A lot of people approached me over the next few days. I was starting to feel like some kind of politician on the campaign trail, what with all the glad-handing. (Since when am I so widely liked?) Now that pretty much everyone who knows me has seen me, the back-pats and handshakes have ended and, frankly, I’m relieved. I’m ready to settle in, as though none of that mess ever happened.

I’m gradually making progress toward that end. My new cell is several square feet larger than most, having the same floor plan as the wheelchair-accessible one below. And, thanks to its orientation, radio reception is excellent. I can finally listen again to the public radio stations my last cell staticked out of existence, KCUR and KKFI. Doyle complains about the noise, but it’s minimal in comparison to the wing I just moved from. (No more motormouth right next door, jabbering all day long about the canteen food he plans to buy, arguing about a pinochle game, and kicking out the slow jams. Good riddance!) I have yet to be stymied by unavailable telephones. Clothes dryers in the wing mean I finally gave my fleece blanket a wash and had it come out fluffy. It’s the little things.

Over in lockdown, my cellmate’s lack of inertia and personal discipline were wearing on me. If you keep up with this blog, you know that I wasn’t writing like I should. I’d started taking more naps. Because my cellmate rarely went anywhere, except to the dining hall at mealtimes, there was scant room to let my thoughts wander freely, without distraction. (That annoying neighbor wasn’t any help, either.) All I need to do now, if I want a bit of privacy, is close the cell door — the universally acknowledged DO NOT DISTURB signal here. And with Doyle working his factory job until midafternoon, I finally have time and space enough to unfurl my mind’s sails and let the breezes of whim carry it wherever they may.

Tapping Out

The novelist boxes up his notes and inters them in the musty depths of a self-storage facility. Then he moves, retiring to some sleepy New England hamlet. He’s convinced that the book labored over for the better part of a decade can’t actually be written. He takes up a new, all-engrossing avocation — beekeeping — and spends the remainder of his years in an approximation of satisfaction, selling jars of dark wildflower honey and beeswax candles from the barn beside his house. His notes and manuscript draft molder and are eventually recycled by his next of kin, who aren’t interested in literary stewardship.

Or the poet for whom words were always lifeblood: he stares at the same vacant page for months, searching his soul for the language that suddenly won’t come. He quits publishing poems. In fact, he doesn’t write at all anymore, save for the occasional critical essay solicited by old acquaintances in the magazine world. His favors to these editors are prompted more by a need to fill empty hours than by creative drive. So he spends his efforts on the work of others, and, although he doesn’t admit as much, what he dreams of finding there is a soupçon of the pleasure he once obtained from his own poems.

Inspiration comes and goes. Creativity needs periodic refueling to keep running, and every writer has his or her preferred depot. (Some lucky bastards refuel midair, impressively enough, like long-distance military planes, but most of us lack the budget and auxiliary support for such maneuvers.) Parks, cafés, mountainsides, parties, beaches, libraries — wherever happens to take you out of your own headspace for a while works. In prose and poetry, perspective is everything. Changes in scenery are crucial… but they aren’t always enough.

Sometimes the tank goes unexpectedly dry, or there’s a mechanical failure, and the writer’s mighty efforts to remedy the problem come to naught. It must feel like a death in the family, to lose a part of one’s self integral to identity and sense of purpose — a horror beyond imagining.

Of course I imagine it all the time. There’s a mytho-romantic element to writer’s block, the tragic drama of a tortured artist pushing forward despite opposition from within. It’s like a Wagnerian opera. What would it be like to sit at the desk, clutching my head in my hands, and staring blankly at typewriter keys taunting me with their untapped potential, the creamy void of a fresh sheet of paper curling from inside the machine, beckoning me, as if from a great distance, to fill it with genius thoughts and ideas? I can see all this so clearly; it looks like I have a migraine.

Maybe more often than it perturbs the average writer, this sad vision preoccupies me. Unlike you, it’s not possible for me to pop outside whenever my low-fuel indicator dings. I can’t take a vacation, a pottery class, a walk down the street. I can’t, in fact, move beyond these four walls most of the time. Every day it’s the same scenery for me, much like Groundhog Day, except at least Bill Murray’s character in the movie had a whole town to call purgatory.

Prison provides a lot of material, from a writer’s perspective. I work with it because it’s what I have (that, plus an active mental life). Yet the images of the exhausted novelist and poet haunt me. Did they see their inactivity coming? Had they heard indicators chiming? More frightening still: were they aware, trying with all their resources to refuel, only to find nowhere offering the type of fuel their craft needed?

I don’t know how capacious my tank is. I suspect that none of us do. The sputtering of a craft running on empty probably feel identical to one merely bogging down for a moment. This indeterminacy makes both equally mortifying. What I’m running on will have to last me the duration of my trip through limbo. One distress I can’t imagine is getting stranded out here.

A Manner of Being: Writers on Their Mentors Now Available

My essay “Lasting Impressions of L.” is one of almost seventy that make up this great anthology, just published by University of Massachusetts Press. Some other contributors include George Saunders, Aimee Bender, James Franco, Sheila Heti, and Henry Rollins — an apparent hodgepodge, but each of us with an anecdote worth relating about someone who profoundly influenced our writing. The little pieces that make up A Manner of Being shine, like their authors, from all points of the writerly spectrum and are noteworthy no matter your relationship to the writing life. Order your copy from the publisher or your bookseller of choice.

Writer’s Cramp #41

Yes, this actually is the last Writer’s Cramp strip. It’s hard for me to believe I was doing these every week of the past ten months, and yet it feels somehow like an eternity. What started as a stopgap measure to get content on my blog while my typewriter was in the shop took on a life of its own. The strip wasn’t meant to last. I was having fun with it for a while, though, so I didn’t notice how much effort was actually going into it until last month, when a bout of mental reorganizing led me to conclude that there were better investments of time I could be making. I’ve got a novel crying my name at night. I’ve got letters pawing for my attention. I’ve got a Twitter feed to throw crumbs to. It isn’t often (or ever) that you’ll hear a prisoner say he needs more time, but I’m hardly your typical prisoner.

To the few who were actually following the anti-adventures of my poorly drawn stick figures I will make no promises but point out that this ending doesn’t necessarily keep me from venturing back into the questionable avocation of webcomic authorship. It could be that someday I’ll pick up another pen and doodle additional installments of the Writer’s harrowed existence. Possibly. Maybe. But don’t hold your breath, and please don’t wish ill on my typewriter — that’d be totally bad for your karma, or something.

Writer’s Cramp #40

Writer’s Cramp #39