Now for a little shameless self-promotion. (Since who else is going to do it, eh?)

The map, left (duh), is that of the AT, ME-GA.

The tale of my character Cal was lacking a certain something.

In August, when I wrote the ending to this piece, I thought of the Art of Fugue, and the way Bach was unable to finish it because he died. (Otherwise he hit his deadlines pretty well.)

Nice try, Beck.

Re-reading the piece now (recently), as my readers know (and Facebook friends), I felt it lacked a certain something. There was the point at which the fugue trails off, and yet there’s a Coda. That was meant to stand in for that last Chorale Prelude, (Before Thy Throne I Stand). It failed to pass even my own critical reading test. It failed to make my hair stand on end, as the Art of Fugue does. It failed to make me sit down and cry my eyes out like the Chorale Prelude does. It failed to…

It failed. And with failure came an awareness of labors wasted. Who will read a book that even its author can’t stand?

No one.

Not for love, nor money.

So.

An ending had to be found. Well. I’d placed my character Cal, not quite myself, but with similarities, amidst a mash-up of the characters I knew at the time, and had him (and the others) walk the timeline of my old appointment book. I took the good stuff from my journal, volume 1, and had them populate that too. But what happened between the abrupt end of the appointment book and the so-called “good stuff” in the journal – that manic, dope smoking, frisbee throwing curtain closer on the Boston years that happened mostly inside that infernal parking garage?

Again, well…

The stuff that I thought needed too much work to rescue. It was clumsy language, the tale not really relevant to my idea for a sexual shocker (that doesn’t really shock, but rather shows an innocent with more inexperience than sense), and besides which, it really was too much like the real me. I love to hike!  I hiked the AT. (Sections.) My youthful journal begins with that!

So?

So I fished that old battered book out again and hurled myself back into the world of ballpoint pen on 8 1/4 x 6 7/8 sheets of lined paper. (Some of you will remember paper.) It turns out, it seems to me now, that I was leaving out the best part. The heart and soul of the matter. The bridge between the then and now, the point at which the lessons were learned. The reason one might want to get to the Chorale Prelude in the first place.

So over the past 24 hours, I got down to it and wrote that chapter. The tale of that solo backpacking trip on the AT, in which our hero walks from Lee Massachusetts to Pawling New York, backpacking it in the New England woods. Nobody knows this story but me. Well. Now you can follow along as our long lost composer gets his wood smoke on.

Here is Back to Nature Part 1
and Back to Nature Part 2.

I’m not saying this is in any way a final draft. These cookies are fresh out of the still warm oven.

If experience has taught me anything, it’s that a period of cooling off must happen, followed by re-reading and editing. But this feels better to me at the moment.

Besides, my muse has fallen silent.
As Lucy Tennant used to say, “No more words. New game.”