what i did on my summer/winter/never-ending pandemic

May 032022
 

Like pretty much everyone else, the past two+ years have provided an opportunity to determine what kind of “I’ve been meaning to do that!” tasks I might actually get done if given ample amounts of free time and nowhere to go.

As it turns out, not ticked off on the “accomplished” list:

  • Bake bread/cake from scratch
  • Go through and organize old files/documents/photos
  • Transmogrify lead into gold
  • Learn to play a didgeridoo
  • Find Bigfoot
  • Fix the sock drawer of my dresser
  • Watch the entire Ernest oeuvre
  • Convince Salma Hayek to leave the billionaire husband she loves for some random 167-year-old guy from Connecticut
  • Write the Great American Novel—

Wait! So on that last one . . . .

SATAOTBEF cover

I’m not saying it’s great but it’s a novel and I’m American, so that’s like two-thirds of the formula. Close enough, right?

Oh, and before typing a letter more: Shoutout to the amazing Sammi Lewis of Poltergeist Soup for the cover!

So yeah, I’ve been working away on this for a while, and now it’s time to emerge from my writing cocoon to share it. Although I’m scared out of my wits to put this out there, tbh. Like a lot of people who write, I’ve gone to bed thinking, “This isn’t terrible,” only to wake up the next morning and be like, “I’m an idiot, I should delete this, smash my laptop, and stab myself in the eye for even thinking of publishing it anywhere, ever.”

And I might (should?) have, except I now feel I owe it to Sammi because their work deserves an opportunity to be seen. I only hope the way I’ve hammered together 100,000 or so words does it justice.

For what it’s worth, this is somehow the best and stupidest thing I’ve ever concocted, and I mean that in the best way possible (I think). Here’s the back-cover blurb:

Sportswriter Nick Brooks is covering yet another boring baseball game when he inadvertently encounters Sarah Rypien, an extraordinary young woman who immediately spins his existence downside up and cattywampus. Before he knows it, the prerequisite chaos/hilarity ensues, dragging him into one of those absurd irregular-Joe-meets-possible-psycho-and-saves-the-world brand of adventures, replete with action, intrigue, mysterious men in Volvos, a very special FBI special agent, 1.5 romances, and a healthy dash of the LOLs. (You know, like Mom used to make.) 

Oh, and on a semi-unrelated note: Nick just happens to be sharing his life with an incarnation of the entity commonly beloved as “Satan.” 

In this fun, satiric sci-fi romp—packed with enough pop culture references to give the intrawebz a nosebleed—Ray Bendici vaults readers through an entertaining jaunt that bends brains, time, reality, and genres. On the plus side, no one gets turned into a newt.

Clearly, an autobiography then.

Ultimately, the lighthouse guiding this journey to completion has been to create something that will be as fun to read as it was to write. Which is not a low bar to clear as much as it’s a chalk line on a playground to skip over. Still, I hope you all find it entertaining.

For what it’s worth, the title is like Snakes on a Plane—you already know if you’re in or out, and that’s probably for the best. No offense taken at all if you’re out, I get it.

And if you’re in … well, that’s on you at this point. Peruse/purchase it on Amazon, either paperback or Kindle, keep your hands inside the ride, and enjoy mucking about in rayality!

draft party

Apr 212019
 

Okay, with the NFL draft nearly upon us … I’m going in a completely different direction this week.

Psych!

Sooo … I’m struggling with writer’s reluctance, but I thought I’d share the opening of a fiction manuscript I’ve been working on for a few months. It’s a coming-of-middle-age story, of sorts, drawn on a short story I wrote like 100 years ago. I feel compelled to add that it’s NOT based on actual incident (fiction, remember), so if someone out there thinks it’s about you … well, it’s not about you.

Anyway, I still have a long way to go in writing—and more importantly, re-writing—but I have the entire story framed out. I’m hoping that sharing it here will keep encouraging me to git ‘er done.

Oh, and even though this is still a draft, all copyright and legal stuff goes here. I have a title, but I’m keeping that off the intrawebz for now, thanks.

Okay, deep breath. And exhale. And enjoy ….

 

I tried not to think about Hayley’s husband while I was kissing her.

First off, it was totally ruining the buzz of the moment—the magical head-rush of a first kiss always should be drunk in deeply, especially when it’s been long while since the last first kiss, and who knows how long (if ever) until the next.

Secondly, it was forcing me to keep my eyes open so as not to have the mental image of him standing there, glaring at me. (I’m a very visual person, you’ll come to discover.) When I was young and still figuring out girls, and the whole making-out thing, I did smooch with my eyes wide open so as not to miss anything. The view was weird and myopic at best, and as I got older, more experienced, and more jaded, I realized there may be nothing less arousing than watching someone kiss you, so I eventually got into the habit of closing my eyes. Now, however, the distraction wasn’t quite working the way I had hoped.

Thirdly, and probably most importantly—she was married! That still matters, to me at least.

Really!

Ever-so-reluctantly, I pulled back. “Look, we can’t do this,” I whispered.

Hayley squinted at me, her hazel eyes dancing in the shadows, then smiled. “It’s because we’re in a storeroom, isn’t it?” she said, gently scratching the back of my neck. “And you’re afraid if we get caught, we’ll both get fired, right?’

“Uh, not exactly,” I said, glancing around the steel shelves, dusty file cabinets, and silent boxes of old magazines. “I thought that part was sorta cool and exciting, to be honest, right up to the moment you mentioned getting fired. That’s not so cool.”

“Come on,” she said. “No one is gonna fire us for this! As a matter of fact, I bet half the office cheers.”

“Well, I’m not that good.”

“You don’t suck,” she said, sliding her lips back up against mine. “Yet.”

“Mmm . . .” I said, allowing myself a nano(no-no)second of pleasure before brushing her back again. “No. Come on. We can’t do this. It’s not right.”

“Feels right to me,” she said, snuggling her firm little body back up against mine.

She wasn’t wrong. From the moment the strawberry-blonde firecracker strode through the doors of our media group ten months ago, it’d been Chemistry 101—spark, snark, and constantly hitting each other’s mark. (Sorry, that sounded cooler in my head.) A game of cat and cat ensued, each of us seemingly finding reasons to cross each other’s paths, not easy to do with me in the editorial department and her over in client services. Through a carefully calculated series of “accidental” break room encounters, “coincidentally timed” restroom visits, and “necessary” emails (plus a very happy happy hour or two), we drifted closer and closer and closer until we found ourselves in the fortuitous position we had a few moments ago: the two of us in the storeroom alone. Together.

And then she kissed me! Or I kissed her. It all happened inexplicably fast, like a train wreck or how “Gangnam Style” got to one billion views. I knew she was married—I saw the shiny gold band on her left hand Day One, except she never mentioned her husband, and if she had, she never uttered his name, now that I thought about it. (Once I took a moment to look at it, the mental picture of “him” glaring at me was really that stupid sexy Ryan Gosling!) On those ultra-rare occasions she did discuss her marriage, she kept saying those kinds of things that make a relationship seem not particularly lovey-dovey, or that it was seriously adrift and about to wreck on the rocks. You know, comments that float hope to interested third parties.

Besides, the game had been flirty and exciting and more fun than I’ve had in a hound’s age, so I kept playing along, never thinking anything would actually come of it. Then, somehow we bumped into each other in the storeroom . . . the banter got cranking . . . things escalated quickly . . . someone threw a trident . . . and boom! Kissyface.

Regardless of how our lips came together, it wasn’t too late at this point for my annoying conscience to stop it all before substantial damage was done. I gave her one big, overlong last kiss and eased her away, although everything in my chromosomes was screaming to pull her closer. “I can’t,” I said. “I’m sorry. I mean . . . it’s not right. What about your husband? What would he say?”

She glanced to the side for a moment, then leaned back into me. “I am one hundred percent certain he won’t say a damn thing.”

“Really?”

She grabbed my shirt with both her hands, and with a reckless urgency, pulled my mouth hard to hers again.

 

Okay, for the record, that’s all titillating and true, but this isn’t the letters page of your second-favorite porn mag. (“Dear Squish, I never thought this could happen to me . . . .”) Although neither of things are things any more. Man, I’m old!

Anyway, I should slow it down here a second so I can get you up to speed. Don’t want you to think it’s that kind of story. (Not that there’s anything wrong with it.) You might even be interested in other events that led up to the aforementioned storeroom snogging session.

Actually, other than the lurid tease of an intro you just read—which, come on, will be an awesome opening scene if this ever gets made into a movie—I really don’t know where to begin ….

 

Again, still a work in progress. Thanks!

distracted writing

Jul 142013
 

I can get very distracted, very easily. Join the club, right?

It’s a huge challenge for me to write sometimes—especially online, like here—because every time I get near the intrawebz, I instantly find myself looking at a hundred different things other than what I’m supposed to be doing at the moment. I wish I had a dollar for every time that I needed to look up a name or a word, open up my browser and then see there’s a message in my email … then I’ll see see a headline … which may lead me to Twitter or Facebook … which leads to how many subsequent sites … and then I realized that I’ve wasted a lot of time and it’s time for me to get back to what I was originally writing, so I go to close my browser and—

D’OH! I *never* got to the original thing I was looking for.

A few months ago I got to interview David Pogue, technology blogger for the New York Times, and one of the things he talked about was that he thought the Next Big Tech Thing is going to be whoever creates a decent digital-curation system, i.e., a way to sort the mountains and mountains of electronic information coming at you from the intrawebz, news sources, social media, smartphones, etc. As he put it, right now trying to process information can be a bit like trying to drink from a fire hose. I certainly feel like that some, if not most, days.

Sometimes I look back at my writing from years ago and I think it was dramatically better and generally more entertaining. That was back before YouTube, Fark, College Humor, Awkward Family Photos, Funny or Die, Cracked, Reddit, The Jets Blog or any of the other ten bajillion sites out there that suck me into their web and away from doing anything that actually might be useful ….

Then again, you’re here reading this … oh, the irony.

Anyway, it doesn’t help that I’m a very slow writer start with. I know what the most of how I express myself looks fairly effortless and somewhat conversational but it actually it takes a lot of work to make it like that. I don’t write as much as I write and rewrite and rewrite, going back over each sentence over and over again. I’m jealous of writers who can generate first drafts that are coherent and brilliant, and then only need to tweak from there.

Let’s put it this way: My process is that I sort of throw up a jumbled lump of clay, and then work it over and over and over until I get something that seems kinda passable, and then with a bit of polishing (sprinkle in those shiny adjectives and metaphors), and eventually it resembles something that can be called “writing.”

I think that it’s because my approach is so labor intensive that I always refer to myself as “a guy who writes” as opposed to “a writer.” Even simple emails take me a long time to bang out because I go back over each word and sentence trying to hone then something that seems intelligible, interesting and, most importantly, comprehensible. A typical blog post, like this one, that you can read in five minutes, if not less, usually takes me about five hours to write. No joke.

Actually, there’s an old joke among writers: “I would have written less except I didn’t have enough time.” I soooo appreciate this! I don’t seem to have enough time in my life to start with, and then to struggle to to get a message across as concisely as possible (which takes even more time), all while trying to avoid the ever-growing minefield of distractions … it can get a little dizzying at times.

Well for this post that you’re reading I decided to try a new approach: voice recognition software.

Yes, I guess you can say I cheated. Although, if I didn’t tell you that I used voice recorder to create the majority of this post you wouldn’t have noticed it. Of course, I still had to go back and edit it quite heavily—for example, earlier I mentioned “ten bajillion” websites, but it was recorded as “Tenba Jillian,” which sounds to me like a reggae band. And for most of the process, I have felt akin to Stephen Hawking, trying to communicate in an odd, stilted way as the app I downloaded for my iPhone only can record/transcribe in short, sentence-or-two bursts. But I was able to get the majority of this post out in a quarter of the time I have in the past, so that’s a good thing.

Too good a thing, though?

Okay, it does seem like I’m sort of cheating here, but is it really any different than using dictation? Milton, Dostoevsky and Henry James all dictated works that have become classics of literature, so I guess that puts me in good company. Well, at least in terms of process, if not actual results. Hopefully, one leads to the other, right? Work smarter, not harder, as my friend Patti likes to say.

But in the world where there’s lots of distractions, sitting in a room by myself without a computer—or more importantly, without the internet staring me in the fact—seems like a good way to write faster, and ultimately, better—without actually having to write anything.

So to speak.

I appreciate your patience as I test this process. I hope that going forward being able to do incorporate this time-saver will actually give me an opportunity to share more than I would normally. Lucky you!