A Cyber Search for 'Temps Perdu'

I quit social media about six months ago, and have steadfastly resisted logging in to Facebook and various other sites I used to frequent, but, like any recovered addict I sometimes feel 'the urge'. It was my son's inquiry, "Is dad still writing?" that sent me tumbling through the looking glass to revisit the blogs of former cyber-friends, especially Susanne O'Leary, perhaps the only person other than my son and wife, who ever thought of me as a writer.

Susanne is an Irish author--prolific, clever, energetic and successful. She has written scores of romances, three crime comedies and a couple of biographies. Considering how busy she has been since we 'met' on-line ten years ago, she is wonderfully generous with her encouragement to floundering amateurs, e.g., her kindly reference (in a sidebar to Susanne's Blog (https//susannefromsweden.wordpress.com) to Anthony J. Barker as a 'witty, talented and charming writer.' Ho, ho--who needs fame or fortune with such a pat on the back from a lovely Swedish/Irish author. I almost wish I hadn't deleted the blog to which she refers, no doubt wittier than this one.

To answer my son's question: 'Yes and no.'

I haven't written anything lately, but I am still imagining works of great wit, charm and social significance. Whether I will ever write them is another question. I'll need to overcome the heart-break of premature self-editing.

Susanne is an exponent of 'pantzing' a method of writing based on 'the seat of the pants' notion that starting somewhere, and continuing on, must eventually lead to a satisfactory conclusion. Of course, she isn't entirely clueless about her direction. As a writer of romances, she knows that the HEA ('happily ever after') must fall within a range of well tested parameters. But not knowing precisely where you are going allows for serendipitous byways and spontaneous complication. Pantzing is the opposite of what might be called 'the sensible method' of story writing that starts with a conclusion, and a clear outline connecting the front and back ends. As one writing professor poignantly pondered, "Would you get on a plane without knowing where it is going?"

Well... yeah. Maybe. I am a 'uber-pantzer'. I can see how writing the last page first would save me tons of grief. After that writing would become a simple matter of filling in the blanks--but it sounds so boring. This explains why so many of my ingenious beginnings have choked out their lives in a La Brea of self hatred, never even reaching 'media res'. It's rare that anything I actually write is as amusing as what I had previously imagined.

Well, screw it. Living in a retirement home, with nothing better to do, I begin to see the full arc of my oeuvre, a story filled with pathos and humor--a delightful journey of several volumes providing countless footnote opportunities for future LitD candidates--if only I can finish it before my own HEA.

I've already begun with Frankie Hill, my favorite among all the heroines I have ever imagined. She is distantly related to John Cleland's classic 'Fannie Hill'. Frankie is cursed with exceptional beauty and a genius for number theory. One or the other might have brought her happiness. Both can only bring grief. Nothing goes right for Frankie, from her difficult childhood in Keokuk, Iowa, through a decade of misadventures in sex, until convicted of attempted murder at age 24. The astonished reader can't help sympathizing with the (female) judge who imposes the lightest possible sentence, saying, "Your husband should thank God he wasn't married to me, for I guarantee that in the same circumstances I would have made a more thorough job of it."

Frankie is released early for 'good behavior'--behavior oddly similar to that which led to her incarceration--but it's all a matter of one's perspective. Too ashamed to return to Keokuk, she takes a job as a book-keeper at a Nevada brothel. There she meets her father, and having, by sheer luck, avoided the horrors of incest, she imagines she has reached rock bottom. Supposing that nothing worse can happen, she returns to Iowa, to become the first 'woman of pleasure' ever to attain a PhD in advanced number theory.

Are things looking up for her? Of course not. There are no seemly academic jobs for female geniuses with criminal records. She is obliged to take work as a 'quant' for a diabolical hedge fund, where she quickly discovers the nexus between mathematics and crime.

But that's as far as I have pantzed--so her future still lies ahead. And it's my future as well. I hope to bring her safely to a life of satin-sheeted ease, first as manager of her own hedge fund and finally as the mega-billionaire sponsor of a retreat for female revolutionaries. It's hidden in the woods just northwest of Poughkeepsie. Getting there will not be easy for either of us, but not since Euripides unleashed 'The Bacchae' will so many women have so much fun in the forest. Justice at last.

And who says, "Revenge is best served cold." Some like it hot.

Anyway, that's the plan--a very indefinite and approximate sort of plan, with many a practical and poetical obstruction to be overcome--but some sort of answer to the question, "Is dad still writing?"