Tag Archives: Stephen King

I Started a Bandcamp

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Most people rarely follow their hearts/dreams. It’s so much easier to simply wish upon a star.

Back in the late 1990s, I decided I wanted to be a writer. Then, Stephen King told me that being a writer wasn’t simply wishing you wanted to be a writer. “Oh,” I thought. I guess there’s some work involved. You have to write. Indeed.

I learned my lesson about writing. But what about music?

Playing the guitar is something I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve had a guitar and I’ve had seasons when I played it quite a bit. But inevitably, it would always end up back in the case, with the case building up a sheen of dust. Hard lessons don’t always stay with us.

My son was killed in 2017. Life came to a standstill for me, or pretty damn close. I could barely function for months. Then, one afternoon, my guitar came out of the case and it’s stayed out ever since.

I wrote “Walking Down the Road” last summer, in August, right after we moved to Biddeford. It’s about Mark’s final walk, as told in his voice, if he could still speak to us. I even have the first lo-fi recording of it made on my phone, in my clothes closet. I thought that would make for a great makeshift studio. I’ve since migrated to my basement, “my bunker” as my wife calls it. She actually decorated it a week ago, and now I have Christmas lights down there.

Having a Bandcamp page is something I’ve thought about. But for some reason, I held off setting one up. I guess I needed more time in the “woodshed.”

JimBaumerME on the Bandcamp

I’ve written 15 songs over the past year. I have an album’s worth of material. I’m starting to create some stark home recordings of my songs. Others like Guided by Voices, Swearing at Motorists, and Daniel Johnston have done similar things. They are certainly artists worth modeling myself after, but at the same time, I’m not really looking to be just like them–they’re guideposts for sure–but I have my own sense of where I want to go as a musician.

So, if you are inclined, bookmark my Bandcamp page. I’ll continue to post new songs and before long, there will be a full-length album.

 

My Own Terms

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We are in that transitional time between late summer, segueing into early fall. I have felt a sense of being adrift. Six months into Covid, with little abatement in sight, the looming darkness and colder days don’t bode well for anyone preferring light and summer breezes. Simply, summer has offered some respite from Covid lockdown. What’s coming, I’m afraid, is a dank, Dickensian dystopia to be endured over the course of the winter.

Last week, a well-known local musician touched down on Facebook about his bookings drying up as the summer places began shutting down for the season. A drive along East and West Grand in Maine’s premier tourist Mecca, OOB, on Sunday revealed summer’s dying embers. Many of the places that had outside entertainment like the Sunset Deck and Myst have closed until next May. Others are open for another three weeks at best. Who knows if The Brunswick will have indoor entertainment come late October.

For the past 44 months I’ve been journeying through the loneliness that apparently is endemic in those relegated to living with the loss and associated grief that accompanies the death of someone deeply loved. During my sojourn, former associates have disappeared. Not sure why. I’m guessing that surface relationships can’t come to terms with darkness of death, subsequent depression it delivers, and all the associated fall-out from an event inflicted on someone.

On days like today, my first inclination used to be to sit down and write a blog post. Given that Mondays don’t require me to check-in at Whitey’s Farm until later in the morning, I went down the stairs to my bunker and picked up my acoustic. As I’ve intimated before, I’m not certain I’d still be here if on that dark day in August of 2018, I hadn’t opened the dust-covered guitar case housing my Yamaha guitar, rather than seeking the alternative hidden in the closet upstairs. Continue reading →

How to Succeed As a Writer

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I’ll be on calls for the rest of the day. I’m on deadline for articles, and I’ve been hired as a writer for a national marketing campaign. Why bother putting a blog post up on the JBE? I don’t know—maybe because I think having a blog and updating content is important. I’ve been doing that for as long as I’ve been writing. Why stop now?

Then, for some reason, I’ve gotten emails from writers soliciting advice. I guess they thought I might have a “magic bullet” related to writing, or something. I hate to disappoint, but I don’t consider myself the model of success, at least in terms of the usual way the term is sliced and diced. It’s possible they had me confused with someone else.

Since people are asking, let me briefly hold court on the topic.

One of the writers has had success, at least I consider having a book published, “success.” But like happens to many writers, things change, sometimes overnight. If you’re not in it for the long haul, during these times “in the desert,” it’s easy to think you’re doing things wrong.

I am still writing. Being a writer is what I set out to do back in the early 2000s and I’ve stayed the course. I’ve had several detours out of necessity, mainly related to paying the bills, but even when I was working full-time, I was still freelancing, putting out books, and honing my craft. So, if success can be joined to stick-to-itiveness, then yes, I guess I am successful.

Success=hard work

Continue reading →

Birthday blog-34

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[Note: I spent much of the weekend thinking and writing about the bond Mark and I shared around writing. We certainly bonded around sports and simply from spending time together when he was in his formative stage. But that doesn’t always guarantee a closeness later in life.

The driver who hit and killed Mark robbed his parents of many things. She robbed me of my only son, and a relationship I’ll never replace. She also took the brightest of personalities, one with passion (and compassion) from a world sorely in need of people like him.

As difficult as 2017 has been, one of the things that keep us going is knowing that Mark had a passion for Earth, other people (and bringing them together), and of course, writing. We founded the Mark Baumer Sustainability Fund earlier this year. We’re happy to announce that we are now a 501(c)3 nonprofit. We also have a brand new website that just went live. Check it out. Also, today would be a great day to remember Mark by making a contribution to the fund. It’s now tax-deductible and a great end-of-year gift to give for a cause that will support causes and organizations that cultivate traits that were part of Mark’s philosophy of life—love, kindness, and working towards building a better and more equitable world for all people.-jb]

 

Birthday Blog, Thirty-four (34)

 

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Developing any craft requires diligence, attention to it, and maybe more than anything else—a dogged determination in cultivating it—regardless of how many people flock to your doorstep. I think this an apt application for both writing and music, too.

I’m not a musician, but I’ve had a passion for various kinds of rock-rooted musicology dating back nearly 50 years. I know a thing or two about it, and what I don’t know experientially, I’ve gleaned from a longstanding tradition of reading what once was known as “rock journalism.” While no longer as prevalent as it once was given the demise of print, there are still outlets where this genre of writing resides.

Since we’re on the topic of writing, I think I can weigh-in on this with definite ink stains on my hands, or perhaps better, a worn keyboard on my laptop. It was 2001—I had read Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Afterwards, I decided not to be some occasional dabbler. I set a goal—I wanted to get published. Following King’s prescription, I got up early before work and wrote something every day. After a year of doing this, I got an essay published in Casco Bay Weekly just like King said would happen. I’d really become a writer. Continue reading →

Writing Questions

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I’ve been writing for a long time. Well, it seems like that to me, and for most people, 14 years isn’t anything to sneeze at. That’s a quarter of my life.

If you’ve been a reader of my various blogs, then you are somewhat familiar with my story. If you haven’t heard it before, here it is in a nutshell. At the age of 39, after dabbling with writing on-and-off for a couple of years, I got serious about my craft. Much of this newfound motivation was a result of reading Stephen King’s well-known book about writing, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. I followed his advice in establishing a routine and adopting discipline. About a year later, I had an essay published. Three years later, my award-winning first book, When Towns Had Teams, came out. That was in 2005.

I continued on through two Moxie books, the period I called “the Moxie years,” and in 2012, decided it was time to move on to something more personal—a book of seven essays touching down on my life experiences, with several centered on my hometown of Lisbon Falls. That book was a failure from a sales standpoint, even though it contained my best writing to date.

During the last decade-and-a-half, I’ve also spent extended periods freelancing for local newspapers, regional magazines, alt-weeklies, and a few websites. I’ve gathered a file of clips, with my most recent ones posted here. Continue reading →

Fewer Words

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Blogging regularly requires finding a subject and crafting a post about it worth reading. The subject can be something significant and newsworthy—or it can also be mundane and personal. As my sister commented the other day, “there is almost no topic that can’t be worked into an interesting post.” That’s what it takes to keep creating content, consistently.

When I got serious about my writing, I realized that writing regularly was part of the process required to develop my craft. Actually, Stephen King shared that secret with me. Since then, my blogging track record dating back to 2003 (although some of that blogging is no longer with us, at least not on the interwebs) demonstrates that commitment.

While I’ve continued to build narratives of 500, 1,000, and upwards of those word counts, the world seems to be moving in a minimalist direction regarding communication. How many words does it take to tell a story? I’m not sure. Probably 400 or 500 would be on the lower end. I’m a firm believer that it takes more than Twitter’s 140 characters to communicate effectively. And I’m no fan of communicating by emoji via Facebook. That probably identifies me as old-fashioned.

No one writes letters these days. People can’t even be bothered to email.

Then there are days like today when life gets in the way and there’s not enough time to tackle something larger. I’ve been ruminating about things I observed during recent work-related travels through western Maine that I can’t do justice to today, so I’ll hold off ‘til a later date.

Richness follows Loss

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I know that not everyone who reads the blog is a writer, or aspires toward the writing life. However, over the past few weeks, a window of reflection has opened, looking backwards. What I’ve been able to see with uncommon clarity, has been much of the past decade or more for me. Writing has been at the center of this period of time, what I characterize as my personal period of reinvention.

Life dictates that we move on from grief and loss. Outside of the death of immediate family members—and even then, superficiality predominates how others respond, with platitudes, or worse—clearly demonstrating some sort of structural disconnect and a deep-rooted denial related to death and dying in our culture. “Get over it and move on” is what we’re expected to do.

Over the weekend, I went through some of Bryant’s books. A demonstration of grace from his son, when he offered me the opportunity to go through his father’s collection of books, at the funeral service. He followed up with an email and we spoke by phone during the week. I planned to meet him on Saturday at his father’s apartment in Augusta.

Bryant had taught at Colby-Sawyer, with Wes McNair. There were several of McNair’s books sitting on his bookshelves. Most of them ended up in the two overstocked boxes I lugged out of the apartment and put in my trunk. Continue reading →

Still Pushing the Envelope

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Aging is many things—we stop being active, no longer take risks, start referring to ourselves as “old”—these are just three things that come to mind when I think of people I know who have transitioned from being “young” to being “old.”

I’ve been thinking about my own life, and what motivates me to keep pushing through resistance. Recently getting another book out the door—my fourth title in nine years—doesn’t qualify as prolific, but it’s still a respectable output for a writer that does more than just write to make a living.

When I set out down the road to be a writer in 2002, I knew nothing about what lie ahead. Fortunately, I was aware that in order to compensate for starting later than many (I was 40 at the time), I would have to work my ass off at learning the craft of writing. For me that’s always been about writing as much as I could carve out time for, in a nod to Stephen King’s advice in On Writing, I’ve written almost every day for the past 12 years.

“Have you written your own success letter?”

Continue reading →

Small Town Newspapers

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I spent an afternoon this week at the Lisbon Historical Society, reading through newspaper accounts about the town. I’m trying to nail down some events from the 1970s and 1980s. Reading back through the clips, I noticed a place that was considerably different than most of what I remembered at the time, when I was coming up.

Back in 2007, the year before writing Moxietown, my initial plan was to write an extensive nonfiction treatment on my hometown of Lisbon Falls. I just found the original outline of the proposed chapters. Some of that book ended up being folded into my first book of history about Moxie, which then led to a second one. There are no plans for a third. Continue reading →

Reading books 2012

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Books 2012 01

Why read? That seems to be the question at hand since I’m once more at the end of a calendar year with another assortment of books read over the course of the past 12 months. With a list like this comes some sort of requirement to justify the time I invested in making my way through these books. Hence, I report back to you, dear reader.

The rediscovery of reading transformed my life back in 1997. I say “rediscovery” because like so many, I’d found other second rate substitutes for books and reading in the course of leaving school and entering the realm of work. Now I’ve come back to an even more essential task—reading broadly. I wish a few more of you would begin wrestling with this task. Continue reading →