st louis « Robin Writes

Well. We set off Saturday morning with high hopes—would this be “the one?”

Sadly, no.

The description was perfect: gently rolling, stock pond, electric, well, ten acres in pasture. The photos were nice, but a bit perplexing. So, anyway, we drove a couple hours and finally arrived.

Even the gravel road that led into the immediate area was wide, level, fairly smooth. A couple neighbors stopped by while we were talking there with our agent and were very nice, very helpful. But that was after . . .

See, the darn place wasn’t marked. Our agent finally reached the listing agent, who was really snippy and kept telling poor C that “there’s a sign, and just follow the fence and the grapevines!”

No sign, no grapevines; not really much of a fence except for maybe 20 feet—we did finally discover the rest of the fence posts. Still no grapevines, no sign.

I walked all the way to the bottom and back up again; no mean feat, considering most of the property was vertical. The mobile home that was supposed to have been removed? Oh, quite a lot of it was still there, scattered all over the place. I did see the well, and there was electric.

But I’m pretty sure the stock pond and 10 acres of pasture was on the next property over, the one I walked to at the bottom of the hill. Oh, and the online photos we saw? At least three of them were taken THREE MILES AWAY!

Guess we know why it’s been on the market for 413 days . . .

C left for another appointment, and we started home. Then we reconsidered—there was another property we’d been interested in and it was just 45 minutes away, so I called the listing agent. He was very helpful, gave us exact directions, told us to walk around and see what there was to see.

So we’re zipping along, and suddenly up pops a 35 mph sign—what? Damn, hit the brakes! Here was a town . . . sort of. It had a bank. And an auto repair place. A couple homes. It also had two really awesomely cool old stone buildings—right on the edge of the road. I mean, RIGHT THERE. Hence the sign . . .

We got to a gravel road, turned, and kept going a few more miles. I’m guessing that during high rains and in the winter, we might be staying put. Easily found the property; it was kind of a wedge-shaped lot, 25 acres like the first one we saw.

The description said there was a garage, but I knew from the photos that it was more like a shed; that’s okay, no surprises. This, too, had had a mobile home on it that had burned down—and it was fairly well cleaned up. A lot of yuccas and quite a few decorative rocks, landscaping, still remained. Oh, and a deck overlooking the lower part of the property.

And I do mean “lower.” Decently level for a bit, then it dropped. Yikes. And beggar’s lice—oh, my. I was covered from boot to hip; my laces looked like dreadlocks! The worst part, though, was the neighbor. Not that we met them, I’m sure they’re perfectly nice, but we could HEAR them. Mower, power tools, whatever, all the way to the middle of the property, or close to that, we could still hear them. No, thanks.

Back to the drawing board!

However.

In a couple weeks, we’re heading out about three hours—a little farther than we’d planned. There’s this one property, the one I mentioned a while back, with a cave. THIS time, I’m studying topo maps! Besides this one, which, I’ll admit, I immediately thought “this is IT!” when I first found it, there are several others. So it’ll be a two-day jaunt.

Can’t wait!

It occurs to me that many, many people are in the process of writing a book. Now, I’ve said repeatedly that not everyone should do that, and I’ll stand by those words.

See, there are storytellers, and there are writers. Often, very often, people have both of those skills. Sometimes they don’t. You may have the ability to verbally tell an interesting, funny, or engaging story, but that doesn’t mean you have the ability to put it down on paper in the same interesting, funny, or engaging manner.

Sometimes, too, a person might tell a story and hear, “Oh, you should write a book!” That’s nice, but writing a book is a lot of work—and, here’s the catch, the average-sized novel runs around 80K words or even more. That’s a really long story to tell, so unless you can stretch out that 10-minute version, you might be in trouble if you try to turn it into an actual manuscript.

The third point in today’s lesson, boys and girls, is that you also have to master the mechanics of writing:

Use the Oxford comma.

Do not leave two spaces between sentences.

Do not even argue with me about these two things.

Do not capitalize random words.

Learn the difference between “Mom” and “my mom.”

For heaven’s sake, learn about comma usage.

Will you screw up? Sure, we all do. But a consistent “my Mom” or “the Minister” or “the Author wrote a Book” is going to irritate your readers.

And you know what else? If you do these things on social media posts or blogs or wherever, I’m NOT going to want to read anything you’ve written. I doubt I’m the only one . . .

So here’s the list, if you want to be a writer:

Learn your craft.

Practice every day.

Make sure you have enough things to say—original, not repetitious.

If you don’t know how to do or spell something, ask. Or Google.

And finally, a few nuggets of writerly wisdom:

It’s okay to only write when inspiration strikes.

It’s okay to make out a grocery list and include that in your daily word count.

It’s okay not to have a daily word count.

It’s okay to type, or use Dragon, or write longhand.

It’s okay to write a short story. Or a poem. Or a series. Or a sequel.

None of the things on this final list make you a writer—or not. All of these things are highly individual, unique to you as a writer. It’s all the rest that makes you a writer—learning, mastering, telling an interesting story.