In this episode, I start out with an invaluable writing tip for long works. While writing the first draft, you don’t want to stop for research and such. You can use Find and Replace to locate bookmarked spots where work is needed. You can put the word BOOKMARK or something of your own choosing. You can also do RESEARCH, TIMELINE, and others as needed. It’s crazy what authors Google search when writing a book. “Erase my search history if I die” is a meme. If you have any questions about this, drop me a line.
Next, I talk about how people who text you in error don’t believe you when you say they have the wrong number. I give a couple anecdotes of this happening to me. It’s very frustrating. I live in cocaine country, and I thought someone was trying to get hold of their dealer, but they really wanted the Avon lady!
I watched the Grammy’s for the first time in decades. There was no Gaga or Kanye, thank God. There was Katy Perry and T-Swift, though. Katy Perry had 226 cliches on her last album. Wow. No wonder she sounds generic. That fact was from Gawker. Now everybody lip syncs, but they are sneaky because they record new “live” versions for them to lip sync to so it sounds live. Some of them that actually do sing use a prerecorded tape to sing along with. Willie Nelson and Kristofferson really sang, and their voices were stronger than Pharell’s.
I read “Call of the Wild” by Jack London. I decided to just go through the Wiki page because it was full of interesting information. Sorry to use the crutch, but that’s what they do on talk radio, right? I did read the book, though. It came out as serialized fiction in 1903. I think writing it like that might make them pack it full of things that happen.
The book starts out with a dog named Buck in California. The Klondike Gold Rush is going on and sled dogs are in demand. Buck gets stolen by the gardener’s assistant. “Atavistic” comes up a lot and it means returning to something primal inside. Hunter Thompson uses that word a lot. Buck turns into a killing machine by the end of the book.
I interrupt with a discussion of how cold it is here in Northern Mexico/Southern Texas.
Buck gets shipped to Seattle in a crate, then gets beaten with a club by a man in a red sweater. He learns ‘the law of the club’. Buck is a huge dog like Cujo. Buck gets sold to two French-Canadians and they take him to the Klondike. Buck enters a pack society of sled dogs. There is a leader named Spitz, and Buck eventually defeats him and the pack rips him apart. It’s a brutal book.
I liked the writing style. It’s formal, but simple. The descriptions of instinct were very good.
The whole pack gets sold to haul mail to mining camps. Buck gets stronger. Then they get sold to a trio of idiots who don’t know what they are doing. They are just there for the gold rush. Buck refuses to pull them after a while and a man named John Thornton takes custody of him. The idiots fall into a river and drown with the rest of the pack.
Thornton and Buck fall in love with each other. Buck wins a bet for him by pulling a huge sled out of the ice. Buck starts going out on sojourns with a wild wolf and getting really atavistic. One day he comes back to camp and his master has been killed by natives. Buck rips their throats out. He becomes a legend to the natives, called the “Ghost Dog”.
Jack London was a hobo, which reminded me of a Whitesnake song. Hobo is not a good word to use in a rock song. He got scurvy and his gums swelled up, so he returned to California. He sold his first story to “Cosmo” magazine. “Call of the Wild” was printed in the “Saturday Evening Post”. Some people thought London was a dog whisperer, but he wasn’t really. The story is an allegory.
Next, I talk about Peter Freuchen. He is a giant who looks like Mick Fleetwood. He has a fur coat and a peg leg and is probably the most interesting man in the world. His gal was named Dagmar, which is a great name, and she was pretty interesting, too. She was a margarine heiress. Freuchen did lots of interesting things like fight Nazi’s and cut himself out of a snow cave with a feces knife. He even won the $64K question on the early game show.
On this day in 1978, Van Halen’s first single was released, and it was a high water mark in the history of teenage boys. I talk about how much I love Van Halen and Eddie’s ‘brown’ sound.
My website is www.PaperbackRocker.com. You can find the podcast archives there. Find my books on Amazon by searching my name, Matt Syverson. [email protected]. Thanks for listening!