I have reached the level of self-importance that I no longer write, but instead sift through past writing. April, 2015 marks a decade of the Big Ring Circus, a blog that began about mocking close friends on bicycles and became a tale of an inner child’s love for the wild outdoors, and a battle for daily freedom from the expectations of adult life. These posts at their best are cryptic little postcards from a space in time, a magic intersection of circumstances. At their worst they are lollygagging ramblings that served to postpone work, rides, or major life decisions.
I have accomplished a few things in my life, including being found again by a girl that I lost on Corvette St. in 1984. I adopted an apricot poodle, lost my work from home lifestyle, and made a desk from a sheet of plywood. Along with those achievements I logged 2160 pages, double spaced, 12 pt font. I managed to download and convert the entire thing to an editable format, and there it stops for now. What I want for Christmas is time. Time to think. Time to ride. Time to slash 2160 pages down to about 100, or 10, or 2. I am proud of many things I have done in the last decade, and equally discouraged by others. those are the stories I now want to unearth, spit-polish, and sell the masses for big, big money. Like sick, buy a new chamois kind of money.
I’ll probably just give it away though.
Juancho
May this be so.
Like a smile on a rainy day. Love this…love you.
Peace
B
You are not only Important (notice Beth-style caps) but a Goddamned Writer (notice profane speech great-granddad style). Excuse me, but your worst blog post is better than writing I see elsewhere on a daily basis. And while I’m not Important, I *am* an editor and proofreader who deals with really bad writing on a pretty steady basis. And, no, I’m not saying this because I am your mother’s sister and therefore the Aunt of an Important Person. So, now that we have that out of the way, here’s what I think: I think you’re dreaming if you think that as many as 2,060 of those pages are throwaways. Sorry, it’s not going to be that easy. And sorry again, but, yes, it will take time. For fully seven of those ten years you’ve been writing, I’ve been writing (loosely speaking) a memoir about your granddad. Total unedited pages to date: 12. This disqualifies me as any kind of writer at all. Like it or not, the torch has been passed to you. So before you trash any of those cryptic little postcards, just realize they are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle of your life–and not only yours, but the lives of the people you write about. It’s easier than ever now to self-publish your work. At least you can count on your family and friends to buy it. And if in the end you decide to give it away and forego the book tour circuit, not to mention fame and fortune, well that won’t surprise me. It would be a Juancho thing to do. But it just might be what the world needs to put life back into a better perspective. After all, that’s what you’ve been doing this last decade, not just for you but for the rest of us. I have spoken. Amen.
Cutting two thousand pages down to one hundred would be a major undertaking (if it were the Old Testament, you’d be losing all the death, destruction and adultery, at a minimum). Maybe it’s asking too much; why not five hundred or a thousand? Are you saying you have that much dreck that you can jettison eighty percent of what you’ve written and not be dumping shit you should’ve kept? Elevate your sights a little lower, mi amigo.
The thing is to enjoy the process, 🙂
Yours is indeed an accomplishment to be celebrated. Move forward one page at a time and see where it leads. There may be more than one book to be published, each in its own time. I am very proud of you for following your dream to be a writer. You learned to cook for yourself, live frugal, waited for the right woman to come back in your life at the right time, and practiced your craft daily for over ten years. Sounds like you are indeed on the right path.
That’s a real nice perspective. Almost like I planned it.
Hey, that was me up there.
Thanks. I thought it was the hacker group Anonymous and I got excited/ nervous.
You’re going to be rich, RICH, I tell you!
I’m cutting you in on the action when I’m big time!
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
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