Writer's Notebook - James Rafferty Blog

Writer's Notebook: Creative Blogs

It's been a busy Fall for me and I've been enjoying the transition from the summer here in southeastern Massachusetts.  I got back from a trip last weekend and discovered, much to my surprise and delight, that my friend Pat Bertram, author of Bertram's Blog, had been nominated for a Kreativ Blogger award for her blog AND passed the nomination for that same award and recognition to this blog.  

The award looks like this:  

I'm very pleased to be nominated for this award and it's much more meaningful when it comes from Pat, a blogger and writer who has done a remarkable job in the blogosphere and other social media in leading discussions about writing in a way that builds community among writers and helps us all get better at what we do.  

About six months ago, I recast this blog to focus primarily about writing and travel, with occasional forays into other areas such as personal technology and music.  I still find it hard to make the time to post regularly, but I'll continue to post when I've got thoughts, pictures or other cool discoveries to share.  So, to Pat Bertram and Bertram's Blog, thank you very much.  

Now for the fun part -- passing on the nomination to three other deserving recipients. My stint in the blogosphere has included lots of interaction with both the community of fiction writers and with my many colleagues in the telecommunications industry.  I blog on matters related to Voice over IP for the Dialogic Corporate Blog and like the split of keeping my business blogging mostly separate from this more personally focused blog. 

So what do I like in a blog?  I like people who are innovative and use their diverse backgrounds and expertise to comment on topics in multiple areas, bringing new insights from these connections.  

With that in mind, I'd like to nominate the following blogs for the Kreativ Blogger award:  

Fractals of Change - written by Tom Evslin - I've known Tom since we worked together on fax standards in the early Nineties and he's had a fascinating career and so-called retirement in the time since.  After leaving his post as CEO of Voice over IP startup ITXC, Tom launched his blog.  He comments on a broad range of topics ranging from the high tech world to public policy.  Like me, he is also a writer and self-published a novel a couple of years ago.  His is a fine blog that I enjoy even when his busy real life reduces the number of posts.  

Communications - written by Brough Turner - I've known Brough over ten years and he has typically brought keen insight and a unique slant to whatever catches his eye.  This past year, we've worked together at Dialogic, and it has been fun to be able to talk without the constraint of being competitors in the workplace.  In his blog, he tracks topics such as the pace of broadband development throughout the world and the social implications as people from third world countries suddenly have tools that connect them with the rest of the world.    

Coming full circle, the third blog I'd like to recognize is from a writer that I've gotten to know over the past two years from our online writing group on Gather.com.  The blog is The Paper Tiger, by Other Lisa aka Lisa Brackmann.  Lisa blogs about writing, her cats, life in Venice, California and, most of all, about her many visits to mainland China.  Lisa is a fine writer and her first novel Rock Paper Tiger, set in China, is due out next spring.  In her blog, we get a current view about what's happening in China for real people in places such as bars, restaurants, museums and so on.  It's not political so much as chronicle.  Lisa offers fascinating glimpses from a western perspective into an often hidden country. 

So, I hope my readers will take a moment to check out these blogs and see if you like what you read.  Please let me know what you think or if there are other blogs you think are a good fit for the creative blog criteria I outlined.  Until the next time  . . .

Writer's Notebook: Road Trip

Road trip.  The very words still set me a-tingle.  This summer has been a time of several trips and I've seen a lot, ranging from mountain vistas to vineyards to tossing seas.  As a writer, I've always mined my trips for material and one of my favorite things to do in a novel or short story is to take the reader to a place that I've been and try to bring it to life.  Set the scene, paint the details, sketch the moment.  Ah, that's part of the joy of writing.  

Tomorrow I go on my most common type of roadtrip, an airplane trip where I do a flyover of the countryside.  You see a lot less during the trip itself, but I find the many hours aloft are a fine time to dive into the details of writing extended scenes with few distractions.  I do most of this kind of writing longhand, which is highly portable and can be done at any time during the flight.   No need to boot the looseleaf notebook or close the pages just because the pilot wants to land.  

My last few trips were on the road.  I took my oldest son to college in western North Carolina recently and he and I drove through ten states over two and one-half days.  For me, the new places were in the middle:  Route 81 crosses from Pennsylvania into Maryland, West Virginia and Virginia in short succession.  

We started the second day in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the very name a harbinger of what was to come.  For on that day, we started in a rainstorm, then cleared a mountain passage on Route 78 and watched at the clouds broke, revealing the road which lay in front of us.   Within an two hours, the clouds had vanished and sun accompanied us for the rest of the trip.  

Around lunch time, we passed into West Virginia and decided to look for lunch in Martinsburg.  My wife family had settled in that area about 300 years ago, so we were curious about the town.   We drove through a residential area for about 10 minutes and began to wonder where the town center was, but finally discovered it.  The local architecture is beautiful, a mix of art deco and victorian styles, without a lot of more modern changes.  Here are a couple of samples of what we saw: 

After lunch at a Mexican restaurant downtown, we explored further -- the railroad station was just a few blocks away.   Martinsburg has a heritage of railroads and we saw an example in the roundhouse that was just across the tracks from the more recently modernized station.  

 

As all railroad buffs know, the roundhouse is where you would turn around the train in order to be able to change directions and go onto another track.  A much smaller example is found in San Francisco with their cable cars, but I'd never seen a fully enclosed building for this purpose.  Martinsburg clearly does not have a booming economy, but the people were very friendly and opened up when we mentioned the existance of family in the area.  

The road trip continued.  Our most spectacular day was on Friday morning, as we rode from Roanoke, Virginia to Tennesee and then into western North Carolina.  Here are a couple of glimpses of our vantage points:  

 

The mountains awed us as new scenes leaped up after each turn.   The two samples here are just examples of the many beauties to be seen on a drive through the Blue Ridge Mountains.  

I recently mentioned to my writing friends how remarkable I found these mountain vistas to be.  I have a feeling I'll be seeing mountains jumping into my fiction very soon.   And now, time for that next road trip.  

Writer's Notebook: Songs about Ireland

As readers of this blog know, I love to write fiction.  One of my other huge interests is music and from time to time I write songs. The reason I bring it up is that I'll be playing this weekend at an open mic night in Medfield, Massachusetts at North Street Coffeehouse.  

For the occasion, I've decided to play the two songs I wrote about my travels in Ireland.  As you might expect for a writer, there's a story behind each song.  Twenty-two years ago, I took my first trip to the isle and loved the unique character of its towns and villages.  I also had heard about Irish music, but the scene at small clubs just amazed me.  In place after place, musicians would gather in a corner and play a wide variety of Celtic music.  This was my real introduction to the Celtic sound and I couldn't get enough of it.  I thought about my experiences for quite a while, then I sat down and started to write a song.  The result was Irish Man.  I recorded a version for a song contest last year and you can hear it here on Gather.com.  

Last summer, I went to Ireland again, this time on a business trip to an area southwest of Dublin.  On the first trip, I hadn't spent much time in Dublin, so I made a point of taking a bus into town and checking it out.  Ireland had changed a lot since my first visit and Dublin is at the epicenter of the economic changes going on.  In Europe, the phrase they use to describe Ireland is the Celtic Tiger.  By the time I arrived, Ireland was beginning to feel it's own downturn, but the economy was still much stronger than what I'd seen on the first visit.  Dublin is a great walking city and I wrote about my walk through parts of town in another post here.  The city is steeped in history and in strolling from place to place, I kept running into references to the many writers who had lived and gone to school in Dublin.  I wanted to capture a bit of that, and that became the nugget for another song.   About a month ago, I decided the time and had and started writing words.  Perhaps thirty minutes later, I had all of the music and my first pass at the lyrics.  The song is called Dublin Walk and builds on the impressions built up by several walks through the city that week. 

I've played Irish Man in public many times, including once earlier this summer for a church group.  But this will be the first time I've played Dublin Walk for anybody other than my family.   I'm looking forward to it.  If you're in the area, stop by.   As an added bonus, my son has a band and they also will be playing.  The last time I went to this coffeehouse, we had a great night listening to all of the local talent and the headlining act.   This should be fun.  

Time to Celebrate

This weekend has been a special one for my family.  My oldest son is graduating from high school and he and his classmates are getting ready to take the big leap forward into the next stages of their lives. 

I moved to Massachusetts almost ten years ago and my son has had most of his formative experiences here.  His graduation is a genuine milestone in his life and in ours.  Next year he'll be away from us at college and life will be different for us, his parents, and for his younger brother.  But for now, we are all still together and are very proud of how our oldest son has developed into a unique individual who is ready to take this next step.  

Modern life passes by too quickly and we are often in too much of a rush to get to the next place.  But when good things happen, we cheat ourselves and our loved ones if we don't take the time to celebrate, both the large triumphs and the small ones.  So the theme of the past few weeks for our family has been celebration -- of my son's graduation and looking back with pride on extracurricular activities such as his scouting career, which culiminated at a high point with an amazing hiking trip at the Philmont Ranch in New Mexico and with the attainment of the rank of Eagle Scout.  

Last weekend, the council in Southeast Massachusetts had a dinner for all of the Eagle scouts from the past year, commemorating their achievement.  I was privileged to be there with my son and hear each scout talk about their Eagle scout projects.   We hear a lot of bad news about young people, but there was none of that here.  Each Eagle scout project involves community service and typically has the scout leading a team of other scouts -- not to mention family and friends -- on an approved project whose cumumulative hours usually exceed one hundred.  

My son's project was no exception.  He and the other scouts ripped out overgrown shrubbery in front of our local church, then totally re-did the landscaping by planting new shrubs and laying a bed of mulch.  Like in real life, the goal line moved a couple of times, but my son kept at it until the church's board of trustees signed off.  My son did many other things in his high school career after the Eagle project, but the lessons of working hard and leading creatively permeated much of what followed.  So, this weekend is all about celebration and rites of passage.  Soon enough the new adventure will begin.