Season Finale

Uh-oh.

Season Finale

Happy one year anniversary! It's been a full trip around the sun since I started this adventure in weekly proselyteizing. I usually end the month with a fiction story, but this one’s gonna be a little different.

I’ve been writing stories since I was at least five years old. The first one I distinctly remember writing was when my kindergarten teacher plucked me up one day, and asked me dictate a story to her (I would add my own drawings to the story later). I had no idea this was coming, was totally unprepared, and improv’d the first thing that came off the top of my head. To my surprise, that story was printed at the end of the year in the school's Creative Writing packet, and distributed to the parents. Mine was the story that represented the kindergarteners.

And now, for the first time in forty-five years, this rare, out-of-print story will finally be reprinted for the first time.

Please enjoy.

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THE BIRD I SAW

by John Patrick Nelson

One day I was outside in my backyard. I saw a bird in his nest. She was feeding her babies. The daddy bird was sleeping. The babies were chirping. After their lunch they flew away.

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Pretty amazing, I know. And what a plot twist, the bird changing sexes midway through the narrative, huh? I should claim that was a metaphor, so I can be accused of being too woke. Having not read this in decades, I appreciate the clipped, direct language, no fat, just a picture being painted with the minimum verbiage. Shits is practically Hemingway. Even has an air of sadness at the end, but tinged with optimism - the birds fly away, but they're still together.

This story actually had quite a firm ground in reality, as I was thinking of the actual birds in the actual tree in my backyard, and my mom quite often did the dinner prep, while my dad, at the time a victim of untreated sleep apnea, took a nap. “The daddy bird was sleeping,” was my family’s favorite line of the whole thing, and it delighted my mom even unto her death. It might be her favorite thing I’ve ever written, so you could say I peaked early.

As I say, this might indeed have been my first time writing a story, and not only writing it, but performing it as well, as I thought it up on the fly for the teacher to write down. Freeze that moment in amber, and fast-forward it right up to this moment, as I riff off a script I’ve written (which you can click here to listen to), and you can see how it might’ve set the course of my life. From that moment on, I wanted to be a writer of something. I just wasn’t sure what. When I was a kid, it was comics, when I was a teenager, it was novels. By the time I got to college, I wanted to write for the stage, by the time I graduated, I wanted to write for the movies.

Like most writers, ideas just kinda pop into my head, quite often a vague half-notion, a total fart of a thing. And these ideas hang there in my brain pan, a little floating bit of fuzz. Doesn't take up much room, just a little puff, drifting through the haze.

Some of those ideas, they start to gather like snowballs. One idea leads to another. One notion adds a layer. Bits of dialogue start to form. Sometimes, these ideas get aggressive. They start to move, and bounce off other ideas, and ricochet, and build up. When those ideas get big enough, that tends to be when I can pluck one of them out of my brain, and start writing.

I always wrote as a teenager, but it was irregular. Lots of stops and starts. When I got into Comedy Corner in college, that taught me the priority of finishing things, as we had a weekly deadline of sixty minutes to fill. Not everything I wrote was a winner, but y'know, some of it was okay, and every so often, there was something genuinely good.

And that carried over to life in Hollywood. My output those first few years, David E. Kelley might have even said, "Oh. Nice. Good start. Now go away, I don’t have any change." I was writing constantly, hours a day after work (no wife or child or money to spend made this much easier). And for some reason, I had this thing about writing a first draft of a script in two weeks. It's a dumb, completely arbitrary and not very helpful goal, but it was how I did things. Shit that first draft out, clean up the mess later. And sometimes it worked. To this day, when I'm working on something, I set the same goal I set back then: ten pages a day. Many days, I can still hit that goal. I'm not saying it's a good idea, I'm just saying that's a thing I do.

Well, skip ahead a few years. I've been a professional writer off and on, and am now a professional TV editor, where I make most of my living. So the writing became more sporadic. Every so often, I have a burst of creativity and bleed something out of me; a script, a short story. But I'm a father and husband now, so my time is more rarified. And so, writing things down less, those little puffy ideas began to accumulate in my head.

When I was writing for comedy groups, even if we only performed to an audience of five people (which did happen once), that’s five people that saw it, took it into their eyes and brains, and could maybe at a later date, say under oath that they saw something I wrote. The Popcorn Fiction stories got read by all the cool kids in Hollywood. The scripts got read mostly by assistants, but for a minute, it was every assistant in Hollywood.

But when I'm not sending ideas into the world, and they have nowhere to go, and no one to read them, all they can do is start to accumulate, and take up space. All those little balls of fuzz bouncing around in my head, all trying to grab my attention. "Write me down!" they say. "Make me a story!" When I write regularly, and pull the ideas from my head, they tend to stay out. They've been preserved in written form, and it's as if the idea says, "ahhhh, I have been given life. Now I may rest," and it stops ricocheting around my skull. Even if I write it badly, the idea is out of my head and in a computer file somewhere, so my subconscious is no longer afraid I'll forget about it. When I'm writing regularly, it tends to clear my head that way.

But after years of irregular output, ideas had begun to build up. And ricochet. And after awhile, all these ideas in my head, pinging back and forth, it kinda started to build, like plaque. Newer ideas had a harder time gestating with all these old ideas elbowing them out of the way. The old ideas started to codify, to grow stale, to calcify. I shit you not, when some of those old rocks of ideas ricocheted, it started to hurt my brain.

So in a lot of ways, I really needed to clear my head, to let newer and hopefully better ideas take their place.

Then, last year, I turned fifty. And for some reason, that really put the fear in me. Until then, I could tell myself, I had all kinds of time. The writing could wait, there was other stuff needed to get done first. But, then I hit fifty, and as Sylvester Stallone has said, "There's only so many bullets left in the gun." The longer I waited to write this stuff, the less chance of it getting written at all. And that really hit me hard. But I had no idea where to start. A weekly blog? A podcast? A fiction site?

Then, as I've recounted many times, I started listening to "The Glass Teat" by Harlan Ellison.

Here was this guy, blasting off his opinion, as if anybody gave a fuck. I’m sure people did give a fuck, he was Harlan Ellison after all. But the crazy thing was, he was a moderately popular sci-fi writer writing for an underground newspaper that was constantly going in and out of business. And he didn’t seem to care, he just ASSUMED somebody would read it.

Well, sauce for the goose, figures I.

And suddenly, it all took form. A column AND a podcast AND a fiction site. Write a weekly column, or a blog, or whatever the fuck you'd call it these days. Just write a bunch, and every so often, jam one of your stories in. That way, anyone who likes the column might try the fiction, and vice-versa. Somebody likes one and not the other, they have options.

This would force me to produce, to kick the old ideas out of my skull. I set a lofty goal for myself, once a week, a brand-new column, for a year. And once a month, a short story. My goal was fifty columns. Fifty years old, fifty columns. At ten pages average apiece, that's, say, five hundred pages in a year. Said like that, it seemed a little crazy to me. I hadn’t written quite that much in awhile. Novelists do it all the time, I countered my inner coward, that’s not even a year’s work for a prolific writer. Still scared me, though.

But damn, it happened.

I wrote the first column. It was kinda fun.

That gave me the idea for a second, so I quickly blasted that one out.

A third occurred during the writing of the second. And a fourth during the third. Columns started multiplying.

Before I went to record the first podcast, I'd written thousands of words. And writing the column opened the gates for more stories and scripts. And the podcast has been a hoot. I enjoy recording it, and when I get the chance to insert a story that Craig Sechler has so, so generously recorded for me, it blows my mind like nothing else.

(I'll tell you a secret, I even started this piece in that initial burst of creativity. I wrote some of it, set it aside, hoping that one day I'd have the balls to come back to it, and share my fear of getting it started.)

So what does this mean, John? You hit the magic fifty, congrats, I guess. But your vague tone hints at changes to come, so what're we actually talking about?

Yeah, it’s true, I’m about to hit you with, “it’s not you, it’s me” vibes.

Turns out, doing a weekly column in both written and audio form is a shitload of work. Especially the podcasting part. I didn't mind, because it was fun, and I was getting a lot done. And for the first few months, I actually stayed ahead. I usually had about three to four episodes in the can, and if something happened one week to upset the applecart, I could pretty easily get back on track.

But, y'know, a few upset applecarts later, and suddenly, I wasn't ahead anymore, so much as racing to keep up, laying the track as the locomotive barreled behind. There were a couple of near misses (as you saw a few weeks ago when I took ill right when I’d procrastinated recording the podcast), but I’d promised myself, no rest ‘til fifty. And somehow, it got done.

But now that we're here, I think it's time for the train to pull to a rest, while I take some time to lay the track. Call this the Season One finale. I'm going to take a little break and kick some newer ideas around that have popped up floating in my skull, starting to ping and ricochet. My intention is to return with a second season of the column to thrill and astonish you, and perhaps using the podcast more sparingly, for things like stories and such.

But I’m always up to something - if you miss hearing my voice, you can always listen to my other podcasts, The Hold Up and Sensory Overload, as they continue every month!

As always, thank you for reading this - if you want to get ahold of me, you can either comment below, email me at the thebookofjohnpodcast@gmail.com, or go to www.thebookofjohnpodcast.com - where you can click on any of the links to my social medias.

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