For the last 6-8 weeks, I’ve been poring through microfilm of newspapers and magazines from the ’50s … reading books about the lynching of Emmett Till and the urban renewal of Chicago’s South Side … surfing the Web for articles about long-forgotten radio DJs … and doing various other things that add up to research for writing a novel.

I’m trying to fill my imagination so full of facts that said imagination starts spilling out what-ifs. The what-ifs are the beginning of the dream that will become my fictional world.

After a while, if things go the way I hope, my dream world will become at least as real to me as my “real” world. My characters will begin to breathe, take on a life of their own, and start doing what they want to do, not what I want them to do.

(This really happens. Ask any novelist.)

The more I write, the more the dream will deepen. There may be times when I’m talking to you that I seem dazed. The reason is, my mind will have slipped me back into the dream world and, at that moment, I’ll be more in that world than I am in your world. I apologize in advance.

I apologize specifically to My Agent Michele, who asked weeks ago for a precís or outline of this novel. She hasn’t seen one yet because, frankly, when she requested it, I myself did not know what the story would be. I had the broad outlines in mind but hadn’t filled in the blanks. I needed to do research and to muse, to take long, aimless walks while my unconscious played around with the building-blocks of research, until hopefully my mind reassembled them into some sort of structure.

That hasn’t happened entirely. The old minderino still is bubbling with questions and unsolved problems. But more than a few are now solved — hopefully enough of them so I can write that outline at last.

Now my principal task (after writing the outline) is to keep the dream alive — by writing every day, without fail, first thing after morning coffee. I can’t allow the dream to flicker. In the past, I’ve let that happen with other projects and it has cost me dearly. It is the worst mistake a novelist can make.

Yesterday morning I started writing the first chapter of the second novel in the “Chicago Trilogy,” tentatively titled To Walk Humbly. Even though the outline isn’t yet written, I now know enough that I am able to open the door and step into the dream.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Many many of you have expressed your delight in this blog. For that I’m deeply grateful although slightly astonished. After all, I started it purely as a way to market my first novel, To Love Mercy. Others probably view these posts as a pain in the blog.

Anyway, I have slightly bad news for blog fans (though perhaps good news for the rest of you): I need to stop posting on a regular weekly schedule, at least while I’m trying to plunge into the dream. You’ll still hear from me, but as the mood strikes, not once a week. When I’ve finished a first draft, I’ll likely start posting weekly again.

Last Thursday, Dr. Connell gave me a knee brace. My anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) was shot, he informed me. I was miffed.

A few months back, I’d gone to Doc with pain I thought was related to prior back surgery. Nothing wrong with your back, he said: You have bursitis in your hip; I might could fix it with a few cortisone shots. I was miffed again.

The cortisone worked but not entirely, or so I thought. I went back with my complaints but Doc said no, fool, I’ve cured the bursitis. Now you have tendinitis in your tushie and how’s about some physical therapy?

Fine, I said, miffed royally, but what about this knee? It’s getting to the point that I’m having trouble walking on it, let alone play tennis.

He rocked it back and forth. It went click-click loud enough for the receptionist to hear. Hmm, no ACL, he said.

Now I was miffed beyond words. Here I’d been walking (or hobbling) around for more than 25 years under the misapprehension that you can’t play tennis, ski or lift weights – all things I’d been blithely doing – with a damaged ACL.

One can do them without a knee cartilage though. His partner had sliced out my knee cartilage around 1980, saying I could live pretty normally post-surgery if I kept my quadriceps muscles strong. Since then I’ve done leg extensions religiously – and played tennis, skied and lifted weights – although things have gotten worse.

Now Connell has the nerve to tell me what I’d been doing is impossible.

The brace is one of those big black ugly things with plastic doodads to hold your knee in place. They look like the cups that keep casters from wearing holes in the floor. I love it. I asked if I could wear it all the time. Just take it off when you shower, Connell said.

In the unlikely event that you’re still with me, let me say that there’s no interesting way to write about aches and pains. By the fourth or fifth paragraph, even I’m bored, and they’re my own aches and pains for God’s sake.

But when you get to a certain age, that’s often how cocktail-party chatter begins.

There are reasons beyond the expectable that we like to bore our friends with this stuff, the expectable being, What could be more interesting than Me?

I have contemporaries who now use canes, for example, while I’m still struggling to play tennis. I’ve discovered that regular exercise and stretching make my tennis efforts possible (or anyway plausible), so I proselytize.

My words fall on deaf ears, leaving me feeling icky.

What I think I want is to bitch-slap these people until they wake up and start taking care of themselves. What I think I want is for them to live forever.

What I really want is for me to live forever. At some level I know that’s not possible. But meanwhile, I’m embracing the brace.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. When I’m not writing blogs or fiction, I write direct marketing copy — what some unkindly call junk mail or spam. If it really were “junk,” your mailbox would empty out fast. That doesn’t happen because people still enjoy reading — and some of the most scintillating writing in America is sitting right in that mailbox of yours. Got a project in mind? Call me at 301-656-8753.

Why read a book when you can go to the movies?

Why go to the movies when you can watch TV at home?

Why watch broadcast TV when you can watch cable?

Why watch basic cable when you can watch pay cable?

Why watch HBO when you can watch a DVD?

Why watch a DVD when you can watch YouTube?

Why watch You Tube when you can go to the movies?

Why go to the movies when you can read a book?

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Why watch a play when you can go to the movies?

Why watch a movie with real actors when you can watch a cartoon?

Why watch a cartoon drawn by artists when you can watch a cartoon generated on computers?

Why watch a computer-generated cartoon when you can read the funnies?

Why read the funnies when you can read a comic book?

Why read a comic book when you can read a graphic novel?

Why read a graphic novel when you can watch a cartoon?

Why watch a cartoon when you can watch a movie with real actors?

Why watch a movie with real actors when you can watch a play with really real actors?

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Why be a poet when you can be a novelist?

Why be a novelist when you can be a graphic novelist?

Why be a graphic novelist when you can be a playwright?

Why be a playwright when you can be a screenwriter?

Why be a screewriter when you can be a director?

Why be a director when you can be an actor?

Why be an actor when you can be a star?

Why be a Paul Newman or an Angelina Jolie or a Tom Hanks, or even a Linda Hunt for God’s sake, when you can be a Mickey Mouse or a Mr. Incredible or a dancing penguin?

Why watch the damn penguin in the first place when you can watch Savion Glover, which is what the penguin is made out of?

Why be a screenwriter in the first place when you can make a DVD at home and post it on YouTube and get millions of people to watch it and thereby gain a new career as a screenwriter or a novelist or a playwright or a director or a star (Linda Hunt if you’re lucky)?

Why not be a star in the first place and write a book with a first printing of a million copies, that people buy not because it’s a great book but because your name is Jamie Lee Curtis or Madonna?

Why post a home-made DVD on YouTube when you can watch a home-made DVD on YouTube, read e-mail, do instant messaging, watch cable, watch DVDs, listen to downloaded music, listen to AM, FM, XM, all at the same time, possibly all on the same screen, have your meals brought to you (if you’re lucky), never see your friends (assuming you still have any), and eventually melt down into a little puddle of protoplasm?

Or why not just get up out of your chair, walk out the door, take a breath of spring, and see what the gods bring you?

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Movies are on my mind. My Agent Michele calls my novel To Love Mercy “cinematic”. She has sent it to Hollywood, and not just shlepper Hollywood but Brillstein-Grey, one of Hollywood’s top-tier agencies. Imagine me sucking in a breath.

P.P.S. To Love Mercy has just been awarded Honorable Mention, General Fiction, Reader Views 2006 Literary Awards. The original Reader Views review is posted at www.ReaderViews.com and also on Amazon (”Amazing Story of Race and Religion,” reviewed by Cyndy Zoch). Check it out at www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0974478539/sr=8-1/qid=ARRAY(0×5876f794)/ref=cm_rev_next/002-4146889-0300022?ie=UTF8&customer-reviews.sort%5Fby=-SubmissionDate&n=283155&s=books&customer-reviews.start=11&qid=1173619562&qid=1173619562&sr=8-1

Last week’s subject was poetry and, no surprise, people came back at me with their favorite poems. Not to be outdone, I came back with two of my favorites. I’m going to hit you with these two, but first … Joyce Dexter responded with this story:

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FRANK - This column of yours called to mind the year 1972 when, in the throes of a recent divorce, I started penning poem after poem after poem, all of which were full of angst, heartbreak and earnest soul-searching, and many of which were composed under the liberating influence of vodka and tonic. I showed a few of them to my best friends, who (being my best friends, after all) pronounced them brilliant and urged me to get them published.

One day, I saw an ad in the St. Pete Times: “AUTHORS WANTED!” And, wow - this company wanted novelists, journalists, and poets; all were welcome under its big tent. I packed up a few of my works and sent them in.

A couple of weeks later, I got a call from a guy named (I swear I’m not making this up) Harvey Harvey, who confided he’d been incredibly moved by my scribblings and invited me to join him for dinner the following week when he’d be in our area. He pulled out all the stops at the local Holiday Inn where he was staying, and where we dined lavishly on the daily special. Over dessert, he launched an intense spiel about how I owed it to mankind to ensure that my work would be available to posterity for eternity.

Alas (and I’m sure you see this coming), it turned out that Harvey Harvey represented a vanity press. Fortunately for me, I didn’t have two nickels to rub together, much less the dinero to self-publish my own volume of poetry, and so sadly and regretfully I had to decline.

Years later, when I was going through some old suitcases and boxes, I ran across those old pages, which I’d carefully tucked into plastic pages to preserve them. And after I reread them for the first time in 30 years, I did the only thing I could do: I burned them, lest I get run over by a truck and my unsuspecting heirs run across them.

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Joyce actually went on to publish some poems. She has a novel sitting in a closet too, like lots of us.

Here’s Favorite Poem #1, by Gwendolyn Brooks:

We Real Cool

THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

And Favorite #2 by e.e. cummings:

I SING OF OLAF GLAD AND BIG

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but–though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments–
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
“I will not kiss your fucking flag”

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)

but–though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation’s blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat–
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
“there is some shit I will not eat”

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.

Them’s my kind of poems.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Reminder: I’m reading Monday night at the Friendship Heights (MD) Village Center. There’s classical guitar and chatter starting at 7, and the reading starts at 7:30 — myself and poet E. Louise Beach. The event, “Café Muse”, is cosponsored by WordWorksDC (www.wordworksdc.com) and the village of Friendship Heights MD. The Village Center is in the vest-pocket park at Friendship Blvd. and N. Park Ave., off Wisconsin Ave. a few blocks north of the D.C. Line. A map is at (www.friendshipheightsmd.gov/AboutCommty.html).