I challenge you to a computer solitaire match.

My record winning time is somewhere around 1:30 with a
conventional mouse. Even with a trackpad (much harder) I’ve
clocked winning times under 1:50. Guinness Book, look out.

I’ve grokked the inner nature of the game in a way that’s
only possible when you’ve played for hours on end and
experienced that mystical moment when the hidden patterns
reveal themselves. (If the card you need is available both
in the deck and on the board, it’s almost always wisest to
play the card on the board. Playing the first card off the
deck often is essential to winning. But exhausting the deck
early probably means you’ll lose.)

When we were publishing the Federal Personnel Guide, I went
through a period of solitaire obsession wherein I
monopolized our main company computer for hours so my wife
Carol and our customer service manager Sandra had no access.
I only realized in retrospect that I’d made it impossible
for them to work. Carol and Sandra never said anything. I
wonder what they were thinking.

Oh sure, you say, big deal. Frank wastes time playing
computer solitaire, you waste time following the Redskins,
she wastes time watching Extraordinary Pregnancies, we all
waste time doing something. Point taken, but wonder why 45
minutes of computer solitaire makes me feel so icky?

It’s an addiction, is why. Stedman’s Medical Dictionary
defines addiction as: “Habitual psychological and
physiological dependence on a substance or practice beyond
one’s voluntary control.”

Add to that addiction’s utter uselessness and
self-destructiveness. Unless you take my bet and let me win
a few bucks, that’s about right. Computer solitaire has cost
me months, maybe years, of time I could have spent making
love, making money, or (here it comes) making fiction.

See, writing a novel is the biggest invitation to
procrastination there ever was. Sitting in front of a blank
screen making stuff up takes its toll. Unless you’re cookin’
(doesn’t happen too often), it’s almost always easier to
check e-mail or your stocks, get a snack or … play
solitaire. Back in the Day, novelists sharpened pencils. Now
we’re in the computer age though, so God or the Devil has
brought us something to do at the keyboard that, like pencil-
sharpening, appears to be useful work but, like pencil-
sharpening, isn’t.

I am discovering that the only remedy for this (not
surprisingly) is to write. It usually takes at least a few
minutes, and sometimes a lot more, to write your way back
into your story. Once you’re there, though, the juices often
resume their flow. You get ideas, you get excited, you try
stuff, maybe your characters even pull a fast one on you,
doing or saying something you didn’t expect. That’s the
coolest thing.

Carol has suggested another remedy, that I simply unload the
solitaire program off my computer. When pigs fly.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. My November Chicago trip so far includes appearances at
Barnes & Noble-Village Crossing, Skokie, and public
libraries in Homewood, Skokie, Schaumburg and Arlington
Heights. More appearances are being added. Check them out at
http://tolovemercy.com/frank_joseph_appearances.html

Thanks to the miracles of technology, I paid a visit last night to Jason Bourne a/k/a Matt Damon.

You’ll never see a more technologically advanced motion picture (well, you probably will, and probably in a few months’ time at that), but I walked out feeling nothing. It was like watching a chess game — interesting to observe the feints and thrusts, but no emotional connection to the characters.

Also, I didn’t know what the stakes were until the end (they turned out to be the well-being of the free world). The stakes undoubtedly had been conveyed early on but I’d missed them somehow amid the jump-cuts and flash-frames and jittery camera shots. As the credits were rolling, I asked my daughter Shawn about some of what I’d missed (yes, there comes a day when your adult children choose to be with you just because they like you). ‘Didn’t you see the first two?’ she responded.

Well. No, I didn’t, and I certainly agree it would have been better if I had. But I take the position that a sequel should stand on its own without depending on reference to the prior work. That, as it happens, is my biggest challenge in the novel I’m currently writing, working title “To Walk Humbly.”

To Walk Humbly (referred to hereinafter as TWH) is a sequel to my first novel To Love Mercy (TLM). TLM was about a white Jewish boy named Steve who encounters a black Evangelical boy nicknamed Sass in Chicago in 1948. Its plot turns on a MacGuffin*, a precious silver talisman fashioned by Steve’s great-great-grandfather. Steve and Sass were 10 and 11 years old in TLM. TWH picks up their lives four years later and entering high school and, again, the plot turns on the silver thing.

So I’ve got a lot of explaining to do. The challenge is to do the explaining in such a way that you, Dear Reader, learn the minutes of the last meeting without getting irritated with me, the Dear Author, for burdening you with them.

I’ve been dealing with this problem by having various characters reveal little bits of the past here and there. Steve and Sass will meet again in Part II and try to resume their aborted friendship. When they meet, I plan to fill in the remaining blanks about their shared history.

I’ve written about 110 pages of TWH — Section I plus two chapters of Section II. I was so concerned about whether it stands alone that I signed up for a Writer’s Center workshop for critique by people who had no prior exposure to TLM. This group gave me very positive feedback, I’m delighted to report, while spotting certain issues and shortcomings.

The best thing I got from them, though, was what they didn’t give me — flak about whether TWH stands alone. The subject didn’t even arise until a half-hour into the discussion, and then it wasn’t a serious concern.

So my advice to Jason Bourne is: If you’re planning to show up on screen a fourth time (and surely you are), work a little harder on having the movie make sense in its own terms. And see if you can fashion a character or two I can care about.

*MacGuffin: An otherwise meaningless thing or notion on which the plot turns — Alfred Hitchcock.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Read the first chapter of To Walk Humbly at http://frankjoseph.com.

P.P.S. And read the first chapter-and-a-half of To Love Mercy at http://tolovemercy.com/to_love_mercy_excerpt.html
P.P.P.S. Chicago in November! I’ll be at Barnes & Nobles in Skokie and Vernon Hills, public libraries in Homewood, Skokie, Arlington Heights and Schaumburg, at least two high schools and one middle school, and the annual meeting of the Illinois School Library & Media Assn. More appearances are being added right along. They’ll be posted on our website in a few days. I’ll keep y’all posted.