Armchair Zen

Thought I’d drop a line for anyone that might have wondered “Where’s Pazlo?” Though it’s not really that unusual for me to hiatus from the blog for periods of time, it seems like forever since I properly managed my main blogroll.

Many folks I’ve met through the blog are writers. (Of course there are a lot of other talents shared, but we’re talking specifically writing now).

As described in the past, I myself was drawn to blogging as an outlet for my writing Jones. I love to write, and have penned poems and radio scripts, songs and philosophical ramblings among other things, and done a lot of journaling.

An inspiration caught up with me. What was once a vague spark. One of those “someday, I’m going to write a book” things. The first idea for Armchair Zen was that it would be a scratchpad and testbed for my modern zen interpretations, a practice pad and a work in progress, that in some fantasy world would end up as something of a book. Herein, it is referred to as a “blook”. A blog that reads like a book. I think this kind of inspiration and concept is not unusual in the blogosphere.

Way back in the last century, my best human friend Jeff and I would sit at typewriters all night, all weekend, composing a variety of creative oddities. We “published” a newspaper (though I can’t quite remember the name). We wrote a long commentary-narrative about a league playing a bizarre game called “Destructoball”, in which teams tried to hand off to the other team an explosive device before it went off. (Totally inappropriate these days)

We wrote scripts for our radio series “The Adventures of Mr. Pazlo”, a sort of The Pink Panther meets Monty Python show, heavily influenced by a group called Firesign Theater. Pazlo and his partner Mr. Butto were private detectives, and the scripts loosely chased after a case which was really just fodder for a lot of one-liners. After completing the scripts, we’d spend a long, sleepless weekend recording the show, doing all the voices and sound effects and even mock commercials on our mock radio station KOMA.

For sheer volume, I think most of my writing was journaling the decade spent with my son-in-law Matt, discovering the thrills and agonies of radio-controlled aircraft flight. We taught ourselves to fly machines with 5-foot wingspans and real (glow) motors. We strapped cameras to airplanes long before Go-Pro, and created an entire world of L & B Aviation, daring bush pilots, and even named the little plastic pilots in our little balsa airplanes.

Fast forward to this post. I’ve neglected writing herein, as well as on Chowdogzen and Life In Engleville. Nor have I done much posting on my photo site Crescent Moon Studio. I started to write something, just a story, totally fiction. Not really sure what I was to do with it, but that’s pretty much my life. I have songs and poems and a story about two guys learning to fly called “Sun Dogs”, I have oil paintings and water paintings I’ve done, and all these things occupy my own little space, my homestead. An unshared creative bonanza!

Well, I’ll tell you a curious thing that has happened to me. Maybe this happens with other authors of fiction. I’m writing more or less “for myself”, for more things to add to my secreted “body of work” in my house (and on my blogs). Well, the story started slow and was a bit clunky and it didn’t matter ’cause it was “just for myself”, and I decided I would not concern myself too much with rules of writing, including story boarding. (That’s when you sketch out the whole theme or plot, to give yourself a roadmap to follow as you write). I started writing, and characters were born and developed. I kept adding and thought “maybe I’ll just treat it as a serial for now.” I’d write each chapter as I pleased, following some continuity, but with no ideas really where the story (and its characters) would go. (Actually, this is also the way the screenplay was written for that famous film Casablanca. The writers themselves were eager to find out how the story ends!)

And that’s what happened to me. Like the writers on Casablanca, I found myself wondering what would happen next. I’ve been pinned down, somewhere in Siberia, with my characters as their lives unfold before me. Whenever I finish a chapter I find myself eager to hear the next episode! I’ve been unable to put time into anything else because I desperately need to find out what happens.

In fact, right now, there’s a young man and a sled dog team that are about to be trapped many miles from home by a blizzard, so I need to wrap this up and get back to them. This is a unique and wonder-filled experience for me, and I’m having the time of my life. So, I hadn’t planned on really publicizing it much or promoting it ’cause as I said, it’s just ramble-writing for myself.

I must admit, however, that the story and the characters have grown on me. I almost miss them and worry about them when I’m gone!

So if you want to entertain yourself a bit, or discover that what I find fascinating is actually quite boring to other people, scroll down the right side of the home page to the Blogroll, and join me in the frozen lands of the Arctic, for Sasha of The Chukchi Sea.

Presently, it’s a serial without an end, so I hope you’re good at hanging patiently if you start reading the story.

More another time, on the ways some fictional characters in a fictional place have stolen my heart, and all my attention and time!

Seek peace,

Paz