Pat’s Blog
 

Photo of Pat in their library taken by
        Darlene "Bun" McManus

June 2008

   I recently received a letter from T. of Kalispell.  In it he states that as a celebration of his freedom from school, he is planning an overnighter in his backyard with three best friends.  T. and friends are all about 12 years old, and all of them have spent most, if not all, their lives in the mountains of Montana.  As host, he would really like to do this in their sleeping bags without a tent.  However, he is worried that his buddies may think differently.  He wanted to know how he could convince them otherwise.  And what advice do I have for them.

   Since summer is about here and it is a timely subject, I thought I should share my response with all prospective overnighters.

Dear T.,

   I envy you your first night adventure into the back yard!  I remember my own well, and I am happy to offer you some advice.  First of all, forget the tent.  When you hear a strange sound, it is difficult to run to the house while inside a tent.  It can be done but it cuts your speed in half.  Take food.  Nights are usually only about eight hours long but they are much longer while sleeping in the backyard and you don’t want to risk starving.  Also, make sure the path into the house is clear of all obstacles, particularly if you own a dog.  I’m sure you get the point.  If this is the first time your buddies have slept out in a backyard, they probably don’t know the basics.  So get them to sleep on each side of you.  Actually they won’t sleep at all but will lie there wide awake staring into the darkness and listening for any little sound, such as the fall of a padded foot.  This will provide you with an excellent alarm system and you should be able to get a good night’s rest.  Good luck with your first night in the back yard.

Best regards,

Pat

February 2008
   With the economy sinking like a rock, I’ve started thinking about the Great Depression, which started with the market crash of 1929. I had nothing to do with the Crash, because I wasn’t born yet. So don’t try to blame me. I made my entrance at the “bottom” of the depression, in 1933, when, as I understand it, life had gotten really tough in this country. As far as I could tell, though, my folks hadn’t even noticed we were having a depression. They had been on the bottom all along.
We had no washing machine, dryer, radio, refrigerator, running water, indoor plumbing or anything else that required electricity, because power lines would not reach our little farm until I was about eight years old, at which time we still couldn’t afford all that stuff anyway. You might think this was an extremely insecure form of existence, but it wasn’t. We could get our fuel for heating and cooking out of our own woodlot or even out of the national forests that surrounded us on almost all sides. My mother canned like crazy all during August and into the fall and my father killed more-or-less-edible wild creatures, so we almost always had something to eat. Some of our neighbors shot and ate what they called “gophers,” but which, I know now, were actually Columbian ground squirrels. Had we known they were squirrels , we might have eaten them, too.
   I remember there would be some point each fall when Mom would say something to the effect,      

   “Well, there, we can survive until next summer.” Then we would settle back and read books and pop corn and make fudge, while the winter winds piled drifts up to our eves and other places. When summer arrived again, my folks would start preparing for the next winter. It was nice, unless, of course, you were, say, five years old and had to make a trip to the outhouse by yourself on a dark and snowy night, with wolves howling in the mountains.
   Actually, I hadn’t paid much attention to the economy, maybe because I didn’t have any money vanishing in The Market. You have to have money in the markets in order to worry about it vanishing. No, what really caught my attention was that a banker friend of mine bought a chainsaw.

   That was scary. Even worse, his wife was complicit in the purchase. I could almost see their minds working: “No matter what happens now, at least we’ll be warm!” My friend is a person who knows how to add and subtract and probably even do fractions and long division, so it startled me when he bought a chainsaw. He no doubt has money in the market, and he’s the kind of guy who knows stuff about the economy.
   “Maybe we should buy a chainsaw,” I said to my wife, Bun.
   “Are you crazy!” she said, thoughtfully. “No!”
   “But if we have a depression, at least we’d be warm.”
   “Who cares if you’re warm if you’ve cut off some major body part with a chainsaw? Or even a minor one!”
   “Yeah but…” I argued.
   “No!” she said. “I don’t want to hear anything more about chainsaws!”
   “But we could sit around the fireplace in the evening and read books and pop corn and make fudge. At least we’d be warm.”
   So far I haven’t been able to get Bun to budge on the chainsaw issue. It did occur to me that I could buy a chainsaw for one of my sons-in-law, and he could cut wood in the national forest for both us and his family.
   “What’s a chainsaw?” he said.
   So I guess that’s out.

November 23, 2007

   It’s Thanksgiving again and time I paid my annual tribute to Beaky.  Beaky was my pet turkey the summer I was ten.  There was at that time a comic-book character, a turkey, by the name of Beaky, and I think that is where I got the name for my own pet turkey.

   Beaky was the only surviving member of half a dozen turkeys we somehow hatched out that year.  His brothers and sisters had each found one of the innumerable ways turkeys have to commit suicide—befriending coyotes, weasels, skunks and dogs, choking on small bugs, jumping off high places and forgetting to open their wings, that sort of thing.  Benjamin Franklin once suggested that the turkey become our national bird, but he was referring to the wild turkey, a completely different animal from the tame turkey.  My old friend Charlie Elliott, famed as both author and hunter, referred to wild turkeys as “the ultimate game.”    The domestic turkey, by contrast, is a dull fellow, who would not survive a day without human care and feeding.

   I suspect Beaky was no different from other domestic turkey’s—not to mention any names—but I took a liking to him.  At age ten, I lived a lonely existence on our tiny farm, and human friends my age were few and far between.  There was a teenager who lived across the creek from me and had sworn to kill me if he ever caught got his hands on me.  Someone had once borrowed the canoe he had built during a mere thousand hours in high-school wood shop.  For some reason, I became his number one suspect.  Still, it was nice to receive a bit of attention from someone. 

   Beaky truly liked me, however.  He would follow me around like a dog and I would throw him sticks to retrieve and he would stand there and look at me, a quizzical expression on his face.  Everybody needs a friend, and that summer I had Beaky.  He was my only source of enjoyment, he and canoeing.

   Then Thanksgiving Day arrived.  My sister (the Troll), my mother and grandmother, my Stepfather Hank and I were all seated around the dining-room table, which was reserved for special occasions.  In the middle of the table was a large golden-brown turkey.  I had no affection for turkeys in general, and I would not be surprised to learn they were my favourite food at that time of my life.  My plate was heaped with sweet-potatoes-and-marshmallows , mashed potatoes and gravy, ambrosia salad, turkey dressing, and of course, slices of turkey. 

   The Troll smiled as she watched me devour  my meal.  Then she nonchalantly said, “Beaky tastes pretty good, doesn’t he?”

   I cannot tell you the sense of horror that came over me.  I shoved back from the table and glared at Hank and Mom.  Never before had I realized that I lived in a family of cannibals!  Whoever heard of eating a person’s pet!  Mom and Hank looked embarrassed, as well they should have.  I knew that the two of them had conspired in the crime.  I fled the dining room and the house, retreating to one of the hideouts I had once shared with Beaky.  There I reflected on this sad state of affairs.  How could I ever come to grips with the fact that I lived in a family of cannibals, that Beaky would no longer be around to comfort me with his companionship, and that he did in fact  taste pretty good.  I returned to Thanksgiving dinner.   Anyway, here’s to Beaky!  May he never be forgotten!

October 20, 2007

      Herbie Getts was a couple of years older than Norm Nelson, Vern Schulze and I. Our little group was about ten on the Halloween night of which I am thinking. The major difference between us and Herbie was that we considered Halloween to be a single night. Herbie regarded it as a season.
     Long before our little Halloween outing for treats, Herbie started raiding the homes along our stretch of the highway. He didn't bother with treats be went directly to tricks. He was a purely destructive force. Outhouses were toppled, car windows waxed over, mailboxes torn off their posts, gates sabotaged. As the three of us set out on our Halloween night of trick-or-treating, Norm, Vern and I had no inkling of the rage Herbie had aroused among the neighbors.
     In the unlikelihood homeowners would fail to give us a treat, we planned to play a mean trick on them, putting a little squiggle of soap on one of their windows. We laughed uproarously over this brazen fiendishness. At the McWilliams, the home of a gruff, burly logger, we trooped up onto the porch and bravely knocked. No response. We waited, then knocked again. Already starting to draw our bars of soap, we suddenly heard the backdoor of the house open and close quietly. Someone was trying to sneak up on us! Norm and I cleared a picket fence like two gazelles and streaked off into the darkness. Vern, for some unknown reason, crouched down to hide behind a tree no more than three-feet tall.
    McWilliams caught him, of course. The sound of a gruff, angry voice, no doubt yelling at some quivering object crouched down behind a tree, drifted out to us. Norm and I were still picking up speed, so it was difficult to know what was being said. Both of us figured that was the end of Vern. Since he was our leader, we were momentarily confused as how to proceed with our trick-or-treating.
    Presently, Vern caught up with us. He had managed to persuade Mr. McWilliams, that he was innocent of all previous mischief, part of which had consisted of toppling the McWilliams' outhouse. The toppling of the privy apparently required considerable strength, it being occupied by Mr. McWilliams at the time. Herbie said later hat he understood it had been accomplished by means of a pry pole and a block of firewood used as a fulcrum, but he couldn't be positive about the facts, because he had only heard them second hand.
    Herbie had been extremely clever in covering his tracks. For one thing, someone had slipped into the Getts' garage and waxed Mr. Getts' car windows so thoroughly he was unable to drive to work the next morning. We heard about this from Herbie himself. He had seemed pleased at our amazement over the viciousness of the deed. Mr. Getts, being no fool, suspected Herbie, as we found out later, but he had no proof. As it turned out, Mr. Getts wasn't the kind of person who needed proof, and Herbie ultimately paid a penalty of some sort.
    On the night of our Halloween, however, the folks living along the highway were on the alert for any tricksters that might come their way. At one place, a big dog began to bark and tug at his chain as we approached along the driveway. The door of the house opened. We dived into a field of weeds. A man came out on the porch carrying a shotgun. His wife emerged and stood next to him. She played the beam of a flashlight over the weeds as we flattened our bodies into the earth.
    "You see anything, Pa?" the wife said.
    "Nope. There's something out there all right. If it's them Halloweeners, they's probably smart enough not to fool around here."
    He was right about that.
    Vern, Norm, and I headed home, without a single treat in our little treat bags, at least none that I can recall.
    We did one trick that night. On our way home, we decided to play a joke on a farmer who was notorious for being lazy. We thought we would cause him some work. So we hauled a number of large rocks and placed them in his driveway in such a fashion that he would have to get out of his car and move them. As were were going by on the school bus the next morning, we saw him steer in and out around the rocks without touching a single one! It was a major disappointment. Those rocks, in fact, remained in his driveway for years afterwards.
    Every Halloween I think back to that night so many years ago, the night we put the rocks in the farmer's driveway. One Halloween during a book tour I was staying at a hotel in a large American City. As I recall, the local citizens referred to Halloween as Devils Night or some such thing. I couldn't get dinner in the restaurant on the top floor of the hotel, because all the tables had been reserved. The restaurant provided the diners with a wonderful vantage point to watch the firework-namely, the local pranksters setting fire to buildings! "Ooooo! Look at that one!"
    I watched the fireworks display on TV in my hotel room. (Mostly, I wanted to make sure I didn't see my hotel featured.) Here all these years I had felt bad about putting those rocks in the farmer's driveway, even though they hadn't seemed to bother him all that much. After watching Devil's Night, I didn't feel bad anymore.

October 7, 2007
    People are always asking me if Rancid Crabtree was a real person. Yes, he was. Did I exaggerate him? No. I did not. The Russell family lived in close proximity to Rancid--maybe too close of a proximity. Mae, the mother of the Russell clan and one of my most favorite people in the whole world, once admonished me in regard to Rancid. "Pat," she said, "you cleaned him up way too much!"
    I have to plead guilty. Normally, I try to avoid stretching a fact even slightly, or varnishing up a truth, or allowing any exaggerations to creep in accidentally. There are some people, however, of such extreme personalities they require some modification, if the story is to be published in a family magazine like Outdoor Life. Also, in Rancid's case, I tried to tone him down a bit, because otherwise readers might think I invented him.
    I think it was Mae who told me that whenever she saw Rancid coming down the drive toward the Russell house, she would shout, "Quick, throw open the windows!" Mae was too kind a person to throw open the windows once Rancid arrived, because that might embarrass him. Rancid was pretty hard to embarrass, though.
    Once my friend Norm Nelson and I were going fishing with Rancid. He told us if we weren't at his place by the crack of dawn, he would leave without us. When we arrived, we found Rancid still in bed. Norm yelled at him. "Rancid, you told us to be here at the crack of dawn and here you're not even dressed yet."
    "Ah shore am," he said. When he got out of bed, we saw he was dressed right down to his boots. He grabbed his fishing pole and walked out the door. Norm and I followed. That's when it occurred to us that it was actually foolish to take your clothes off at night and then just put them back on again in the morning. We learned all kinds of good things like that from Rancid, even though our mothers wouldn't let us put them into practice.
    Norm told me recently that any time his family had fried chicken for dinner, Rancid showed up. Fried chicken was Rancid's favorite food, and he apparently could smell it all the way to his place. Norm is still upset about this half a century later. Because Rancid was a guest, the plate of chicken was always passed to him first. The old woodsman would hold his fork like a dagger and go stab stab stab and take every choice piece of chicken, lined up on his fork like shish kebab. Using his other grubby hand, he would slide the chicken pieces onto his plate. Even now the irritation rises in Norm's voice, as he remembers all the times he was left gnawing on a chicken back.
    Norm reminded me a few minutes ago of the time Rancid strangled a skunk with his bare hands. He had tried to shoot the skunk with his rifle and missed, so then he grabbed the rifle by the barrel and swung it at the skunk. He missed and hit a log, breaking the stock off the rifle. Furious, he then grabbed the skunk and tried to strangle it. The skunk fought back with its entire arsenal. The lesson all the neighbors learned from this episode is you never want to strangle a skunk with your bare hands. Furthermore, you never want to invite to dinner anyone who has done so.
    Presently on this web site I am going to post some of the pictures of many of the people I've written about over the years. One of the pictures will be of a man without any identification. Readers can guess as to what character this person represents. Does this look like a man who would strange a skunk with his bare hands? I'm not giving any clues.

October 1, 2007

     Vernon Allan Schulze passed away August 22, 2007, at age 75 years old.

  I have written at least 100 stories about Vern Schulze. Sometimes he was Crazy Eddie Muldoon, sometimes Retch Sweeney, but usually Vern himself.

  Vern was the calmest person I've ever known. You could not ask for a better camping companion when you are far back in the mountains with night closing in on you. He was almost always rock-solid calm. Whenever Vern got excited, you knew it was time to panic.

    I can't recall many times that Vern panicked. Once we came upon a fresh grizzly track up by Lake Darling. The mud was still caving in on the sides of the track, that's how fresh it was. While we were staring at the track, a grouse exploded out of the brush right next to us. When I finally caught up to Vern, I said, "It was just a grouse!" He said, "I know it was just a grouse, but I couldn't stop anyway."

    My first experience with Vern in a panic situation occurred when we were about ten. We were somewhere out in the Schulze's woods when we came upon a bunch of mounds covered with wild roses. It was a very spooky situation. Then Vern said, "I think it's an Indian graveyard." At that moment we heard a hideous noise off in the brush. The next moment I became aware of, I was out in the middle of our hayfield and still picking up speed. It occurred to me that I had crossed a barbwire fence, a ditch, a highway, another ditch, and another barbwire fence, and I hadn't noticed any of them. Vern beat me home by ten minutes. The strange thing was, we were never again able to find those mounds with the wild roses growing on top of them.

    I would like to make a clarification here about the incident Vern and Gisela always referred to as "the time Pat got lost." I wasn't lost! I knew exactly where I was. On one side was a large rock and the other, a hard place.

    Eventually Vern and Gisela's boys got old enough to go on outings with us. By then the trails had gotten a lot steeper and longer and the air a lot thinner. Wayne and Jim never seemed to notice, though, because they were ignorant of such things. They would rush ahead and start fishing the lake and every so often run back down the trail and report to Vern and me how the fish were biting. It was disgusting.

    A while back I told my wife that I would like to make one more trip into Pyramid Lake. She said, "Not unless you take someone with you who knows CPR." Vern knew CPR but would never use it on me. So I haven't been able to get back to Pyramid Lake. I would still like to go, though, because I'm pretty sure Vern is hanging around up there somewhere. 

September 1, 2007

      The reason I never get anything done is that I always have to do something else first.  And before I can do that, I have to do another thing first.  And so on.

      For example, the other day I decided to build a shelf in my garage.  Not being a person of any carpenteresque talents or knowledge or skills, I decided that the shelf would take me a whole day.  It took me four days.  I would not enter it in a woodworking contest but it is serviceable.  There’s no point of putting a work of art in your garage, I always say.  What puzzled me the most, however, was that this simple shelf took me four days to build.

      I mentioned the mystery to my friend Fenton Quagmire. Fenton carries around with him a vast fount of useful knowledge.

      "Every one-day job takes four days," he said.  "Don’t you know that?"

      Actually, I didn’t know that.  All this time I thought a one-day job took one day.  Right away, though, I realized that Fenton had provided me with a wonderful insight to the problems that confront most people and especially politicians.  Suppose I wanted to start a war.  (Don’t worry, I can’t even start an argument.)  I might think that this will be a fairly simple, straight-forward war.  At the outside, it shouldn’t take me more than a couple of years to win it.  Wrong!  According to Fenton’s formula, it will take eight years.  But then I have to apply the principle that before you do anything, you always have to do something else first, and before you do that, you have to do something else, etc.  By the time you work all the way back to the war, you will have forgotten why you wanted to hold it in the first place.

      If my war turned out to be anything like my shelf, it wouldn’t have been worth the trouble anyway.

July 1, 2007
   Let me say right off that I am happy the Fourth of July has been made safe for my grandchildren.  I would hate to see them out exploding things, by which I mean fingers, toes, noses and eyes and assorted other body parts. 
   Still, the Fourth of Julys I am remembering now, with the help of certain scars, were wonderful. Mostly what we exploded in those days were firecrackers. No doubt we had sparklers and various other sparkly things, but they are not worth remembering. Firecrackers were the thing. I think they must have been ridiculously cheap because even the poorest of the poor kids had them in major quantities. I’m thinking something like a package of 20 for a nickel.  Don’t scoff, a nickel was major money back in the 1940’s, with WWII going full blast. Perhaps it was all the daily risks and dangers and precariousness of lives during the war that parents could not be concerned about one-inch long explosives, not with 16-inch guns blasting away in the Pacific and the Normandy coast. It was a matter of proportion.
   The standard procedure for igniting a firecracker, at least when I had reached the adventurous age of ten, was to hold the firecracker between two fingers of one hand and light it with the fingers of the other hand, usually employing a glowing "punk" for the task.  As soon as the firecracker was lit, you threw it. If your reflexes were good, the cracker exploded in midair. My first and only attempt at throwing a lighted firecracker taught me that I did not have the reflexes for this particular kind of entertainment. I touched the glowing punk to the fuse and—BANG!
   In case you had a coddled childhood and therefore never had a firecracker explode between two of your fingers, I will describe the sensation. I remember it quite well, even though the experience occurred more than half a century ago. First, the blast, which comes as a major surprise, drives all the blood out of our fingers, and leaves them numb. This is good. You look at them. They are spoon-shaped and flat and black. You know instinctively that as soon as the numbness goes away, your fingers are going to provide you with a major load of HURT!
   I ran in the house and showed my mother. She looked at my fingers, shook her head, and then walked away, no doubt saying something like, "Now where did I leave that cup of coffee." The typical mother, or so I believe, never having had one, might at least have said, "Are you stupid or what? Don’t throw firecrackers!" My own mother, who was actually quite brilliant, and who regarded her only son as "slow," would have seen no point in exclaiming the obvious. She knew that even though I was slow, I would at least now have learned never ever to throw firecrackers again.
   I must say, though, that if one of my young grandsons ran up to me this Fourth of July and showed me two flat, spoon-shaped, blackened fingers, I would feel a certain sense of nostalgia, before I walked away, saying, "Now where did I leave that cup of coffee?"

March 15, 2007
       Time for me to get ready for another book tour, this one for my second Bo Tully mystery novel, Avalanche. I think this novel is pretty good. I thought the first one, The Blight Way, was pretty good, too, especially considering that it was my first. I learned a lot about writing mystery novels from doing that first one, and I hope that learning shows up in this second one. 
       One of the things I learned is that, even when the characters aren’t on deck at the moment, they have to be somewhere, doing something. They don’t just disappear and show up later when you need them. They possess lives. They have past lives, too, so you have to take care of that. Characters can be practically a full-time job. They’re running all over the place constantly, and it drives you almost crazy keeping track of them.
       As you can see, I’m easily distracted. I meant to tell you about my book tour for Avalanche. You can find the tour schedule somewhere else on this website—at least I hope you can.  My daughter Peggy runs the site and she’s pretty responsible. Pretty anyway.

        I have been doing book tours for about thirty years. My first book tour was from my home in Spokane, Washington to a bookstore in Libby, Montana. That was the only bookstore to indicate they wanted me for a signing. I recall the signing vividly. I had forgotten the hour difference between Spokane and Libby, so I showed up an hour late. The line stretched out of the store and those persons outside had been standing in the rain for about an hour. Montanans are tough. Any time I have a new book out, I make sure I get over to Libby for a signing. The town is filled up with very special people. The book, by the way, was A Fine And Pleasant Misery. It has now been in print for 30 years. One day in a New York elevator I met a publisher I knew, and he said, “I wish you had let us see A Fine And Pleasant Misery.” I said, “I did. You rejected it.” Revenge has this tart but rather sweet taste.

        On this tour for Avalanche (remember that title) I’ll be going to Texas. I’ve been to Texas many times, and it will be good to get back. There was a Texas lady who was very upset that I didn’t get down her way on my tour for The Blight Way.  She’s one of the reasons I’m happy to be headed to Texas this time. The other reason is that I just like the place. I have a lot of friends in and from Texas.

        Then I’m going to Michigan. Back in my early days of book touring, I used to rent a car in Detroit, and then drive all over the state, usually ending up in Kalamazoo. People in Michigan have this thing they do with their hand when you ask directions. They hold the hand palm up with the thumb sticking out, so that it presumably represents a map of Michigan. Then with a finger from their other hand they point to a place on their palm and say, “This is where you want to be.” I can’t tell you all the times I’ve been hopelessly lost in Michigan, usually somewhere along the life line. Nowadays, the publisher wisely furnishes me with a driver.

        My Avalanche tour will also take me to Washington, Idaho, Colorado and Arizona. Years ago my wife and I drove all over the United States on a book tour. That was for The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw. The tour helped keep the book on the New York Times Bestseller List for 14 weeks. Or maybe it was 12 weeks but let’s say 14. 
      I remember we walked all over Boston and were lost so often it seemed as if a sizable portion of the residents there had to help us find our way to wherever we were going. I, of course, was used to finding my way by determining on which side of the trees the moss was growing. The problem with that is, moss doesn’t care one iota whether you live or die out there. So I have great affection for the kindness of Bostonians. 
      One day the Italian doorman at our hotel was helping us load our luggage in the car and noticed a pile of The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw there. He said, “Did you write that?” I said, “Yep.” He said, “Do you know what a goombaw is?” I said, “It’s just a name I made up.” He said, “No, a goombaw is what an Italian man calls his best friend, his goombaw.”  And that is how I learned what a goombaw is. Book tours can be very educational, at least if you grew up in Idaho.
      Also on that tour, I had received a letter from a young Amish fellow, saying if we would stop by his place he would give us a horse-carriage ride around the Amish community. So we did. We met a great many Amish and I found out that they possess a wonderful sense of humor, a trait I believe to be a rather common among them. Our host made brooms for a living, and he made one for my wife while we watched. She still keeps it in perfect condition. I think she’s never figured out how to turn it on.

 February 15, 2007

My wife, Bun, has suggested that I start writing a blog. I think this is because I have opinions about everything, and she is the sole recipient. 

I should admit right off that I have never even read a blog, so I’m not sure what it is that bloggers do. I will start off by giving some advice to persons interested in a career in writing. The late Dr. Johnson once said something to the effect, “Only a blockhead writes for any reason other than money.” Or maybe it was my old friend Rancid Crabtree who said that. In any case, I am in general agreement with that opinion.

Some years ago I gave a series of workshops on writing, and people were charged a great deal of money to attend. I cancelled the workshops because I got tired of them, and also because I was afraid the fraud might be discovered. What the workshop boiled down was this bit of advice: Set up a schedule in which you do nothing but write two hours a day, seven days a week, and within four to six months you will know if you are a writer.

What happens in that four to six months is that your mind will undergo a peculiar change—or maybe not. If not, you will know you weren’t intended to be a writer and then can direct your attention to some useful endeavor. People can go through their whole lives thinking they might have become a writer if they had only put their minds to it. This little exercise will do away with all speculation in that regard.

I set up my own schedule when I was about 30, writing every night between 7 and 9, so as not to interfere with my favorite TV programs. Up to that time, I had written sporadically, occasionally selling a factual feature to a local or regional publication, along with photos to illustrate it. My rate of pay was about ten cents an hour, although probably not that exorbitant. Once I got my schedule going, I stuck to it tenaciously. After awhile, as the time approached for me to go to the typewriter, I would begin to feel an almost magnetic pull in that direction. But here is an important secret. If your writing time is between 7 and 9, write only between those two hours. Start at exactly 7:00 o’clock and end at exactly 9:00 o’clock, even if you must stop halfway through a sentence. 

I was still writing factual pieces in those days. I would do research as I had time during the day, never during my writing time. It was during that period that I sold my first factual piece to a national magazine, Sports Illustrated. (In a later blog, I will tell how that article came about, because I think the same techniques can be applied by any writer interested in doing factual pieces.) One evening I was writing a factual piece on the uses of telemetry in the study of wildlife, and finished the piece about 8:00 o’clock. I still had another hour of writing time left, but no material available for another article. So I decided simply to write some nonsense for the next hour. The basic idea, following up on the telemetry article, was that eventually all wildlife would be hooked up with transmitters so that they could be located any time of day or night. This would simplify hunting a great deal. You’d just go to the nearest telemetry center and ask the whereabouts of a deer, grouse or whatever. I didn’t think the piece was particularly good, but I had a rule, and that was that anything I wrote, no matter how bad I thought it might be, I sent it out to a magazine. (Critics have picked up on this comment and said they surmised as much!) A rejection came from Sports Afield. I sent the ms out again. A rejection came from Outdoor Life. I sent it out again. This time a small envelope arrived in the mail from Field & Stream. I tore it open. Inside was a check for $300 and a small brass band that burst into a rendition of “Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here,” or something like it. It was a wonderful experience. The piece was called “I’ll Never Forget Old 5789-A” and is collected in my first book, A FINE AND PLEASANT MISERY. Suddenly I had become a humor writer. Although my wife claims I am exaggerating, I believe I sold 50 humor pieces the following year, all products of my two-hour sessions.

Messages to Pat can be sent to probideaux@aol.com.