Checking In With Joel
Hey [Joel].
Yes, it’s been way too long since we last talked. It’s so nice to hear that your life is coming together. 2007 will be a big year for you, and I hope you enjoy the ride immensely.
About windy England: Europe just had a record-breaking wind storm pass through, and you may have experienced its leading edges during your visit.
Yes, writing indeed requires lots of time and thought power investment before realizing any payoff. Modern psychologists say that it’s good to have some long-term goals – ones that take years to complete like becoming a successful writer – to help keep us sane and away from neurosis. So, though the writing craft is quite ruthless and thankless as you say, it nonetheless helps sharpen our minds and keeps them sharp [...]. If I get no more benefit from it than this, I’m still thankful to be engaged in the daily search for the right words.
Well, you may not need to say something “original” in order to [...] contribute meaningfully to humanity’s body of written knowledge. Consider, for example, how many people throughout history have achieved respectability just by repackaging and re-expressing the same ideas embodied in, say, the Bible or the Magna Carta. Indeed, much of writing involves the recycling of previously circulated ideas, if not for the purpose of modernizing them, then to use them as foundations for new ideas. This is especially true when writing in the natural sciences. But even with artistic styles like poetry, you can write something truly innovative even with but a modest supply of ground-breaking creativity.
Truly enjoyable written works achieve a delicate balance between new ideas, and older ones familiar to the readers. If you skimp on the old ideas, you risk boring your readers. Likewise if your material lacks sufficient creativity, then you leave your readers wondering why you undertook to write the stuff in the first place. Different readers like to see different balance points between old and new ideas, and I typically find that I like more old ideas than new when I read a book. Too much newness sets my head to spinning.  
  So, perhaps you’re expecting yourself to be more creative than necessary. I’ve found that often I must spend some days writing popular ideas before my mind begins to create new ones. I don’t know. Try that, and maybe you’ll begin generating the amount of original stuff that you will feel comfortable with.
On the rejection letters: Well, you’re one up on me there because I don’t have any rejections yet. Why not? Well, I’m still working on my autobiographical book which centers on my search for a soul mate, and describes key experiences and insights I’ve encountered along the journey. No one has seen this work, so no one has rejected it yet.  I’ve been reading and journaling a great deal over the last year, considering my history, interpreting my dreams, and looking for answers wherever they might lay – movies, books, TV, conversations, and such. But I’m just not ready to move forward with putting it all into a finished book. Not yet. The difficulty is in how to end my story, because the only story I care to tell would end with me actually finding my dream girl, and establishing a lasting love relationship in spite of the apparent odds against it. Since that has not yet happened, I can’t write it. So you see, I have other things besides the writing to accomplish, before the writing will fall into place.
[...]
Changing subject: You’ve probably heard that [Mel] resigned from her post at [camp] in December, and there’s a new director now [...]. I don’t know her but it should be interesting to see what changes will be made. One change is that they’ve reworked the summer session schedule with the session that [Jack], [Ron], Danny, Carl, Bill [...], and I attend being run in early July instead of late July. I haven’t received the papers yet, but so far, all I’ve talked to from the late July session of the past will be attending the early July session (July 7th thru July 18th) this year. So if you decide to come back (which would be terrific), hopefully you can come during our session.
I’ll be bringing my music as usual. I’m up to 46,000 songs now and have extended my software to better support searching for MP4 files (mo collection has both MP3 and MP4 files in it now). Also, I have begun categorizing all my MP4 music according to genre (country, rock, disco, dance, techno, club, hip-hop, pop, grunge, Etc.), and the new software supports searching songs by these genres. Later this year, I plan on porting my software to Windows Vista, although I’ll probably wait until the first service pack comes out before I upgrade the laptops to Microsoft’s latest operating system.
Well, time for me to go be creative. To make writing my book easier, I’ve been developing lists of persons, places, things, and events that have been significant in my life, and when and why each was meaningful. I thought I’d put all this into an Access Database to better organize it. Yes, I’m writing again. So, you take care and say hi to [your girlfriend] for me. Hopefully we’ll see the two of you at camp this summer.
Take care,
Tom