May 8, 2009 TIME LOST AND GAPS IN TIME I can’t really make up for lost time. Time lost is lost forever. But, perhaps I can fill in some of the gaps since my last journal entry. For several months, Leslie King, my esteemed webmistress, and I, have been out of touch. Turns out that she wasn’t getting my emails and hers to me were being sent back. We still do not know why, but now we communicate via her alternative email address. So, she and I are back on track, and here’s another journal entry. The latest “old” news is that Berkley has optioned me to write 2 new novels in a possible western series I call SIDEWINDER. I have written the first of these and delivered it, with that very name as a title. In the meantime, they also contracted me for 2 more SAVAGE GUN novels. I am presently writing SAVAGE GUN #4, which I will complete next month. I thought that 3-book series was dead, like so many others, at Harper Collins, Pocket Books and Berkley. But, no, John Savage will carry his hot pistol through two more adventures in the old West. Feels good. Meanwhile, I have also been honoring speaking engagements, once at the library in Troup, Texas, and last weekend, for Books in Bloom, at the famed Crescent hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. At both engagements I was asked to speak about my life as a writer, something I am reluctant to do. But, this is what they wanted to hear, so I framed my talks on Fate and Destiny. I spoke about how I started writing early in my life, but never dreamed of being a writer. Fate kept tapping me on the shoulder, however, and I finally realized that my destiny lay firmly in the craft of writing. It took me a long time to catch on that I was a writer and could actually earn a living at the trade. Once I made the decision to write, Fate took a firmer hand and led me down many a strange and exciting path. I am still at it and looking forward to more years of writing, of working at my “craft and sullen art,” as Dylan Thomas put it. In the meantime, Fate not only tapped me on the shoulder again, but grasped me firmly with both hands and pointed me in another direction, along a well-hidden path that I stumbled across a time or two. One day, writer Bob St. John invited Charlotte and me to have lunch at his lovely home on Lake Cypress. His wife, Sandy, is a fine artist and she prepared the delicious meal. Afterwards, we all went out to her studio and I began to talk about painting. For years, I kept an easel in my office and painted, without any training whatsoever, in oils. I carried those Grumbacher oils, palette, canvases and brushes all around the country until our trailer caught fire outside of Sarasota, Florida, and everything we owned was burned to a crisp, including 3 computers, 3 printers, 2 kayaks, a moped, the novel I was winding up, and plots and notes for the next dozen years or so. I told Sandy about this, after admiring her watercolors and acrylics and she, a most generous soul, loaded me down with acrylics, watercolors, brushes, a palette, canvases and such. Later, I called a friend, an artists who lives in Winnsboro, and whom I knew to be a teacher of painting, and asked him if I could study under his tutelage. The next fateful step took me to Winnsboro, Texas, where Grahame Hopkins, began to teach me how to paint with watercolors. I loved it, and then we got into acrylics. Grahame and his wife, Tracy, are both very fine artists, both from England, and have a lovely home just a few miles from Winnsboro. For the first couple of sessions, Grahame and I painted at the Trails Country Art Center, and then, one day when it was closed, we went out to his studio where we have been painting ever since. I have learned so much, and painting has deepened my respect for art and sharpened my approach to language, heightened my desire to paint with words, as well. Since I can no longer drive, I look out the window when Charlotte is driving me and see ponds and fields, hills and lakes and clouds and skies that I paint in my mind. And, when I sit down to work on my novel, I paint with that same eye, using language on my palette. So, I am a contented man at this late stage of life, painting and writing, enjoying the wonders of nature and the thrilling experience of working with colors on canvas. Why do I think Fate had a hand in all this? My very first novel, LUST ON CANVAS, was about an artist, a painter who was so poor, he used dirt and sand and rock, mixed with chicken offal and mud. He lived in an abandoned chicken house out in the country near San Bernardino, California. He leaned his finished paintings, done on old boards, against a fence along the road. One day a rich woman saw the paintings, stopped to admire them and met the artist. She took him to her home in Beverly Hills. A friend of mine, an art critic, told me the story when we were in a gallery displaying this man’s startling paintings, and I wrote the story, making up my own plot. Later, I met the man and he had read the book. “You got it pretty close,” he said. And, so, I’ve come nearly full circle from that first novel, and am painting on canvas and splashing color all over my prose. I feel very rich and very blessed. I am not a fine artist or even a good painter. I call myself a “primitive Impressionist.” I love the French Impressionists, and since I can barely see to paint, my paintings are mere impressions of what I imagine I see. I often find the tip of my brush touching a spot not intended for that particular stroke, but that spot can be scrubbed away or painted over. And, those are some of the gaps in lost time since my last journal entry. Painting is now my life, and beneath both pursuits, the strains of classical music, binding it all together in a song played by the very Fates who have nudged me along the little journey that is my life. Speaking of LITTLE JOURNEYS, this is my latest collection of short stories, now in print, from Dan Case’s AWOC, in Denton, Texas. The book carries a wonderful introduction by my friend, Richard S. Wheeler, and the cover has a painting by my son Vic, Jory V. Sherman. I am proud of him and proud of the book. Fate, keep doing your stuff. J.S.