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FROM MY CORNER: Catching Up on Life

Howell Hurst American News

September 1, 2019

Carmel Valley, CA . . . At 81 years of age, I can tell I am getting more mature (that’s “older” to those of you who demand concrete reality). How can I tell? Today I bought a small bag of potting soil and two packets of flower seeds. I’m going to try my hand at having a green thumb. Blue Bells and Sunflowers to start.

A few weeks back I promised you I’d return soon with a regular edition of From My Corner, which quite simply are my musings on the world and its various bumps. That is, bumps as in holes in a highway you expect to be relatively smooth.

Seeing that the political and social condition of the world remains as absurd as when I left it almost eight months ago to refurbish my fifteen-year-old home and ocean sailing boat and sell it to a new captain of the open seas, I am now free of that adventurous part of my life.

It is good to have become once again a landlubber. I really look forward to the sprouting of my flower seeds. I live in sunny Carmel Valley, CA, and I anticipate both the flower and the Valley will rekindle my once utterly positive outlook on life.

It is not that I am now depressed. I don’t suffer from that malady. I just occasionally become mildly sad and melancholy.  I suspect you do too. This living this long does reveal that real life does not turn out as you expected it would when you were sixteen.

I’ve had two eye openers of late: money spent advertising my espionage political novel Subterfuge in the New York Review of Books, anda delightful but finally sad ending to a late-blooming love affair.

The ad campaign did not produce a single sale. The love affair did not produce returned love. So is it in the world sometimes. I have hope for my writing. Since I don’t seek mass markets for it, that restricts what I allow myself to say.

I try to write what I really think. That does not usually produce big sales. As for love affairs, I try at my advancing years to sincerely love the lover I nurture. In both cases, the results depend not on my intentions but on the intentions of others.

The New York Eastern publishing world does not easily pay a great deal of attention to a Far West Writer. And a married woman estranged from her husband, experimenting on the outside with a dedicated writer, finds it hard not to return to her husband when the chips are down.

My mistake in both cases, of course. I now need a legitimate book reviewer to read my novel and my book of short stories, and I need to be more careful in the future whom I fall in love with. No more married women. Simple, huh?

But, all in all, I remain happy. Life definitely is better than the alternative. I am now preparing to strive to battle my way into the American publishing world, and my next love will be more prudent, though not less passionate I hope. This one hurt, but was worth it.

I hope your life is going well and that you will enjoy my more regular columns. My currently published books are still available at www.howellhurst.com, as well as bn.com (Barnes & Noble).

Keep your chin up.

Until next time,

Hal

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