Robert Lawson: Little Elf by Big Shoe (not dated)
" … hopefully not Arithmetic."

I have a lot of material, much of it uncatalogued. Twenty years ago, I had several file boxes filled with pieces I'd written. I still have those, unopened in the interim, and several times more volume, newer stuff, less accessibly filed. I figure that most of all of that stuff was practice, warm up pitches honing my approach. I was preparing for the day when I might be called upon to commercially create, in the bigs, but that call never came. I remember the shame I felt when I first considered submitting pieces to journals only to find that my inventory was thin. I set about trying to fill it in and may have gone a little overboard. I feel like a hoarder now, squeezing between piles of finished material so randomly organized that little within it could ever be located. It's a random access filing system where the product of every search can only be randomly selected.

I created perhaps a quarter of the material in now obsolete apps, ones for which nobody seems to make translators anymore. They're gibberish or Klingon now, lost to the ages. I have something written on thousands of topics, but of course, they aren't stored by topic because topic generally depends. You might have noticed that little of what I write could be crisply categorized. What each one's about depends, and as allegory, any one might serve to elucidate or obfuscate almost any subject. Each needs a little framing. Like this one you're presently reading appears under the aegis of my Authoring series. You might have been wondering what this Show&Tell title has to do with Authoring.

I think of Authoring, unlike writing, the point in the creative process where I stand up in front of the class to perform a little Show&Tell. I warmly recall the opportunities such performances afforded me in elementary school. I'd lovingly package something I held as special and practice telling its story. Later, I'd stand before my class and share something I felt was special, an intimacy I afforded everybody in the class to receive. I always felt plenty exposed up there. I felt the risk involved. Someone might find my precious possession lame or it might say something about me that I might have preferred nobody knowing. There I was regardless, full open kimono, dependent upon the generous reception of my captive audience. We were all mindful that Show&Tell could not last all morning and that the alternative to these performances would almost certainly be something far worse, like arithmetic. We stayed on our best behaviors through every minute of it.

This posting will soon become my latest one, my latest little mini performance. It will much later also become a part of my next finished manuscript, but that will come so far in the future that you and I will have both long forgotten this piece by then. This Show&Tell amounts to a sneak preview of a far distant fresh release, so danged distant as to render this action not even a little bit like promotion. It's not a commercial transaction. It's just Show&Tell time, a potentially refreshing interlude before we all get on with whatever we were planning on doing, hopefully not Arithmetic.

©2022 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Authoring, #PureSchmaltz