It was great

 

It was great

I had a great time yesterday.

I went on a antiques road trip in southwestern Indiana with two of my young adult kids. We stopped at antique shops, some open, some closed, some big, some small. We drove a loop that took us to about six hours, stopped to eat, and found a few things to buy. And for me, one of the many great things about the whole trip was that I did not drive a mile of it.

I have driven the young adults all over Indiana for well over twenty years and now it is my turn to be a passenger. And it was great.

It is great

Great to sit in the back seat, take in rural Indiana on July 4th weekend and allow my mind to go where it wants. In the front, the driver and navigator were doing much the same as my mind, just going along the path, and stopping anywhere that looked promising. They stopped at antique stores, while my mind stopped repeatedly at the word great.

It did that because a few nights before the trip, I watched a documentary on AMC called, Something’s Gonna Live.

A few weeks before that, my second novel The Trier came out on Amazon. A few months before that, it was edited, proofread and revised. And the year or more before that, I was working on bringing it out of my mind and putting the words on the pages.

 

So, what do I tell people about the book now that it’s out there? I would tell them, and have told folks, that it is great. But, how the hell would I know?

 

Is it great?

I know for sure that the times I spent working on the bringing the book out of me were spent alone, very early in the morning, and witnessed only by my ever present coffee cup. No one insisted I do any of it. No one really cared if it happened or not. But when a paragraph or even a line or two was realized on this screen, usually after several revisions and mornings, I had a great time.

Which brings my back to a the quote in the movie that stuck in my mind. I found it there on the antique road trip around Clayton, Indiana and a small farmer’s market. No antiques here, just Chee Wees Original Cheese Curls.

That was great

The quote was from one the men in the film, and I forget who. But I it was “I don’t know if any of the films we made were great. But what was great, was trying to make them great.”

That is the great I get to keep for myself. Those anonymous moments ass achingly early writing The Trier, when I felt good enough about a line or paragraph that it could carry me through the entire following work day.

That is how I define The Trier being great. I’ll keep that definition for myself. If the book is or isn’t great by someone else’s definition of great, then that is good by me. It’s not going to change my mind.

Just like the antiques road trip, the real value was in the journey.