Red on Fridays/A Thought about Writing

I am posting this one on Friday, since my ranting and raving is about Red Shirt Fridays.

There's a thing going around by e-mail that requests everyone wear a red shirt on Friday to honor our troops or show support for the troops. At first, I thought it was a pretty good idea, but I began to wonder.....oh, yes.....I wonder a lot, too much at times. Red, to me, has always been the color of Communists, Red this and Red that, and I wondered, Who started this trend? And why Red? Are they just taking a survey of who reads, and follows blindly, an e-mail, in some obscure counting game? Or, do they really want to show support for the troops? Was it some Democrat, who also use the color Red, e.g., Red States, or just what the Hell is going on? Maybe people with a guilty conscious not having done anything to show support, now put your Red Shirt on every Friday and it will make your conscious clear. A part-time supporter!

Well, now that I've got that off my chest, let's move on to something else. I need to rewrite some of the narrative in "Blood Runs in the Gulch." The more I think about it, the more I can see where the plot is too contrived, so it must be reworked, and I think it can be redone without too much disruption in the basic storyline. I'll just have to work something else in that will take more words, maybe, than the present configuration, but there is plenty of leeway, and since its my story, I can put it in any context that I would like. At least, that's one consolation of rewriting your own material. If it was someone else's, more care would have to be taken.


I have to hand it to the ghost-writers, they write stuff to meet someone else's approval, and if the someone doesn't like it, back to the drawing boards. It takes a lot of "putsbah" or incentive to be a ghost-writer, something that I don't have, and a great imagination. Reporting is a little bit like that, and I have had a little experience, not much, at reporting, but have never had enough confidence to turn it into a career. In fact, I've pretty much written things for other's approval for many years, required to, in fact, but had never thought of applying it to some sort of career practice. Writing Westerns seems to be a natural thing, and if they don't meet someone's approval, it's back to the drawing boards. And I've been making plenty of trips back there the last few years!