Writer's Jargon: Freelance,Galley,Ghost Writer & Gutter

Writers have their own language. A shorthand, if you will. Outsiders (non-writers) think they know what most of these words and phrases mean. But they don't. Here, in a continuing series of posts, I will divulge the SECRET MEANINGS OF WRITERS' JARGON:

Freelance: (verb) The act of starving to death (or dying from lack of health insurance) while maintaining your own business.

Galley: (noun) Where you sit in your chains and row the boat. Also known as a “proof,” as in, “Here’s proof of your misery.”

Ghost writer: (noun) What you will be when you die of freelancing.

Gutter: (noun) Where they’ll find your body.

...to be continued...

Artist's Touch: When art is life, ‘we are the plan’

Heather Parker

PANAMA CITY — Heather Parker relaxed on a couch Friday in the community gallery she founded last year, nursing an aching knee, and musing on the accomplishments of the year and the life that brought her to this place and time.

Floriopolis, which is referred to as an “arts and culture metropolis” in historic St. Andrews, opened Jan. 18, 2014, at 1125 Beck Ave. Heather and some of the 100-plus artists who have work in the gallery, as well as students, friends and family, will celebrate the anniversary 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday with free art projects for everyone, live music and a wine toast at 4 p.m.

Heather said the past year has been a learning experience. Some plans remain unfulfilled, but many projects reached fruition and paid off in spectacular ways.

“We know what we’re doing now,” she said. “The mission is very solid, the role we’re playing in the community is solid. It didn’t take as long to fine-tune as I thought. ... What has been great is, people cry when they come in — there’s so much self expression. I’m personally still coming to terms with that.”

The gallery’s new exhibit, “Glow,” will be in place through March. Then Floriopolis will host an ongoing project through September called “The Space Between Words,” which will include a short story contest. The winning 2,000-word story will be tattooed on 2,000 people — each receiving one word from the tale.

October through December, the exhibit will be “Life on the Water,” with an eye toward work the public will want for Christmas gift shopping.

“We had great traffic and super sales for the holidays,” Heather said.

'Charlotte,' by Heather Parker

Heather’s favorite medium is acrylic painting on wood. It has required her to learn about absorption rates, how paint will spread or bleed. The wood grain always becomes part of the work, as she finds hidden shapes in the swirls of dark and light.

“I’ve barely painted anything this year, though,” she said. “That’s why I started painting little blocks of wood, something to do first thing in the morning before I’m even really awake yet.”

She “always loved art,” Heather said, but she wasn’t much of a student in her youth, graduating high school only because an administrator liked her. She moved out to live with other students when she was in 10th grade, and paid her portion of rent by selling artwork door to door.

“I only went to art classes and on test days,” she said.

Later, she worked at the education department of a children’s museum in Virginia. But when her work and her daughter Megan’s kindergarten schedules couldn’t be reconciled, Heather quit and began homeschooling. Selling art to make up for the loss of income led to a position at the Suffolk Museum of Art.

“You can use art to teach almost anything,” Heather said.

The family moved to Bay County from Virginia in 2000.

“We had been doing trade shows a couple of years,” Heather said. “We were tired, we ran out of gas, and our trailer was damaged as we crossed the bridge. ... We sold the trailer and stayed.”

Heather has worked for the Junior Museum of Bay County, the YMCA, and the Visual Arts Center of Northwest Florida. Then she and a fellow artist, Xan Miller, opened the CityArts Cooperative downtown. Heather is still involved there via her connection to the Chautauqua Learn & Serve School, where she is the artist in residence.

“My time at the Coop helped me figure out what I wanted to do as a person to contribute to the world,” she said, adding that the reactions of people who visit Floriopolis are always positive and personally satisfying. “That might be the best thing that happened to them today.”

(Heather will teach art classes at the Panama City Beach Senior Center on Jan. 20, Feb. 17 and March 17.)

Heather’s husband, John, doesn’t like attention, she said, but she credits him with keeping her on track. Not only does he do a lot of the heavy lifting around Floriopolis, as owner of Patriot Tax Solutions he does the books. John’s “a numbers guy,” and each time Heather comes up with another event, project or mission to tackle, John asks her what the plan is.

“I know how far out of his comfort zone I push him,” Heather said, such as when she decided to “bomb” downtown with 500 Styrofoam monkeys, or create a transparent plastic giraffe and photograph it visiting locations all over town.

Okay, he’d say, what’s the plan?

“We are the plan,” she said. “As we do it, the next step will reveal itself.”

Station Identification 2015

The net is a big place. Here are most of the places you can find me:

I tweet about anything I see that interests me here: Twitter.com/midnightonmars.

I have a tumblr here that sees irregular use, but I still like it.

And if you want to know about me? See my About Me page.

This bad boy is my Amazon Author page. I sure could use some reviews. If you've read one of my books, please take a moment to give it a star or 5 and a word or two.

Facebook will be getting a lot more attention from me this year, as I plan to launch a sequence of novels, including the first in a series that will be, and has been, my life's obsession.

- Find me at Facebook.com/WriterTonySimmons

- Check out my Tales of the Awakening Dead Facebook, which will soon have new info as a new "tale" is published.

- Here's the Facebook page for my slowly developing series The Shadow War.
- And here's the Facebook page for Graphic Knowledge, where we share geek culture.

Although the sites keep changing, you can currently see my columns and random blogs for The News Herald here<< (Some of these are rewritten/repurposed items from this blog, or vice versa.)

My Instagram account is MidnightOnMars also.

I'm on Foursquare, but seldom try to use it since the latest updates require an additional app to do what you used to do on Foursquare.

I still have a MySpace, though I seldom even visit there.

I'm also on Google Plus, but not sure why.

You can check out my self-published stuff in my "author spotlight" page at Lulu. (While you're there, click some review buttons. I'd appreciate it.)

I have a YouTube account as well. There's no telling what you'll find there, as it has been used for News Herald work, home videos, short films and so forth.

This is me at Linked In. I have no idea what use this place is, and I haven't updated it in a while.

I'm probably other places online also, but just can't recall it right now.

If you can recall, please remind me.

Artist's Touch: Stress relief becomes way of life

Don Taylor and work-in-progress.

PANAMA CITY — Touring Don Taylor’s home off State 390 is a lesson in local history and art, as he and his wife, Louisa, recount the house’s former occupants and location while showing their collection of works from across the world.

Art has been in Don’s life since his childhood, growing up in St. Augustine.

“My father went to art school and did metal crafting,” Don said. “He turned down an animation job offer from Disney in 1930. He painted as a hobby and gave the paintings away to friends.”

Reaching his upstairs studio and classroom space, Don held up a work-in-progress showing three cooks busy in a kitchen. He photographed the men through a large plate glass window using a telephoto lens, then combined his favorite poses into a single composition.

“You’ll never get a photograph that’s got everything you want in the right places,” he said. “Don’t try to copy the photograph. Pick what you want out of it and recompose.”

(One of the day-classes he’s teaching at the Panama City Beach Senior Center this month covers sketching designs based on a favorite photo.)

“The thing I really enjoy, probably more than anything else,” Don said, is sketching and painting from real life. He’s filled books with sketches and watercolors of sites he’s visited in his travels, and he said every detail of that day is imprinted in his memory when he does so.

“I can take thousands of photos (on a trip) and six months later I’m hard pressed to tell your where in the world I was,” he said. “But with these (sketches) I become totally absorbed in it. I can tell you everything — where I was, what was going on around me.”

Sample from Taylor's sketchbooks.

Don had never heard of Panama City before he attended veterinarian school at Auburn University. His next-door neighbor had lived here though, and, “I came down and spent Christmas with them here, and when I finished school I moved here in 1972,” he said.

He established a veterinary practice, Gulf Coast Animal Hospital, which he sold 15 years ago to spend more time painting. Now, he only works relief days at the practice. Don is also a veteran of the Vietnam conflict, where he served in the U.S. Marine Corps.

Don started painting as a form of stress relief, and found he loved doing it.

“You forget all your problems and worries,” he said. “It’s not like work, it’s something I totally enjoy.”

Don began teaching painting “a number of years ago,” and has a waiting list for new students. He teaches in his upstairs classroom space, as well as local galleries and recreation centers, and far-flung workshops, such as one scheduled at Blue Ridge, Ga., in June.

He began entering shows almost as soon as he started painting fulltime, about 15 years ago, and has won numerous awards and recognitions across the country. Most recently, Don was recognized by the American Artists Professional League for his watercolor painting “Heaven’s Glow.”

“We are extremely proud to recognize some of America’s finest artists, and our award winners’ work epitomizes the quality of art that our organization strives to support,” said Peter Rossi, AAPL president, in remarks at the 86th annual Grand National Exhibition held in November 2014 in New York City.

Don also has served on many art association boards; he is a past president of the Southern Watercolor Society and past member of the Board of Directors at the Visual Arts Center of Northwest Florida.

“We have a wonderful local group of artists,” he said. “A lot of them have been painting 20 or 30 years, and still have a good time.”

In the artist’s statement on his website, DonTaylorArt.com, Don said he hopes his art will evoke the same feelings in the viewer that he experienced when first seeing the subject — “the sense that there is more to the subject than mere rendering. ... I attempt to apply the illusion of detail in many works so that viewers can use their imagination to complete the image. Sometimes less is more.”

Time for one last cup before they go

Robbie and Ellen

PANAMA CITY — I had coffee with Robbie Fehrenbach and Ellen Mapelsden on Thursday morning, and we talked about the little shop they opened in St. Andrews in 1998.

St. Andrews Coffee House will close its doors Dec. 20, although Robbie and Ellen assure longtime customers and friends that the new owner, James Pigneri, will reopen under a slightly changed name and menu in early January 2015. (Stay tuned to PanamaCity.com and these pages for details when the St. Andrews Coffee House & Bistro will debut.)

“We can’t wait,” Ellen said of Pigneri’s reopening. “We plan to come here for good coffee and a good meal.”

The duo once told me they opened the shop “on a dare.” They said in front of the wrong people that “somebody ought to do something” in St. Andrews, and that someone pointed out they were somebody, too.

“For us, it was a means to an end,” Robbie said, that end being to revitalize their beloved St. Andrews community. “Over the years, it has made us so busy that we have much less time for community involvement.”

Their grandfather, Ed Day, arrived in St. Andrews in 1887 as a child. The building the coffeehouse occupies was built in 1927. Great Uncle Bill opened Gainer Brothers’ Grocery there, and their Aunt Weezie cut meat in the same spot where they now make sandwiches.

They enjoy “doing everything” from taking orders, to cooking, to serving tables, to running the register, Ellen said. But as business has grown, doing everything has become more difficult.

“We opened a little coffee shop, and it’s turned into a food place,” Robbie said. “It’s a faster pace than we can keep up. It’s growing, and it needs to grow, and for that it needs a new set-up.”

Recent years have seen a “younger demographic” frequent the area, including families and young professionals, and that makes them hopeful their work is bearing fruit.

“We’re so excited that our baby has grown up, and it’s going to continue,” Ellen said. “It’s time to pass the torch.”

The Coffee House will open regular hours for its final week in this incarnation, and will run a special fundraiser on its final day. From 7 to 11 a.m. Dec. 20, a minimum $5 donation will get you a drink and a simple breakfast item (no eggs or regular breakfast menu will be served). Every penny of the day’s proceeds will go to Lucky Puppy Rescue and Castaway Cats.

“It will be a little send-off and a little fun,” Ellen said.

I will miss Robbie and Ellen. I meet with friends for lunch at the shop each week, and was honored when I’d become enough of a fixture for them to know my “regular” order. They labeled us the “Marvels” and reserved our table with a sign they fashioned using a toy Batmobile.

“It’s bittersweet. We wanted to leave it when it would be hard to leave, not when we were tired of it. So it’s a good thing,” Ellen said. “Robbie and I are actually starters. When we started with this, we had no idea we’d still be doing it all these years later.”

Peace.

Taking candy from strangers

PANAMA  CITY — My parents taught me never to take candy from strangers. My children heard the same rule as they were growing up.

Monday, I broke that age-old imperative.

Entering the downtown Post Office, I joined a queue of people waiting for their chance to do business with one of the two clerks. Up ahead, I saw an older gentleman in a denim shirt and cap shaking a woman’s hand. She had a confused expression, and I saw him pass something to her during the handshake.

He moved on to the person ahead of her in line, and she opened her right palm to examine the mint candies he had given her. Little white-and-red swirls of  sugar wrapped in cellophane.

I wondered then if she was leery of accepting candy from a stranger, and I counted myself lucky to be entering behind him so I didn’t have to make that same decision.

“May I shake your hand?” I heard him ask the person in front of her. They shook hands, and he passed some more candy in the handshake.

He continued in this way to the front of the line, then spoke to the clerks, who appeared to know him. He turned to a young man who had stepped out of the line when a third clerk appeared to ask if anyone was there for General Delivery. He asked if he could shake the young man’s hand, but the guy held up a mint and said, “You did already, thank you.”

I saw the old man notice me at the back of the line, then. He started my way, and I wondered what my response would be when he asked. I hoped nothing smart-alecky would erupt, unbidden, out of my mouth. I looked up at the boxes wrapped in shiny Christmas paper on the walls and part of me hoped he would just bypass me.

But he rounded the kiosk of Priority Mail envelopes and extended his right hand. I spotted the candy wrappers peeking out.

“May I shake your hand?” he asked in an accent from the woods where I grew up.

“Sure,” I said. He gave my right hand a friendly tug, pressing two pieces of candy into my palm as he did so. I said thank you, then I asked how he was doing.

He almost turned away, then he looked up at me from under the bill of his cap.

“Not so great, if I’m still here and not in heaven,” he said. “I’m ready to go.”

I smiled as if I understood, but my true emotions were conflicted. I looked at the candy in my hand, then back at him as he opened the door and stepped through, shaking his head and repeating, “I am ready to go.”

It occurred to me to question if one should eat candy that came from a man who’s anticipating the afterlife so eagerly. But I unwrapped the cellophane and popped a piece in my mouth anyway.

It was sweet, and minty, and smelled like Christmas days visiting my great-grandfather. He always kept mints in the house — old-fashioned ones that melted in your mouth. And then I recalled this older fellow at Century First Baptist Church who would give the kids at the evening service mints or butterscotches when I was little. I hadn’t thought about that for a long time, and it was a sweet recollection.

I looked over my shoulder and saw the old man talking to someone in the main lobby, reaching out to shake hands.

Some days, like this old guy, I’m not doing so great. But I’m not yet ready to go. And so long as strangers can still offer a handshake, a smile, a gentle word — maybe even a candy mint — I’m not sure I should be in any great hurry.

Maybe, at my age, it’s okay to take candy from strangers. Maybe, in specific circumstances, we should be willing to take the chance.

Or maybe all of us in the Post Office that morning just got lucky and shared a little Christmas miracle.

Peace. 

Artist's Touch: Art in the Family

Sarah, Theresa, Taylor and Craig Bush at Floriopolis

PANAMA CITY — Craig Bush described his family as “unconventional” during a recent conversation at Floriopolis gallery.

“We all tend to be nonconformist,” he said. “We don’t listen very well.”

What they do well is pursue their muses. Craig, 64, is a retired educator, novelist and painter. His wife, Theresa, 62, is a retired paralegal, jeweler and crafter. Their daughters — Sarah, 36, and Taylor, 29 — are artists working in acrylics, ink and other mediums.

All four gathered on the couch and chairs at Floriopolis to talk about the way art is part of their lives, both as a family and as individuals.

“I was poor growing up, so there wasn’t a whole lot I couldn’t do,” Theresa said. “I still feel that way. I was taught if you want it, then you do it. You make it. I made things because I needed to have them.”

Theresa in her workshop.

Theresa has sewed and made crafts all her life, but retirement gave her time to focus on creative pursuits. After taking an Education Encore class on jewelry design at Gulf Coast State College, she discovered a love of jewelry making — though she wears almost none herself. She also does stained glass art, baskets, felt figures and more.

Her work is for sale at Floriopolis, RTA Designs, and Shipwreck Ltd., but she hopes to do more online sales in the new year. Her Etsy.com store is Four Free Spirits.
“I don’t want to make a lot of money, I  just want to make stuff and get rid of it so I can make more stuff,” Theresa said. Sarah responded, “I want to make enough (money) to replace my low-level job.”

Art by Sarah Bush

Craig said Sarah was in middle school when they all recognized her artistic bent. Her successes encouraged the rest of the family to “kind of dabble” in art more. But Sarah recalls always having art in their home.

“That’s what you do in life. You make stuff,” Sarah said. “When I was little, Pop would write messages in symbols and have me decode it, and that’s a lot of what I do now with iconography, symbology and archetypes. ... My parents have always been creative, as long as I can remember. Even my grandmother was always making a quilt or sewing something.”

When Sarah was in daycare, Craig would walk her home in the afternoons. They collected pieces of colored glass on the roadside each day and glued them to a length of driftwood.

“It’s still hanging on our wall today,” he said. “It’s a little bit bizarre.”

Sarah received an art scholarship to Gulf Coast State College, but kept taking art labs instead of other core courses. After some time focusing on drawing and “building sturdy things,” Sarah said she’s trying to go back to “actually painting.” Her work is online at SarahBushArt.com

Art by Taylor Bush

Taylor said Sarah was her early inspiration, and she took the same classes with the same teachers Sarah had. Taylor creates black-and-white designs and is looking into making prints, fabric designs and possibly T-shirt images, mass producing some of her drawings.
Craig’s debut novel, “Hometown,” was released this autumn, and he’s just completed the first draft of his next novel, “The Ninth Rainbow,” which he hopes to publish in early 2015. “It’s somewhat apocalyptic, but it ends up with a lot of hope,” he said.

Of the creative process, Craig said he follows where the characters lead him: “I often don’t have a clue what they’re doing. When it’s best for me, I can’t type fast enough to keep up with it.”

Craig also paints impressionistic landscapes that he describes as “a little bit Van Gogh-ish.” He has never tried selling any of his paintings, adding that “none of us is great at marketing ourselves.”

As a child, Craig’s imagination was encouraged by a teacher who gave him a copy of “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert Heinlein. But reading Herman Hesse in the 1960s made him want to be a writer. He studied journalism in college before shifting to education.

Craig at his writing desk.

“With the novel release, I think I had the right expectation, which was no expectations,” Craig said. “It’s shown me the importance of people in the arts being willing to help one another. It’s not a competition.”

The children have their own places now, but Theresa still had some trepidation about how Craig’s retirement could cut into her creative time. Over the years, each of them has learned to value a level of solitude, but she said it took “some adjustment” when he began staying home all day.

“I think we all appreciate our alone time a lot,” Taylor said, adding that the creative process requires solitude as well as preparation and openness. “Sometimes it’s sort of like a transmission from the universe, and you’re there to catch that. I think that’s the point of the whole thing. It’s super magical.”