Revolution!

"Out of the nowhere's forehead, born full arm'd...", my professional life has a new plan. The notion of publishing "a reader," an anthology of the work I'm most proud of, feels like a period at the end of a 50+ year writing career. Maybe it's the Big C scare, maybe it's the subtext of an unlettered New Year's resolution, whatever it is, I think I am going to run with it. This feels like retirement as a writer, the way I've been at it these many decades, but not as a creative person.

That is, with the clock ticking louder than ever, I am reminded that the great unrealized project of my recent desires is a music drama, a chamber opera, whatever it would be called, a drama for which I would write music and text, and perhaps even video it. I don't have the skills required to do it all (orchestrate it, for example) but I can do a lot of it, if slowly. I think it's time to begin. The novel I've been working on has a story easily cast to the new form -- in fact, better told with music since music can disguise and communicate melodrama far better than text alone can. Yes, this last day in the life of an old man can be an opera of sorts, not a short novel. I can devote the time remaining to me to composing music, primarily, and I'll certainly need all the time the gods can give me.

I even have a new working title, "Life Is A Nice Place To Visit," after an epigram written by my brother. I'd have a subtitle to cover my ass: Dramatic and Musical Notes for a Chamber Opera. I'd publish it, whatever I have near the end, if I have warning to do so, in hopes some genuine composer would pick up the ball and run with it. Networking with the future. I like that. I do so little of it.

What a change! And so suddenly! It all began with a title, "A Charles Deemer Reader," and I thought, an end, The End, and on to a new challenging adventure. After all, does the world need another novel or play by yours truly? Hardly. My archive already is stuffed with them.

But this, a chamber opera, a music drama, is completely new for me, although I've been talking about it for several years now. "Time's winged chariot" has gotten my attention. Put up or shut up. Shit or get off the pot. I already hear music in my head, which tells me this is the right thing to do.

What to put in a reader? What fun, as my late friend Jim Wiley used to say.