by Charles Newbery
Posted in: Work
Watch out for the dragonflies. You never know, do you?
COCA-COLA WAS the subject of my first stab at writing when I was a fourth or fifth grader at Brentwood Elementary School in West L.A. I based the story on Jack and the Beanstalk. My main character, a boy like Jack, climbed up the beanstalk and found a giant hoarding a wealth of Coca-Cola. Back in those days, soft drinks were a rarity in my house. Us five kids were allowed only one glass when we were out for a family dinner at Denny’s or Andersen’s Pea Soup on road trips to Big Sur or Sequoia National Park. We nursed them. The hero of my story managed to steal magic beans from the giant and took them home to make his own soft drinks, all for free, all for his own guzzling. Soon he had gallons and gallons of the syrupy cola, so much that he became wealthy on the sales around town of what he couldn’t drink himself. But soon his friends turned against him and he got lonely. So he dumped his wealth and returned to a happier life of nursing a cola on special occasions. [click to continue reading…]
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by Charles Newbery
Posted in: Work
"Have I got a story to tell you..."
I’VE NOT WRITTEN for Pine Tree Paradise for more than a week, not one story. Beginnings came, but not the rest. The stories about my family’s life here in Argentina didn’t pan out. They went half a page and fizzled, and I thought is that it, is that the end of my muse, is that the end of these years of tales, some funny, some wacky and some tearful? I couldn’t figure it out. Could it end just like that after such fervor, and be gone forever? I told myself not to fret but to take a break, to rest and rekindle that zeal, and the days went and nothing came, not even tonight as I made a pasta dinner for the three kids while my wife went out with her girlfriends, and we sat down, the two, five and eight year olds, with our four-ton dog under the table, and we talked about our day, about friends, the walk home, the squabbles at school and the best ways to swat the swarm of mosquitoes in the kitchen, and the one now feeding on the youngest. Yet it was not enough of a distraction to my melancholy and my distress over my incapacity to get a story out for this blog because the muse was waning, until just then, just at the bottom of my despair, my eldest daughter deftly squashed a fat-ass mosquito on our freshly painted kitchen wall and turned to me and raised her voice and said, “Dad, what if we turned back the clock and went back in time…”
My eyes lit up.
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by Charles Newbery
Posted in: Work
It's a wide, wide world out there.
WE’RE TAKING A short break today from the stories about my life with the kids for a look at the back office, for a look at the engines behind this blog and some of the recent transformations in how it is put together and presented.
The media world is changing and digital is in. Ebooks, podcasts and videos. It’s all part of the new media, and I’m breaking out the digital recorders and video cameras and getting into the nitty gritty of HTML, metadata and SEO. I’m familiar with the terms of this digital language and I’m figuring out how they’re used. I can just about read HTML and know enough not to mess with it if in doubt.
This is a far cry from my roots as a newswire reporter and learning the trade on the run. It was a crash course on economics, finance, bonds and stocks and interest rates and yields – and how to cover it all on deadline as a reporter. These were all subjects previously foreign to this English literature major with his unfinished minor in Greek and a short-lived attempt at an art degree and even briefer foray into environmental sciences with a class on backpacking. [click to continue reading…]
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