Richard Schiver

Tag: works in progress

  • Weekly Writing Challenge 03/11/2026

    Weekly Writing Challenge 03/11/2026

    We continue the story of J is for Jogah. You may have noticed I’m borrowing a bit from one of the masters when the story delves into an exploration of seeing someone’s ability, Like the shine Stephen King made famous in The Shinning. Of course aren’t we all standing upon the shoulders of giants when we write. I also feel I’ll be expanding the idea of the little people into a novella length work sometime in the future. Without further adieu let’s get into it.

    Continued from 03/04/2026

    As he lay in bed the aroma of fresh baked blueberry muffins reached him. Getting up he passed down that shadowy hallway to the stairs and started down the steps in his spiderman pajamas. When he spotted the movers bringing in boxes and the last of their furniture he retreated to his room to change into a pair of jeans and a tee shirt.

    In the kitchen he found his mom working on the small island while his dad was on the porch talking with the movers who were nearly finished.

    “They’re not done yet,” she said as he entered the kitchen and he turned to join his dad on the porch. As he crossed through the living room he came upon the older man who had just placed a large cardboard box on a pile of similar boxes along one wall. As Jeffery passed through the room his attention was again drawn to that little door as an unsettled sensation filled him. Something could get in that way. Something that might be able to hurt them.

    “If you don’t look at them directly they won’t hurt you,” the older man said,

    “Who?’ Jeffery asked.

    “The little people.”

    “What little people?”

    The older man smiled as he knelt beside him. “When I was a kid growing up, a little older than you, my grandmother told me about the little people. Only she called them Jogah. She was pure blooded Oneida, the native American Indians who once ruled this land.”

    “She was a real Indian?” Jeffery asked.

    “As real as they come, the Jogah lived in the forest and sometimes played tricks on the braves who would go into the forest for food. But they were never mean, not unless you stared at them. I guess they were a little peeved about being so small.”

    “Tell your dad the muffins are ready,” his mother said as she stuck her head through the door into the living room.

    “Just remember that you’ll be able to see them. They don’t mean any harm, but when you do see them, don’t stare.” With that the older man pushed himself to his feet and joined his dad on the porch. He wasn’t sure if he should believe that the older man said. After all his dad told him the door was for milk deliveries back in the old days. One or the other was lying and he was confident his dad wouldn’t lie to him. Maybe the older man liked telling stories to scare little kids. But he’d told him about his talent.

    His mom joined them on the porch with a basket of blueberry muffins while his dad had set up the coffee pot, a thank you to the men who moved them for a job well done.

    Jeffery helped himself to one of the muffins, the aroma making his mouth water in anticipation as he took a big bite. A blueberry popped into his mouth as he chewed, but it was missing the sweetness that would have normally flooded his senses. Instead, a saltiness cramped his mouth and his stomach as he looked down at what remained of the blueberry muffin. Spots of deep blue marked where the blueberries resided in the cake texture. One of the blueberries opened like a tiny eye, watching him with an unnatural stillness as his heart climbed into his throat and he threw the muffin to the floor of the porch with a startled cry. The muffin bounced once before coming to rest with the eaten part exposed while the eye lay there watching him as his mother and father raced to his side to see what was wrong.

    To be continued!

  • Writing in Old Age: A Journey of Reflection and Expression

    Writing in Old Age: A Journey of Reflection and Expression

    As a writer ages time becomes more malleable, seeming to have changed shape while we are distracted. The hours may feel longer in some cases while for others, me included, the hours fly by. The years pile up behind us like heavily edited manuscripts, full of red, and sometimes regret at missed opportunities. Writing stops feeling like a ladder we climb towards some lofty goal, and more like a comfortable chair we sink into with an honest familiarity.  

    When I started in 1991 I belonged to a small group of writers who met monthly via snail-mail. We called ourselves the Night Writers and worked to hone our craft while encouraging and celebrating the achievements of the other members. I recall one discussion in which we talked about aging, and the strong possibility of not hitting the goals we sought until we were well into our sixties.

    This past December I celebrated 67 trips around the sun, and I’m still plugging away, searching for that one elusive story that will put me over the top. The one I’ve been chasing since the day I started pouring out my soul on the typewriter.

    When we’re young, we write to prove we’re here. Later, we may write to understand what being here means. Age doesn’t only bring loss. It brings angles. The same childhood kitchen, the same first job, the same arguments you swore you’d never repeat. Looking back, they reveal the patterns you couldn’t see while you were living them. Mostly because you were too busy being dramatic.

    That widened perspective is not nostalgia, but material.

    Memory frays. Names go missing. Dates slide by the wayside. You can walk into a room with purpose then stand there like an actor who’s forgotten their line. Writing in old age doesn’t have to pretend to be a ledger. In fact, the gaps can become part of the form. You can write around what you can’t recall, noting the blank spaces the way you’d notice a torn page, with curiosity rather than shame. Sometimes the truth lives in the feeling you can still summon, or in the questions that remain after the facts have softened.

    The work may need to adapt. A daily ritual can be smaller now, two pages instead of ten, fifteen minutes instead of an afternoon. Of course, afternoons may now include an appointment for your knees. You discover large-print settings, a better lamp, a softer chair, or dictation when fingers ache. These aren’t compromises so much as craft decisions that keep the door open. The goal is continuity, not heroics. Keep a notebook within reach. Draft letters you may never send. Start with a single sensory detail. The sound of a screen door. The smell of rubbing alcohol. The color of late winter light, or the mysterious creak you swear the house is making just to get your attention.

    Old age also changes the question of audience. You may still publish, still chase polish and acclaim, still argue with a paragraph the way you once argued with a teenager (and yes, the paragraph is winning). But you might also write for a grandchild who hasn’t been born yet, or for the friend you miss, or for yourself on a day when the world feels narrow. Writing becomes a way to keep company. An intimate conversation with your own mind, conducted in sentences that can be revisited when words are hard to find out loud.

    In the end, writing and old age share a quiet discipline. Paying attention. To what endures, to what changes, to what you can still choose. A paragraph is small, but it is a decision, an act of shaping experience rather than letting it simply pass. If the body insists on limits, the page can offer range. And if you keep writing, even in brief bursts, you’re not only recording a life; you’re continuing it. One sentence at a time. Preferably before you put down your pen and wonder where it disappeared to.

  • Weekly Writing Challenge 03/03/2026

    Weekly Writing Challenge 03/03/2026

    My apologies for not getting anything posted last Friday and Monday. Real life intruded. Without further adieu let us return to J is for Jogah.

    Later that night after supper, and an evening spent watching game shows on TV, Jeffery struggled to claim the sleep he needed. As he lay in bed staring at the ceiling he went over the conversation he’d had with Bill, each time circling back to his statement they could not hurt him. He would have liked to believe it, but he knew Bill had been lying to him about that point. It wasn’t physical pain these errant spirits could bring. What they brought was something far more terrifying. A perpetual gloom that would shroud your soul in endless despair. He had experienced that firsthand in the apartment.

    Boys being boys, it wasn’t long before he tried an experiment. He had grown so accustomed to the old lady’s presence that she didn’t even bother him anymore. He understood that they were merely ghosts, and ghosts couldn’t hit you the way another person could. One night in the old apartment he stood in the way of the old lady’s ghost as she glided through the deep shadows of the kitchen on her nightly visit to the sink.

    Why she was visiting the sink was beyond him, he didn’t believe a ghost could drink or get thirsty, but what did he know, he was only seven at the time.

    He almost stepped aside as she got closer but closed his eyes and held his ground as she came to him. There was no hesitation on her part, and he suspected her spirit could not see him, yet. In hindsight he wished he hadn’t done what he did. As he lay in bed he relived every emotion, ever feeling every sound and sensation that washed through him as she closed with him.

    The first thing he noticed was a slight tickling at the base of his skull as the short hair on the nape of his neck slowly stood at attention. This was followed by a deepening chill as she reached him, a chill that grew as her essence began to mingle with his own. As it did goosebumps spread across the length of his arms him, his shoulders and down the center of his back following the line of his spine.

    His mind filled with memories that were not his own. Brief flashes from her past slid across the screen of his mind. Her saw her as a young child in school, struggling to pay attention to the nuns in class, her knuckle sore from the beatings they took every time her attention wandered. Spring had arrived with the joyous singing of the birds, and she wanted to go outside and experience everything the season had to offer. Yet she was trapped in a dreary classroom, crammed into a small room with twenty other children whose only desire was to escape the hard lessons few believed would serve them in their life after graduation. He saw her meet a young man and fall in love with him. Their hasty marriage as her young man was called off to war and their joyous reunion when he returned safe and sound while so many other wives and parents only ever saw a flag draped coffin.

    They built a life together, raising a family of three boys and two girls. Two of the boys were called up by the government to do their part and she learned the sorrow of a parent outliving their child when the oldest returned in a flag draped casket.

    Weddings followed, along with the births of grandchildren who brought a measure of joy to her and her husband as old age crept up on them. The loss of her husband, and the home they raised their family in when the money started to run out. Moving to the apartment in the city had been the last straw for her and the carefree young woman who had become old and slow, deliberately stepped away from this life. In the wee hours of the morning she took a handful of sleeping pills, washing them down with a glass of water from the kitchen sink. Hence the reason for her nightly visits. It was like she had been cursed to relive her final moments for eternity.

    As the 0ld woman’s ghost emerged from the other side of him, a small part of their mingled essences became trapped with the other. Afterwards Jeffery was filled with a craving for blueberry muffins, something he had never eaten before. Aside from that it appeared his encounter had left him no worse for wear until the following night when she returned. As the moon slowly rose above the city skyline she came gliding into his bedroom, passing through the door as if it didn’t exist and stood beside his bed looking down at him with sorrowful eyes.

    He had taken something from her and she wanted it back.

    Now, in the present, he lay in bed staring at the door, waiting for her return. Sometime after midnight he drifted off to sleep and awoke to a new day to what sounded like a million birds singing beyond his bedroom window. It was the first good night’s sleep he’d had since his little experiment, and while he was hesitant to celebrate, he felt it best to wait and see what happened.

    To be continued!

  • Weekly Writing Challenge. 02/25/2026

    Weekly Writing Challenge. 02/25/2026

    J is for Jogah contd.

    Nothing good he imagined. He was too young to have read anything that might explain the purpose of the door, leaving the only plausible answer open to his imagination. He did not want to see what used that door, but at the same time his innate curiosity filled him with a desire to keep a close eye on it, to make sure whatever did come through, was not going to harm anyone.

    As the afternoon neared early evening the last of the furniture had been placed and the canvas tarps had been removed. His mother was in the kitchen fixing dinner while his father sat on the front porch to share a beer with the men who moved them. Jeffery had come down and was sitting in one of the lawn chairs on the porch as the men spoke quietly about their families, and what had prompted them to move people’s belongings for a living.

    One of the older men who had chosen a glass of iced tea in place of the offered beer was sitting near him and Jeffery noted that he kept glancing in his direction. He also noted that in addition to not wanting a beer, he was different in that his only participation in the conversation was in response to any questions that came his way. Between these his attention kept drifting back to Jeffery.

    As the other men laughed at a coarse joke he turned to Jeffery. “You’ve seen them?”

    The question was to the point and Jeffery immediately understood the context in which it had been asked. Had he seen them? Of course he had, but after that night in the kitchen he never said a word to anyone else about it. His mother’s response to his assertion that he had seen a ghost was to send him for counseling. To an old man who smelled of cigarettes and whiskey. Who kept coughing into his handkerchief that Jeffery noted was becoming spotted with blood. He only went to the counselor for several sessions before his appointments were dropped without reason. Maybe the doctor had assured his mother there was nothing wrong with him short of a child’s imagination, but Jeffery suspected something else had happened.

    “Seen what?” Jeffery responded with all the innocence he could muster.

    The old man smiled, one front tooth gold and glowing softly in the waning light. “You’re a cagey one. But you know what I mean, I can see it, there’s an air about you.”

    “What kind of air?” he asked.

    The old man’s face broke into an even wider smile, his eyes twinkling with merriment. “I like you, you know what’s going on, you’re closer to them than you think. But keep in mind they can’t hurt you unless you let them.”

    “What can’t hurt me?” Jefferey had become unsettled with the old man’s comment, his suspicions growing that the old man knew about his special talent, though he had never told anyone.

    “I was like you the first time I saw one, it doesn’t get any easier, but you can learn to ignore them, in fact I believe that’s the best you can do. If they knew you could see them that would acknowledge their presence and they would never leave you alone.”

    It was all Jeffery could do to shrug indifferently. The old man had hit the nail on the head. The how and why were not important. But the fact he could see it was. What was it about him that stood out?

    “There’s a glow about you, I have it too, but you haven’t learned to see it yet. You will in time, and when you do you’ll be surprised by how many there are of us.”

    By this time the conversation on the porch had turned to leaving and the old man’s co-workers were calling for him to come along. Bill was his name, and he responded by throwing a wink in Jeffery’s direction before placing his half empty glass of iced tea on the table beside him and pushing himself to his feet.

    “Just remember, they can’t hurt you unless you let them.”

    With that he was gone, following the other three to the two trucks parked in the driveway. Vanishing into a cloud of diesel as the silence of the approaching night washed over them.

    “What did he mean they can’t hurt you?” his dad asked as Jeffery joined him at the front door, his eyes drawn once again to the smaller door to the left of the entrance.

    “Nothing, we were just talking about a new school and all that.” Jefferey hated lying to his dad but were he to tell him the truth he was afraid he might end up back in counseling.

    “It’s called a milk door,” his dad said, pointing at the smaller door, “years ago milk was delivered every day and some people built small doors for the milk to be put inside by the delivery guy.”

    “Why couldn’t they just go to the store?” Jefferey asked.

    “I guess that’s the way it was back then.”

    To be continued!

  • Establishing Daily Routines for Effective Writing

    Establishing Daily Routines for Effective Writing

    My wife is always teasing me about how structured my days are. “It’s 8:30, time for Rick to grab breakfast, then go to his office and work.”

    “It’s eleven o’clock, time to work out.”

    “We don’t always have to eat dinner at five.”

    But for me these routines are important in helping me manage my day. It’s critical that we establish routines in our daily lives so as not to become overwhelmed with all of the mundane tasks that occupy our days. I know a few people who are so disorganized that they act surprised when it’s time to go to work, as if that moment were a wild beast quietly sneaking up on them.

    You probably know a few in your own life. Those people who are never on time and can’t really be relied upon to be where they promise they will be.

    “I’m sorry, was that today?” They’ll tell you even though they had known about the appointment for than a month and had been reminded periodically. There is a certain subset of society who likes to blame this on a new phenomenon called Time Blindless. Of course, I’m old school and willing to call it what it is. Laziness. But that’s a subject for another time and place.

    Today I want to talk about writing and routine, and why a routine is important in not only writing, but in every aspect of a person’s life. Routine provides a structure to your day, a roadmap if you will that guides you through the myriad events of your day, ensuring you meet your own expectations and arrive on time at any appointments you may have scheduled.

    When I served in the military punctuality was drilled into us relentlessly. “If you’re ten minutes early you’re on time. If you’re on time you’re late.” Unfortunately, command had a totally different idea as to what was considered on time.

    We had another saying in the military that tied neatly into the first. “Hurry up and wait.” It was not unusual to get the order to move out at 0600, 6am for those not familiar with military time, yet we’d all be sitting around in the staging area come 9am waiting for someone to pull their foot out of their ass so we could get going.

    It’s a good thing this was in training and there was not a friendly force out there somewhere desperately holding on waiting for us to show up with a promise to roll at dawn. Of course, most would not have expected the unit to move when promised anyway. Yet, somehow, we have managed to maintain our place as a reigning superpower.  

    And here I’m going off on another tangent. The real reason behind all this is that I should have had this finished and uploaded to my blog yesterday. But here I am at 8:53 am ET, writing this post. Sorry.

    As for writing, creating, or learning a new process it’s important to structure your day around your goals. When you establish a time and place, and stick to it, you’re telling yourself that this is the time and place where I will write. At first it might seem counterproductive to restrict your writing to a certain time and place, but it’s important to do so as you will train your body, and your mind to be ready to create at that time. At first you may end up browsing the web, or writing a late blog post, but you’re forcing yourself to concentrate on writing at this time.

    That doesn’t mean you can’t brainstorm the rest of the day. Most of us gather material for our work from our daily interaction. Writing down ideas, and thoughts throughout your day will help you store them for when you cam sit down to write.

    How many have heard the excuse. “I can’t write unless my muse is speaking to me, or they’re inspired to create.”   

    When you train yourself to write at a certain time and place you’ll be amazed to learn how easily it comes to you with a little practice. So be patient. Even if you only have an hour a day or can only manage a hundred words. That’s a hundred words that weren’t there before. A hundred words a day can add up, that’s 3000 words a month, which is the length of a typical short story. In one hundred days a hundred words a day will net you 10,000 words. Are they perfect words? Likely not, but everyone starts somewhere.

    What you’ll find when you start focusing your efforts is your word count for that hour can climb. Right now, as I’m writing this post it has been twenty-five minutes since I started and I’ve managed to put down 778 words to this point. They’re not completely clean by any stretch of the imagination, but within the next half an hour I’ll have a finished post that hopefully you’re reading right now.

    Tell me about your process. Do you have a set time and place to write, or create? Or do you take the scattered approach and grab what time you can spare throughout the day?