WRITERS CO-OP: A WRITER COMMUNITY FOR YOU.

GD Deckard

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30 comments on You Are Invited

You Are Invited

To formally join the Writers Co-op, simply submit a blog of up to 1600 or so words. The subject can be anything having to do with the writing life. Feel free to promote your own work. Or share an insight. Or opine. We’re easy.

Once your blog is accepted, we’ll post it on the first open Monday or Thursday. And, we’ll grant you author’s rights, allowing you to write, upload photos, and edit your own posts. Thereafter, you can put blogs into the draft section and they will be published on a first-in first-out schedule.

We are adults who write, edit, publish & market books. We believe strongly in supporting one another’s work. We have no formal set of rules. Just good people.

Submit your initial blog to
GD<at>Deckard<dot>one

And, Well Come!

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GD Deckard

Severely beaten as a child by a WWII hero and combat-induced-PTSD stepfather, the author, as a teen, faced the old man down with a shotgun and earned his blessing to join the military at the time Americans were learning about a country called Vietnam. The “lazy, no good son-of-a-bitch” opted out of combat and hard labor by becoming an Air Force medic, stamping out suffering and misery on Freedom’s Frontier at Clark Airbase in S.E. Asia and earning some kind of medal pinned on him personally by then Secretary of the Air Force, Harold Brown, for “Saving lives, etc.” There followed a summer in Europe ending in the first of happy marriages. Then graduation with University Honors, kids worth dying for and a career in business. Life is good. Author, The Phoenix Diary, Penguin, 2015. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-phoenix-diary-g-d-deckard/1122175645 Founding Member, Writers Co-op. https://WritersCo-op.com Co-Editor, The Rabbit Hole anthologies. https://www.amazon.com/Rabbit-Hole-Weird-Stories/dp/1691225355/ref=sr_1_1 Founder, SciFi Lampoon Magazine. http://scifilampoon.com/ Contributing Editor, A Celebration of Storytelling https://www.amazon.com/Celebration-Storytelling-GD-Deckard/dp/1951716167 Current WIP: Code Blue and Little Deaths, stories from Clark during the Vietnam War. Recipient of the Psi Young award for Creative Biography.

30 responses to “You Are Invited”

  1. Mike Van Horn Avatar
    Mike Van Horn

    Thank you! I’ll see if I can come up with something erudite and insightful and literary. Or metaphysical and transcendent. Or corny and humorous.

    Liked by 5 people

    Reply
    1. GD Deckard Avatar
      GD Deckard

      😁 About time, Mike. We gave you full Author privilege’s a long time ago. So, c’mon, leave us a blog in Drafts. 😆

      Liked by 4 people

      Reply
      1. Mike Van Horn Avatar
        Mike Van Horn

        I had one published here. Then I submitted another one that was not published. I think I didn’t put it in drafts.

        Liked by 3 people

        Reply
        1. GD Deckard Avatar
          GD Deckard

          Ha! Who knows where it went. You know how the ‘Net is. If it were ever mapped, whole areas would be marked, “Here There Be Dragons.”

          Liked by 3 people

          Reply
          1. Mike Van Horn Avatar
            Mike Van Horn

            Probably it’s part of a tangled mass with all those lost socks and keys

            Liked by 2 people

            Reply
  2. Carl E. Reed Avatar
    Carl E. Reed

    Nice to see the Co-Op reaching out to other writers. If you have something to say and an idiosyncratic way of saying it, we’ll be your huckleberry!

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply
    1. GD Deckard Avatar
      GD Deckard

      “I’ll be your huckleberry”
      Once again, Carl, you send me Googling. Apparently, we know the line from Val Kilmer playing Doc Holliday in the film, “Tombstone.”
      Interesting side-note, though. At least one historian claims that while Doc Holliday actually spoke the line in real life, Doc really said “huckle bearer.” Which is the piece of hardware on a casket that you carry the casket with. In other words, Doc Holliday was warning Ringo that he was going to put him six feet under.

      Liked by 5 people

      Reply
  3. Carl E. Reed Avatar
    Carl E. Reed

    Interesting! I can well believe Doc Holiday told Johnny Ringo he’d be one of his pallbearers if Ringo messed with him.

    I’m using it in the playful sense (from “teh internets”): “In the Old West being a huckleberry meant you were game, up for anything. It also meant that you were the one to bring trouble to your opponent. According to Urbandictionary.com “I’m your huckleberry” is the rough equivalent of saying “I’m the man you’re looking for.”

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply
  4. GD Deckard Avatar
    GD Deckard

    There must be a body of knowledge regarding how words & phrases change over generations. That has to be an interesting study. You’re the best of us to write a blog on that, Carl.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply
  5. curtisbausse Avatar
    curtisbausse

    Cogitating a blog about vocabulary. Looking forward to an exchange with Carl. Maybe we can coordinate something?
    Welcome all contributors!

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply
    1. GD Deckard Avatar
      GD Deckard

      I like that idea. How might we go about it?

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply
  6. victoracquista Avatar
    victoracquista

    This seems to be an appropriate time to quote Marx: “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”
    (Good thing I’m not a Marxist.)

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply
    1. Mike Van Horn Avatar
      Mike Van Horn

      Groucho, not Karl, right?

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply
      1. victoracquista Avatar
        victoracquista

        I’m a fan of the Marx Brothers and still remember a film festival we organized back in my high school days to show a batch of their movies. Karl Marx as a philosopher and deep thinker is worth studying but I’ve not spent enough time to say anything definitive. I am deeply envious of his beard.

        Liked by 2 people

        Reply
        1. GD Deckard Avatar
          GD Deckard

          😅😂🤣

          Like

          Reply
    2. GD Deckard Avatar
      GD Deckard

      You’re in good company, Victor. 😆

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply
  7. Scott D. Vander Ploeg Avatar
    Scott D. Vander Ploeg

    I have been officially a philologist, and though this translates from Latin blandly as someone who loves language, it became the term used for one who deeply studies language, word derivations, and yes, how words and phrases have changed over time. In the beginning of my career as a college professor, I joined the Kentucky Philological Association (yes… in Kentucky!), giving my second conference paper at their annual conference. Most of the presentations have been literary criticism essays, but often language issues are the mainstay. Years later, I became their Executive Director for a decade, and currently am the President–though that just means I have to help adjudicate what we publish, and also give the annual President’s speech at the conference, which will be online again. My most recent paper given there was on the onomastics that Barbara Kingsolver plays with in her recent novel, _Unsheltered_.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply
    1. Carl E. Reed Avatar
      Carl E. Reed

      Welcome, Mr. Ploeg!

      @GD: Now HERE’S the right guy to teach us about the shifting meaning of English words, phrases and sounds over time (Great Vowel Shift, anyone?)–an honest-to-god philologist! (Suddenly, I’m terrified. I thought . . . I thought . . . no one was reading us. Uh-oh!)

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply
      1. GD Deckard Avatar
        GD Deckard

        Relax Carl. Scott becomes very approachable if you approach with an offering of good coffee.
        😄
        And I agree. He’s the perfect writer to blog on philology.

        (😁 Which may even help me to sometimes better understand what you’re going on about. 😋 )

        Liked by 2 people

        Reply
    2. GD Deckard Avatar
      GD Deckard

      Great Scott! (I’ve always wanted to say that.) Your experience will appeal to many writers here. Welcome.

      And yes, we look forward to reading your blog, “Why, I Write.”

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply
    3. victoracquista Avatar
      victoracquista

      Welcome!

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply
  8. GD Deckard Avatar
    GD Deckard

    (As an aside) The Writers Co-op Anthology keeps reproducing like rabbits.
    Tom Wolosz just sent me a proof PDF of “The Rabbit Hole Volume Four.” Full of good down-the-rabbit-hole stories. Including “Maisie the Moocher” By Mimi Speike, “Night Terror,” and, “Haunted House” by Carl E. Reed, “Sportsman Land” by Margret A. Treiber, “Tobey” by Tom Wolosz, and my own “Molly and the Bandit,” being the true but heretofore unknown story of how the unsinkable Molly Brown met the love of her life.

    “The Rabbit Hole Volume Four” will publish in October.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply
  9. GD Deckard Avatar
    GD Deckard

    @Carl,
    You may appreciate this email I just received from SCOTT D. VANDER PLOEG.

    “Also thanks for the opportunity to join as one of the Writers’ Co-op authors. I’ll look more into it, but it seems an honor I’d be an idiot to pass up. I look forward to knowing the crew better. I note your wry comments about looking up words that Reed posts. If I cause you similar grief, know that it is just an egregious psychomachia of mine: concision and clarity vs perspicacious tergiversation. I once argued with my students over whether I could use the word “ubiquitous” in an essay–they said no.”

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply
  10. GD Deckard Avatar
    GD Deckard

    @SCOTT D. VANDER PLOEG
    You reminded me that I have a copy of Tom Wolfe’s “The Kingdom of Speech.” I enjoyed that book but it was controversial. What do you think of Wolfe’s argument that speech, not evolution, is responsible for humanity’s complex societies and achievements?

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
    1. Mike Van Horn Avatar
      Mike Van Horn

      You didn’t ask me, but I’ll say that speech couldn’t have happened without evolution. I just finished reading The Dawn of Human Culture by Richard Klein. He documents, by artifacts in caves, why homo sapiens, due to small changes in our throats, were better able to speak compared to Neanderthals. This led to improved social organization and cooperation, thus to passing along innovations. Before long we had vanquished the Neanderthals.

      Liked by 4 people

      Reply
      1. GD Deckard Avatar
        GD Deckard

        True but. We humans have taken the use of vocal chords beyond physical evolution. My guess is that we often use complex sounds to mentally create an image in others of what does not exist so that we can work together to make it exist. I say I’m thirsty and need water so you might give me some. This ability seems to have occurred about (estimates fluctuate) 40-75,000 years ago, based on the explosion of human behaviors that led people to cooperate in agricultural endeavors (about) 10,000 years ago. I don’t know if I’m actually right or just enjoying a reasonable flight of fancy. 😆 But it’s human of me to assume that a flight of fancy can come to illustrate a reality.

        Liked by 3 people

        Reply
        1. Mike Van Horn Avatar
          Mike Van Horn

          I don’t think we’re disagreeing. I would say that our ability to do verbally what you describe grew from changes in our vocal apparatus that emerged at about the time you say. From what I’ve read, these changes emerged over a fairly short period of time, rather than a gradual evolution over myriad years.

          Liked by 3 people

          Reply
          1. GD Deckard Avatar
            GD Deckard

            Nope, no disagreement here, Mike. Evolution rules.
            Oddly enough, it seems evolution still determines the range of human behavior while language and writing builds a knowledge base that expands. On the one hand, our behavior now is not significantly different from how people behaved in Ancient Sumer. Yet we are on the edge of space travel. As people, we remain the same even as our technology expands.

            Baris Sagir, a Turk living in Germany whose intellect and achievements I admire, sums human behavior up with the phrase, “savage scavengers.” Not quite my take, but, if you were an alien species considering mankind’s history before deciding if you wanted to introduce yourself, we may never meet you.

            Liked by 2 people

            Reply
        2. Peter Thomson Avatar
          Peter Thomson

          Sorry, GD. Agriculture is much younger, and full human capacities older, than “40-75,000 years ago. People reached Australia some 60,000 years ago. They cannot have left Africa much later than 80,000 years ago, and the peoples they left were as human as we, spread from the Cape to the Middle East and beyond. Beads and burials go with stories, and these are older still.

          Liked by 3 people

          Reply
  11. GD Deckard Avatar
    GD Deckard

    @PETER THOMSON
    I understand agriculture started “a little before” before Ancient Sumer. But I remember reports of a change in human behavior “around 40k” years ago. I wouldn’t know of course. But something happened between the millions of years of the stone age and the beginning of agriculture that abruptly catapulted humans into the widespread use of technology.
    Any idea what the cause may have been?

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

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