We spoke last week about the Invocation of the Muse from Homer’s Odyssey [translation by T.E. Lawrence] … and the tattered copy of that prayer that I still have (and still recite each morning) from my dear friend and mentor, Paul Rink.

I wrote in The War of Art about my old friend and mentor, Paul Rink. When I lived in Northern California years ago, I used to have coffee every morning with Paul in his camper, “Moby Dick.”

I was having breakfast the other morning with D.B. Sweeney, the actor/writer/producer. He told me a story about working with Francis Ford Coppola that was funny and charming and loaded with writing wisdom.

When I used to work a forty-hour-a-week job and could only write in my spare time, I often thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could write full-time … instead of squeezing in an hour here and an hour there?”

We were talking in last week’s post about A Man at Arms falling into the “Western” genre, even though the book is set in the ancient world—much as many samurai movies are Westerns, as well as post-apocalyptic tales (Mad Max, The Book of Eli), mutant tales, and even, in my opinion, John Wick movies.

We’ve been talking in the past few posts about the evolution of A Man at Arms from its shaky, unclear inception—and how one narrative element led to another until we had a fully-formed, living and breathing story.

In our previous two posts, we examined several embryonic elements as they came together at the inception of an idea for a novel. 

We’ve talked in earlier posts about “the McGuffin,” i.e. the item or person that the villain wants. Let’s examine this today in terms of the genesis of A Man at Arms.

My niece Meredith was getting married. She asked me to be the officiant.

William Holden plays Pike Bishop, the leader of the “Wild Bunch,” in the 1969 movie of the same name. He has one of the all-time great Private Moments toward the end of the final reel.